Posts about AAA

Update: DCist's Martin Austermuhle figured out the missing context. For example,

I think he's developmentally retarded, and I use 'retarded' in the French way, meaning that he's late. He's late to development meetings, that's what I'm trying to say.

Update 2: Reporter Aaron Wiener defends the context of the quotations and gives even more examples of insults from Townsend: "He also called [David Alpert] 'reptilian,' 'pedantic,' and 'childlike,' and suggested he had a 'Napoleonic complex.'"

Spirited argument is important in public policy, but it should not cross into insults. When it does, that has a chilling effect on open discourse. Fostering an inclusive conversation about the shape of our region is the purpose of this site, but discourse must be civil to be truly open. That's why our comment policy here on Greater Greater Washington prohibits invective like this. In our articles, we try hard to avoid crossing this line, and are disappointed when we or others do, intentionally or inadvertently.

The "war on cars" frame unnecessarily pits drivers against cyclists and pedestrians instead of working together for positive solutions. The City Paper article, by Aaron Wiener, does a good job of debunking that, and is worth reading for much more than the insults it quotes.

When pressed, Townsend told Wiener he wants to back away from the "war on cars."

"I regret the rhetoric sometimes," he says. "Because I think that when you use that type of language, it shuts down communication with people who disagree."

We hope Townsend, his colleagues, and their superiors also regret the things he said about David and Greater Greater Washington. We look forward to the day when AAA ceases using antagonistic language and begins working toward safety, mobility, and harmony among all road users.

In the meantime, residents do have a choice when purchasing towing, insurance, and travel discounts. Better World Club is one company that offers many of the same benefits as AAA, but without the disdain.

To lower the fines cost money, and the Council didn't find enough money to lower all speed fines. Instead, the fine for speeding 11-15 mph over the limit only dropped from $100 to $92. It would have made more sense to use the limited funds to drop the lower-speed fines first instead of the higher-speed ones, but that's not what happened.

They also only allocated money in the current fiscal year. Unless this budget said otherwise, the fines would have automatically jumped back up on October 1. Mayor Gray indeed allocated money to keep many of the lower fines, including ones for infractions besides speeding.

However, the administration proposes to set the fine for 11-15 mph and 16-20 mph over both at $100, said budget director Eric Goulet, and also raise the fine for speeding over 20 mph to $250 $200 and over 25 mph to $300. This is actually the same fine schedule Gray previously proposed when the Council was debating lowering fines.

Fines for running red lights did not go down in the last bill. That's in part because AAA's John Townsend actually argued in the task force for maintaining higher red light fines, though he's since started spewing press releases complaining about them, despite his earlier stance.

Here is a table of the old fines, what Cheh and Wells proposed, what passed in the final bill both as the authorized level and the actual level that got funding, and what Gray is proposing for 2014.

Offense	2012	Cheh/ Wells	Auth. 2013	Funded 2013	Gray 2014
Speeding 1-10 mph (not enforced)	$75	$50	$50	$50	$50
Speeding 11-15 mph	$125	$50	$75	$92	$100
Speeding 16-20 mph	$150	$50	$100	$100	$100
Speeding 21-25 mph	$200	$200	$150	$150	$200
Speeding 26-30 mph	$250	$250	$250	$250	$300
Running red light	$150	$150	$150	$150	$150
Blocking the box	$100	$50	$50	$50	$50
Not stopping at stop sign	$100	$50	$50	$50	$50
Not yielding to pedestrian in crosswalk	$250	$50	$75	$75	$75
Not stopping before right on red	$100	$50	$50	$50	$50
Right on red when prohibited	$100	$50	$50	$50	$50

The Budget Support Act is not yet available, so all of the information here is based on my conversation with Goulet, and I am checking to confirm their proposal for the never-enforced 1-10 mph violation and whether not yielding to a pedestrian is $50 or $75. I will update the post when that is available. Update: After talking to Goulet, I have updated the table and added a row for speeding 26-30 mph, whose fine will be rising from $250 to $300 as well.

