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Entries tagged: Transit

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the fourth national Equity Summit in Detroit. Hosted by PolicyLink, the four-day event brought together nearly 3,000 leaders of the movement to share their visions and advance a policy agenda to address equity in our communities. Among those present were advocates, elected officials, agency staff and foundations working on sustainable and equitable transportation.

Nearly every breakout session included a piece on public transportation with some reference to the role of biking and walking in addressing equity issues. What are the benefits of our transportation systems? Who benefits? Who is making these decisions? These are some of the questions that were asked and that inspired the vision coming out of the week.

Detroit is a city challenged with the task of overcoming an industrial fall-out. The car-pride of Michigan still carries strong, and partially as a result the transit system is in disrepair and there’s a serious lack of bike lanes.

A special Thursday-morning session featured Peter Rogoff, administrator for the Federal Transit Administration, who addressed the need to repair our nation’s crumbling transit systems but there is also a need to ensure safe connections to bus and rail lines that are cut short or close early. The failure to provide pedestrian walkways and bike lanes that are accessible to people of all communities and provide key corridors to school, job, and opportunities is an equity issue that must be addressed.

In a country where traffic injuries and fatalities are at $200 billion, 11 percent of motor vehicle access deaths are pedestrians and bicyclists, and the societal costs of obesity is $117 billion, we must take a complete approach to transforming our transportation systems and it begins with the work of local advocates.

Many Alliance organizations, like the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition and the Community Cycling Center, are leading the way in making sure all residents are at the table for these important discussions about the future of our streets and our communities. Thanks, in part, to an Advocacy Advance grant, the LACBC has hired a bilingual bicycle safety instructor. In Portland, the Community Cycling Center has helped establish bicycle committees at local public housing developments and committed to a “collaborative advocacy” model in its programming.

Moving forward, the Alliance will is certainly committed to raising up these best practices, compiling the best research on transportation equity, acting as an active partner in the Equity Caucus, and incorporating these issues into our 2012 programming, including Mutual Aid Calls and discussions at our Leadership Retreat.

In the meantime, we’re beginning to build an Equity section in our Resources Library. If you have items to share, please send them to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

After a mandate from members and a decade of dedicated work, Bike Pittsburgh celebrated last week as the local Port Authority announced 100 percent of buses now have bike racks.

The story starts way back in 2002, when BikePGH was just getting its feet wet as an upstart advocacy organization. Already, the Port Authority and City of Pittsburgh had received a $75,000 grant for “Ride, Rack and Roll,” an initiative intended to outfit 75 buses with bike racks. But, a year after the program was established, only eight routes had racks — and often, even on those lines, buses would arrive sans rack. So BikePGH got to work.

“[From 2003 to 2006] stakeholders represented by Sustainable Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh’s Department of City Planning, the Port Authority and BikePGH met on and off to try to figure out the issues regarding the Rack ‘n Roll service,” Erok Boerer, BikePGH Advocacy Director, explained on the group’s blog last week. “It was clear the only answer was to get more racks into the entire system.”

In 2004, the program got an influx of money — $290,150 from the federal Transportation Enhancements program — to grow the program to 12 routes. But still, service was spotty and riders had little confidence that their bus would arrive with a rack. So it wasn’t surprising that BikePGH members considered the bus situation a major frustration. “At a BikePGH strategic planning session, members expressed that outfitting 100 percent of Port Authority buses with bike racks should be a high priority campaign that we should pursue,” Boerer explained.

So, in 2007, when the Port Authority announced it was buying new buses without racks the advocates pressed for a new policy that could solve the problem: No new buses should be purchased without a bike rack. The Port Authority agreed. By 2008, the landscape started to change as old buses were retired and, from the get-go, the new ones hit the streets with racks attached. To make sure the Port Authority had the cash to complete the task, BikePGH worked with local officials to get funding from another federal source — the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program — and from a private foundation. By the end of 2009, they had secured the dollars to outfit the remaining 190 buses and the city promised to get it done by the end of 2011.

