Posts about Mary Peters
Parking
Golden Gate congestion pricing out, performance parking in
After New York rejected congestion pricing, At the same time they offered money to New York for congestion pricing, USDOT also dedicated funds to San Francisco for a limited congestion pricing experiment on Golden Gate bridge approach road Doyle Drive. But according to the SF Chronicle, Golden Gate transportation officials wouldn't agree to make the tolls truly market priced, and USDOT won't give them the money for a mere $1 toll hike.
Photo by marymactavish on Flickr.
Instead, SF will implement market-based parking pricing on major bridge approach roads, like Lombard and Van Ness. We don't have all the details, but I doubt just pricing the main roads will help much. The idea is to reduce congestion on those roads by discouraging circling for parking, but if side streets are underpriced, people will still circle and still use the main streets amidst the circling.
The Bay Area's proposal calls for $145 million in federal funds, with $47 million for Doyle Drive reconstruction, $20 million to set up the SF Park congestion-based parking program, $13 million for regional ferry improvements, and $58 million for the SF Go program to synchronize traffic signals along many of the city's busiest boulevards.This time, it's the SF officials who are right, though the Chronicle article is misleading. Synchronizing traffic lights isn't the right approach and just speeds up traffic. That might speed buses a bit, but it'll make driving even more appealing. But SFgo is about more than "synchronization". It allows timing signals to help pedestrians or bicycles instead of just for cars. And it'll provide signal priority for buses, which really is a great way to speed transit and reduce congestion.Moscovich said federal officials have agreed to everything but the traffic signal money. In their letter to Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, Bay Area officials pitched that program as an effective way to reduce congestion and attract more riders on public transportation.
Correction: The SF money wasn't New York's reallocated Also, the Chronicle article claims that USDOT doesn't want to fund signal priority, but the existing agreement between SF and USDOT includes signal priority. I'm trying to find out if the Chronicle article is wrong or what.
Transit
Breakfast links: governmental lameness edition
Proposed design for the Watha T. Daniel/
Shaw library. Photo from DCPL.
FTA sucks part 937: The Federal Transit Administration continues its attempts to make itself obsolete by ensuring transit can't ever achieve economies of scale. This time, they're forbidding city transit systems (including DC's) from transporting kids to school, despite the fact that it's cheaper (due to the buses already being there and all).
Not the very model of a modern DC library: Ward 2 Council candidate Cary Silverman is disappointed with plans for the Shaw library. It's basically a classic library inside a modern-looking building, not a modern library that caters to the needs of a modern community.
Roads
Dinner links: Kansas outdoes everyone else edition
Tom the Dancing Bug via Salon.
What about the "character of the community"? Greensburg, Kansas was completely destroyed by a tornado. Every building was gone. Now, they are building a walkable, mixed-use town in its place. (But we still have to rebuild Klingle Road exactly as it is!)
Good at sports, bad at urban planning: Boston is planning a new TOD development at the Forest Hills subway, commuter rail, and bus station in Jamaica Plain. But the MBTA still insists the developers replace all the parking, and planners are thinking about making all the streets one-way and changing traffic signals to speed traffic. All this while the development seeks LEED certification. Can LEED please add "not building lots of parking and adding traffic" as a factor? Via Planetizen.
Please go away, Mary Peters: The FTA also doesn't like Baltimore's Red Line proposal. What else is new? The Baltimore Sun is eager for a new administration, as is The Overhead Wire.
Get inna the road: MyBikeLane, the site where people publish photos of cars parked blocking bike lanes, is now operating in DC. Via Matthew Yglesias.
Transit
Silver Line back on track
The Post is reporting that DOT Secretary Mary Peters will approve the Metro extension to Dulles, reversing her and the FTA's earlier surprise objections. It must be because I asked her about it on Monday!Roads
Peters: promote local control and eschew silos, except on transit and gas taxes
US Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters spoke at the Brookings Institution today, giving an overview of her thoughts on the future of transportation. Peters has been courageously promoting new ideas, like congestion pricing, that we really need or at least need to thoughtfully consider. Her market-oriented solutions are a potentially revolutionary alternative to the build-more-roads dogma of many past Secretaries of Transportation.
US Transportation Secretary
Mary Peters
Still, some dogmatic ideology still shows through. Peters reflexively argues against the gas tax while the very principles in her speech support it. She argues for more local control and results- Peters began by relaying powerful statistics that build the case for congestion pricing Most agree that the current system doesn't work very well. Congress directs significant transit money to pet pork projects and "bridges to nowhere". Federal transportation dollars not allocated with earmarks go into discrete pots of money that can only be used for a specific purpose, like highway construction or small transit lines, "modal silos" that prevent broader thinking or local decisionmaking. This "stovepiped approach," Peters argued, is "more focused on process than performance."
Peters wants to focus on three main areas: Transportation safety, the interstate highway system and a few other key national corridors, and mobility in metropolitan areas. Congestion pricing falls into the third category. The second, as you may note, assumes that highways represent the best way to move goods while making no mention of intercity rail. When I asked about this, she replied that getting away from "modal silos" will allow "incentivizing other investment" in high congestion corridors like Boston-DC. But by listing the interstate system, rather than all modes of intercity travel, as her top priority, it's clear that silos aren't completely purged from Peters' thinking.