I originally pushed for even lower fines from cameras, on the logic that the fine should just be high enough to deter speeding or other behaviors, and that it could buy peace. Unfortunately, we really don't have good evidence about what deters speeding. Also, AAA has stepped up the pace of camera complaints and attack press releases, so it's become clear that there's no partner for peace over there.

Therefore, Gray's proposal is a reasonable position. It keeps some of the formerly most egregious fines down and should deter some of the most reckless behavior.

It's not waging any kind of "war on drivers," but if AAA is going to claim there is one even after DC leaders make a good faith effort to address the group's concerns, DC may as well prioritize making neighborhoods safe for residents by adding cameras and maintaining fines.

Segraves got data from DC, Montgomery, and Prince George's about the percentage of drivers who get multiple tickets, out of all the drivers who get a ticket from the cameras. Ticketed drivers are twice as likely to have multiple tickets in the Maryland counties, and 20 times as likely to have 5 or 10 tickets.

What would cause this discrepancy?

This could be because the fines were much higher in DC in Maryland (they decreased in DC thanks the last year's camera bill). It could be that the lower fines mean people are less worried about getting caught. Prince George's County Executive Rushern Baker thinks that's true. Anecdotally, I've heard from other drivers who say they're much more afraid of speeding in DC.

It also could be that different groups of drivers get tickets in each jurisdiction. John Townsend of AAA (who can sound entirely reasonable when he tries) thinks that the Maryland cameras are in neighborhoods where the same drivers ply the roads day after day. A possible counter-argument is that drivers who live nearby know where the cameras are, so they shouldn't get tickets.

Another possibility is that DC gets more tourists, who come in, speed, get a ticket, and then aren't around to get more. Martin Austermuhle muses that perhaps Maryland drivers are just worse.

One way to better analyze these possibilities would be to break the data down by state. Are DC drivers re-offending at the same rate on DC cameras as Maryland drivers on Maryland cameras? Are Maryland drivers (most of whom do commute) getting more or fewer tickets on DC cameras than the DC drivers do?

Or, to investigate Townsend's claim, what about just the DC cameras that are in neighborhoods? AAA mostly complains about the ones on freeways, but the most serious safety problems are where major streets cut through neighborhoods. Do people get multiple tickets at higher rates on those DC cameras?

Was it wise to lower fines?

The task force Councilmembers Tommy Wells (ward 6) and Mary Cheh (ward 3) put together couldn't find convincing evidence one way or the other, so the councilmembers decided to lower the fines because of the political blowback. I argued at the time that AAA is orchestrating a lot of that blowback, so if they want to trade peace for lower fines, they'll have to follow through.

Townsend hasn't. Instead, they've sent out a stream of press releases attacking the cameras, and given lots of juicy quotes to the press. He's called cameras "the mother's milk of additional revenue" for government, even though DC lowered the fines.

Townsend even complained about red light cameras after arguing in the task force for keeping the fines high. He told Ashley Halsey III, "The District collects nearly two-thirds, a stunning 61.6 percent, of the [red-light camera] revenue total for the national capital area."

Let's debate the actual safety, not the fake anti-government frame

Maybe cameras won't work. Mount Pleasant ANC Commissioner Jack McKay doesn't think they do. MPD does, but doesn't have good enough data to really prove it. It would be great to have a real debate about what measures will and won't make streets safer.

That's not the debate we are having, however. Instead, AAA is using misdirection. They aren't saying the measures don't improve safety; they are saying the whole thing is a government conspiracy to squeeze money out of drivers. And the non-revenue elements like bike lanes are a "war on drivers" and an attempt to force people out of cars.

This is a pernicious theme because it plays right into the press's existing biases to cover stories as government vs. the people. AAA doesn't want to talk about the people who get hurt from drivers turning right without stopping; they want everyone to blame the evil gummint.

For some reason which escapes me, most reporters seem to eat it up. Halsey led off his story with the extremely biased line, "The lucrative battle to keep drivers in the District from running red lights seems to be achieving more profit than success." It's amazing that there had to be a letter to the editor to point out that illegal driving is more than a revenue issue, it's a safety issue.