Finally, on Friday, the Port Authority and BikePGH had reason to party: All the city buses are now equipped with bike racks.

“This momentous development didn’t happen overnight,” Boerer wrote before the event. “It took a decade, with many different folks working to better the program. When it all came down to it, though, it was all about advocacy and leadership that made it happen.”

Read more on the BikePGH blog.

The Active Transportation Alliance may be best known for supporting and promoting biking and walking in the greater Chicagoland region. But, last month, the advocates teamed up with the Natural Resource Defense Council to launch a new campaign that will unite and fight for transit riders.

With city officials facing tough budget decisions, Chicago transit agencies could see their funding slashed, and residents could be hit with service cuts and fare increases. Riders for Better Transit — the new initiative from Active Trans and the NRDC — is building a vocal constituency for increased investment and improved initiatives that serve riders’ needs.

“Transit reduces pollution, provides essential links to jobs and commerce, and offers an affordable transportation choice for Chicagoland residents,” Jennifer Henry of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a press release last month. “We need to use transportation dollars wisely and reinvest in existing communities and infrastructure.”

The Riders for Better Transit campaign has a vision for how to spend those dollars wisely and invest in a world-class transit system, including bus rapid transit, modernized rail service and a more-passenger-friendly Union Station. The campaign is also pushing for a universal fare system, real-time transit information and “complete stations” that are inviting and safely accessible by walking, biking, and persons of all abilities.

And, perhaps most importantly, the campaign will fight to prevent further service cuts and fare increases as transit agencies prepare to finalize their 2012 budgets.

“Riders across the region know our system is plagued by slow zones, overcrowding and deteriorating stations, and every community has a laundry list of needs, from restoring bus service that’s been cut to increasing train frequencies,” added Ron Burke, Executive Director of Active Trans. “Our region can barely maintain our current transit service, much less make improvements riders need. The bottom line is transit in our region is significantly underfunded.”

Read more on the campaign website.

Thanks to a new policy released today by the Federal Transit Administration, more money could flow to biking and walking facilities near transit stations.

The exciting change is mostly a matter of distance. Previously, the FTA allowed funding for biking and walking projects that benefited public transportation facilities if they were located within 1,500 feet of that transit location. Today’s announcement, dramatically widens the door for that funding.

According to the FTA: “All pedestrian improvements located within one-half mile and all bicycle improvements located within three miles of a public transportation stop or station shall have a de facto physical and functional relationship to public transportation.”

Read a full analysis from Darren Flusche over on the League of American Bicyclists blog.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition recently announced that they have joined forced with Streetsblog San Francisco and the SF Chronicle to create Bay Area Transit, a new blog that will appear on sfgate.com. According to the Coalition, “This blog is an opportunity for us to write about our work and highlight all of the exciting new bicycling improvements (hello Market Street separated bike lane) that are making San Francisco a better place to ride a bike. We’ll certainly be sharing the faces and stories of some of the 120,000 San Franciscans who bicycle frequently and showcasing great biking events and rides that are bound to get even more people riding. You can check it out here: Bay Area Transit.”

The Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin (BFW) celebrated a victory for cycling on November 19th, when the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors passed a measure to put bike racks on all Milwaukee buses. Milwaukee County will provide the local match for Milwaukee’s Bike Racks on Buses Program. The project will be in full swing this spring and completed by the fall of 2010.

BFW has been working with the Milwaukee County Transit System for nearly five years on various measures. The campaign for bike racks on buses has been running for two and a half years. According to Shea Schachameyer of BFW, “I view the campaign’s success as yet another example of the power of grassroots organizing; it was because of the broad base of support which the campaign attracted and the BFW’s ability to mobilize those supporters on a dime’s notice which has led the program to be implemented this spring.”

Read more on this victory from Shea here (http://www.bfw.org/advocacy/index.php?category_id=4027). To read more about the bike racks on buses program click here (http://www.bfw.org/advocacy/index.php?category_id=4170).