Secretary Peters strongly supports local decisionmaking, using federal dollars to "encourage local officials to pursue sustainable congestion strategies" like congestion pricing and HOT lanes. We need to have federal money "leverage investment by states and localities." Every dollar spent could bring in three or four in local and private money and "tap into the $400 billion in private capital available for intrastructure." To open the faucet on that money, Peters wants to remove federal restrictions that prohibit tolls on many roads, expand pubilc-private partnerships and "allow jurisdictions greater flexibility."
A former county executive from Buffalo, New York asked about our decades of overbuilding infrastructure that has created sprawl, to which Peters reemphasized the value of local control. Of course, local control is a great principle until Virginia decides their top priority is Metro expansion to Dulles, at which point the focus on process roared back as Peters and the FTA raised their eleventh hour concerns about WMATA, MWAA, and other issues that are more about process than performance.
Several questioners asked about her opposition to the gas tax. "If the American people were clamoring for gas tax increase, we would have one," she declared. But, asked one questioner, why would they accept a congestion charge which the American people don't seem excited about either? Peters feels the difference is that the congestion charges (or "convenience fees") go directly to local government, and people support pricing when they know the revenues will fund local improvements. That's entirely true, but a gas tax could just as easily be dedicated to local improvements if the tax revenue went to local governments.
Peters also emphasized the importance of reducing dependence on foreign oil, through more efficient vehicles and other means. A gas tax, therefore, is "contrary to our environmental goals." I can't figure out what she means: economics tells us if we tax something, people will do less of it. Taxing fuel directly, therefore, is the most immediate way to reduce dependence on foreign oil.
Despite the occasional Republican talking point showing through, Peters is clearly very committed to solving the problem of congestion and even the environmental impacts of driving, even if her solution is to make sure people can drive faster at higher cost rather than providing alternatives to driving altogether. Peters said that HOT lanes and congestion cordons were really only first steps to a better, longer-term solution of having a "VMT-based form of payment," which is "convenience priced" in the highest congestion areas and lower in other areas. That's a great direction to go, even if a gas tax and construction of rail lines, despite Peters' opposition, are equally great steps to take along with congestion pricing.
Transit
Dulles rail decision from a backroom deal?
Is the DOT and FTA trying to force Virginia to sell the Dulles Toll Road? Did the FTA work out a deal with private investors ahead of time to reject public financing? BeyondDC picks up on an interesting angle from the Post's report that private investors are floating an idea to finance the Dulles rail extension by privatizing the Dulles Toll Road (which will require raising tolls). Two Virginia Congressmen, Democrat Jim Moran and Republican Frank Wolf, claim the FTA's decision is intended to back Virginia into a corner where its only option is privatization; BeyondDC sees this as meaning "the Feds struck a back room deal with private investors."
I keep bringing up the Virginia elected officials are totally baffled by the motivation behind this decision. Virginia did everything the FTA asked, and the FTA even told Congress the project was going forward. Back-room deal or no, there's plenty of evidence (like Peters' personal anti-rail bias) that political motives are at work.
Transit
Chicken, meet egg on Dulles rail line
Yesterday, many wrote about the FTA and DOT Secretary Mary Peters' decision to deny funding for the Metro extension to Dulles, at least unless the project meets a new set of criteria over and above the many hurdles it's already surmounted. Some are livid. Others doubt the project's wisdom. But Peters and FTA chief James Simpson advance unreasonable chicken-
It's true that $5 billion is a lot of money, and San Francisco's BART extension to SFO airport Peters and Simpson say they are concerned that Metro can't operate the line because it has trouble getting enough money to run its current lines. But by this logic no transit would ever be built. As Zachary Schrag explains in The Great Society Subway, the governments funding the DC Metro expected operating costs to cover capital expenses. Only once much of the system was already built did officials realize this wouldn't happen, but the system was too popular with the public and had too much momentum to stop. It's just like the way Robert Moses built highways in New York by starting them with limited funds, then relying on governments' unwillingness to kill the project once there were holes in the ground.
Do we wish Metro had never been built, now that we know the costs? Like all transit systems, it operates at a deficit, but its externalities are positive and significant, as opposed to highways' negative externalities. Schrag quotes transportation officials and real estate developers alike who argue that "Downtown would not have come back [after the riots of 1968] if it wasn't for the subway". I'm glad officials in the 1960s underestimated Metro's long-term costs, because the city's long-term benefits far outweigh them.
And the public won't allow Metro to run out of money or cut service. Maybe voters will only support funding for transit when it's truly threatened, but they will. Maybe we have to build it and then figure out how to pay for it long-term. Under Peters' logic, that would never happen.
We built the Interstate Highways without knowing for sure where the money would come from to maintain them (and still often do). Likewise, we built the highways before anyone had expertise building them. WMATA, led by a former Army Corps of Engineers general, built Metro without really having any expertise building a subway. But Peters believes that because the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority is better at running airports than building trains, we shouldn't build the trains at all. Maybe someone better can build them. Or maybe we just have to develop the expertise. Otherwise, we'll only build roads for the simple reason that we already have state highway departments who know how to build roads.
By that logic, our transportation choices can never change from where they have been for the last 50 years. Maybe that's exactly what Mary Peters wants.
@ggwash
- Latest Metro map drafts add Anacostia parks and other tweaks
- Bikeshare is a gateway to private biking, not competition
- DC Council makes major policy changes overnight
- Short-term Washingtonians deserve a voice, too
- Parklets give every block a little park
- Public land deals have both benefits and pitfalls
- Judge denies injunction against closing schools
Greater Washington
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