Let's look at that success, seriously. A debate about the cameras based on safety would be welcome. There are plenty of angles for reporters to investigate that relate to the actual safety, or the appropriate level of fines. Mark Segraves has taken one step toward that. Will others follow?

Martin wrote, "D.C., pre-war on cars. The place was motorist heaven."

This makes a real point. We've been hearing a lot about the "war on cars" lately as AAA, the car lobby organization, has been really pushing the theme hard in the press and outlets eager for controversy lap up the destructive rhetoric.

But let's not forget where we were. Not that long ago, much of DC had been shaped by a multi-decade "war on the city." Well-meaning urban renewal efforts tore out large swaths of the urban fabric to build things like the Southeast-Southwest Freeway and big parking lots, like the ones in the picture.

The 1958 zoning code that DC is currently trying to replace was a weapon in that war. Its author, Harold Lewis, wrote that the city's form was unable to adapt to a more car-oriented form and zoning must therefore compel it "for the salvation of the downtown area."

In 1950, the federal government decreed that places like Shaw, Southwest DC, and more were "obsolete" and had to be replaced with more car-oriented development patterns. The "obsolete" zones include the area in this picture; this was the result.

It's also worth remembering this era to understand the time when, as we discussed yesterday, very strong historic preservation protection was not only clearly necessary but absolutely urgent. The preservation plan quotes one resident saying "The next generation of preservation leaders is not there; where are the future activists?" Commenter drumz pointed out that there isn't really "an example in DC today of the same sort of large scale clearing that inspired the first preservation movement."

Nobody is trying to wage a war on cars. AAA is just pushing the idea because after their long and successful war on urban places, the trend is moving in the other direction. And anyone who lives in the Mount Vernon Triangle today instead of that 1992 wasteland is pretty glad it is.

Parking minimums are a terrible idea for many reasons. Start with the fact that they simply don't work.

You can force a housing developer to build parking spaces, but you can't force a renter to rent them. It costs anywhere from $100-$300 per month to park in a garage, but only $35 per year for a residential curbside parking permit. Which would you choose? We've had parking minimums for decades, but the problem of spillover parking is still with us—because it costs so much less to park on public land than it does on private land.

And parking minimums come with unintended consequences, the worst of which is that they make housing unaffordable.

Forcing a developer to build unwanted parking makes it more expensive to build, by as much as $30,000-$40,000 per unit. That cost is passed on to tenants, whether they know it or not.

More broadly, the District's crisis of unaffordable housing has its roots in a shortage of housing supply. Between DC's geography, the Height Act, and the zoning map, real estate for residential development is scarce. Parking minimums require that much of that space to be devoted to parking lots and garages instead of housing, they limit the overall size of buildings, and they make some projects altogether unfeasible. Less housing supply leads to higher prices.

So what we have is a very aggressive affordable housing policy for cars that is at cross-purposes with affordable housing for people.

In a city that is growing, we'll always have more and more demand for lots of goods: More demand for parking, schools, police, transit infrastructure, and drinking water. At the same time, the newcomers create economic benefits for lots of people. Yes, housing developers benefit, but so does anyone else who is in a position to sell them goods and services: local merchants, tax accountants, construction workers, interior designers, waiters. Local employers also benefit from a broader pool of talent.

Of all those people who benefit from DC's population growth, why should we single out the housing developer and penalize them with what amounts to a hidden tax, just because they're satisfying the new residents' need for housing?.

DC's most beloved neighborhoods were built before parking minimums were in place. If any given street in Dupont Circle, Shaw, or Georgetown burned down today, it would be illegal to rebuild it as is—every building would need to be accompanied by a parking lot or garage, destroying the beauty and walkability that define the character of our older neighborhoods.

The zoning excesses of the 1950s and 1960s were reckless experiments, and their unintended consequences—from the oceanic parking lots and strip malls of Rockville Pike to the megablocks of Southwest DC—are plain for all to see. Today's zoning reforms take a small step towards undoing that damage.

None of this is to say that residential parking scarcity is not a real problem.

But it's only a problem because we act as if curbside space were abundant and valueless. The District gives away the right to park on public land for practically free (9.6 cents per day, to be exact).

When you underprice something valuable, you can be assured that it will be overconsumed.

If I have an old car that I no longer need, I have no incentive to get rid of it when I can store it on the street at public expense. If I have a garage, I have no reason to use it to store my car when I can use it to store my bikes and tools and junk. If I'm deciding whether my household needs one more car, the cost of storage doesn't enter my factor into my decision—but it should.

The city is currently exploring ways to price parking more accurately, neighborhood by neighborhood.

As the population of the city grows, the cost of residential parking should reflect its growth in value. This will cause demand to fall naturally, because residents have incentives to own fewer cars or get them off the street. And it will allow supply to increase naturally, because the private sector will have an incentive to create parking where it's needed.

Oh, and by the way: If you prefer your roadside assistance without a side order of retrograde lobbying, there are lots of options out there. Do a web search for "AAA alternatives." My family has switched to Better World Club, which—in a nice touch—provides emergency service for bikes as well as cars.

Gray said he will use some of the money to hire 100 new police officers. That's fine, though if the police officers don't focus on traffic, then it ultimately is just using camera revenue for things other than road safety.

We need to do more for traffic safety. DC is adding a few cameras which will make a big impact, but there's a lot of dangerous driving out there. A few cameras with high fines will stem a little bit of it and raise a bunch of money. I want to see us stem a lot more of it, and the only realistic way to do that is to expand the cameras significantly.

A major element of the Wells-Cheh bill is a provision that some camera revenue goes into a fund the Metropolitan Police Department can use to buy more cameras. Regardless of the level of fines, it's critical to set up a system whereby the stock of cameras can automatically grow over time.

It's also critical to ensure that the political blowback from speed cameras doesn't stop the District government from adding more. Now, it's not clear what exactly is necessary to achieve this. If Gray had 3-4 more years on his mayoralty, there might be little need to change the fines. Gray shows no interest in curtailing the plan whatsoever, regardless of fines, and in fact is resistant to lowering fines.

The DC Council might have disapproved some contracts for new cameras, but it couldn't. The next year's budget counts on a lot of revenue from cameras, which means that if councilmembers had wanted to delete the cameras, they would have had to fill a big budget hole.

What about in the future? If Gray doesn't run for reelection, as most speculate he won't, then the next mayor might have a different view. Maybe the next mayor will be so hostile to cameras that it won't matter how high or low the fines are. Or maybe he or she will keep cameras going no matter what.

From a safety point of view, fines don't need to be high as long as it's having a deterrent effect. At the press conference, Police Chief Cathy Lanier said she doesn't believe $50 fines are enough to deter, but council staff could find no studies that showed any conclusive correlation between fine size and driving behavior.

That suggest that high fines don't really improve safety. On the other hand, it also means that lowering fines probably won't do anything for safety either—unless lowering fines changes the political dynamic and allows more cameras.

It's not clear it will. AAA's John Townsend participated in the task force, and said in the meetings that AAA would support cameras as long as they're not for revenue. But then, last week AAA still came out with a provcative study of how many dollars certain cameras brought in, and got a raft of sympathetic stories in the press.

From a purely abstract point of view, lowering fines is the right thing to do. Punishments should be high enough to deter lawbreaking, but don't need to be higher just to punish. A lot of people believe, despite academic evidence to the contrary, that cranking up punishments fights crime or unsafe driving; past a certain point, it doesn't.

From a political point of view, on the other hand, it's worth doing this right thing if it achieves a greater goal. Expanding cameras, and making streets safer, should be that goal. If the bill sets aside a fund for MPD to buy more cameras, that could significantly streamline the process.

If lowering fines blunts political blowback, that's worth a lot. However, if speeders still complain, and AAA's Townsend will continue to say anything to get attention in the press regardless of lower fines, then lower fines would just give dangerous lawbreakers a windfall for little benefit.

Highway-building won't save the planet

NVTA has been pushing for an Outer Beltway through the rural piedmont for decades, and apparently believes we should widen every other highway ad infinitum. Landowners at the edges of the developed region fund NVTA, and the edge highways they constantly lobby for will open up opportunities to create large subdivisions of single-family homes (exactly the types of housing in the locations the region doesn't need right now).

That certainly won't decrease congestion in the medium or long term, though. It will probably increase it, because thousands more commuters will then joint the predominantly east-west commuter routes to jobs.

Even if it does reduce congestion for a short while, that doesn't save the planet one bit. A review by Portland State University found congestion reduction programs often don't reduce emissions. While cars do pollute less when not in traffic, any congestion reduction also entices people to drive more, adding new emissions as well.

Transportation made up 36% of Fairfax's energy use in 2006. The national report "Growing Cooler," by Smart Growth America and the Center for Clean Air Policy, and "Cool Communities" by the Coalition for Smarter Growth in the DC region, demonstrate convincingly that smart growth and transit-oriented development are the best tools to reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector. The compact development of smart growth also contributes to better building energy efficiency as well.

NVTA alert warps reality

NVTA's "Save the Planet. Expand the Highway Network" alert cites Fairfax County's Private Sector Energy Task Force, which, it claims, concluded:

Due to the need for transit to use highways and the need for most trips in the County to continue to use individual vehicles, a highway program to eliminate or at least drastically reduce congestion, provides the county with the largest opportunity for transportation energy reduction in the short and medium-term.

The NVTA alert also notes that "The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors recently endorsed unanimously its Private Sector Energy Task Force's recommendations." That certainly implies the board endorsed the above statement.

Besides the fact that the recommendation is dead wrong, NVTA is misleading on several fronts. This isn't really a recommendation of the task force at all, the county board certainly did not endorse this statement, and the report doesn't really only recommend highways as the solution to all problems.

The statement that the county should fix congestion with indiscriminate road-building appears nowhere in the task force's presentation to the Board of Supervisors or its formal recommendations. It does appear in a long document of "supporting material" which makes a very large number of different and sometimes conflicting suggestions.

Fairfax supervisors don't agree with highway agenda; neither did the task force

At Fairfax County's annual Revitalization Conference on October 22, Fairfax Chairman Sharon Bulova offered a very different vision than the one NVTA claims to ascribe to her. Stewart Schwartz of the Coalition for Smarter Growth attended, and reports that Chairman Bulova opened the conference with a strong statement that the county must focus addressing traffic congestion through land use policy, in particular by revitalizing and redeveloping its old commercial corridors.

The task force's membership happens to include people like Lon Anderson from AAA Mid-Atlantic, and Leo Schefer of the Washington Airports Task Force, who has long lobbied for the Outer Beltway. It's little surprise that a long list of supporting information from a task force containing professional road lobbyists and longtime road boosters includes a few road lobbyist statements. It also contains a great many recommendations that contradict the wider-roads-everywhere agenda.

Even in the congestion section, the supporting information document's long list of suggestions includes making it easier for people within 1 mile of rail stations to reach transit, and using road elements like roundabouts to improve flow without widening roads. The document advocates for tax credits and parking incentives for fuel-efficient vehicles, and encouraging more children to bicycle to school.

It's actually more telling that the task force demurred from endorsing the bad idea of focusing on expanding capacity to reduce energy use. Instead, there's a very vague recommendation asking the board to "review the transportation report" and possibly convey some findings to the Council of Governments.

Besides, the task force wasn't supposed to be about country transportation policy. A Fairfax County official said the goal was to find ways the private sector could help improve energy efficiency within the private sphere. It wasn't a transportation panel and its charge was never to try to set the county's priorities on transportation.

But for the people in Northern Virginia who single-mindedly pursue the Outer Beltway year in and year out, any task force seems to be an opportunity to push their same ideas. The Board of Supervisors should be cautious about these task forces or permanent panels, like the task force's suggestion to create a Public-Private Energy Alliance, if some members constantly try to hijack such forums to serve their own transportation and development ends.