Transportation Policy

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (pictured right) emphasized quality of life issues in his annual State of the City address last week. Most significant, Newsom put forward an ambitious transportation agenda and laid out specific targets for increasing bicycling and reducing automobile use:

Streetfilms' Clarence Eckerson has been spending a lot of time in Portland learning about the politics, planning, engineering and culture behind that city's phenomenal bike network. Working closely with Greg Raisman from Portland's Dept. of Transportation Clarence produced a half hour documentary called "A Celebration of Portland Transportation." On Saturday, the film was shown on the big screen at Portland's Bagdad Theater.

Sketches from an internal BRT Study depicting the three general types of stations: A) Major Station: Includes extended canopy with windscreens and seating. Icon and full platform pavement treatment. B) Standard Station: Shelter with Icon and full platform pavement treatment. C) Minimum Station: For locations with narrow sidewalks: Icon and platform edge strip only. Bigger image here.

One of the more troublesome aspects of Forest City Enterprise's "Atlantic Yards" proposal is the developer's plan to create two rather huge, suburban mall-style surface parking lots on the eastern side of the project footprint. If all goes as planned there will 3,600 new parking spaces will be in place by 2012.

The Gansevoort Project Aims to Turn a Chaotic Intersection into a Grand Piazza

A couple of different sources tell me that Bob Kiley is moving back to New York City to take a position with Parsons Brinckerhoff, the global engineering firm with a lead role in Partnership for New York City's secretive, long-delayed congestion pricing study.

Via the Manhattan Institute's new blog, Streetsblog learns of a pdf-formatted report entitled A Heavy Load: The Combined Housing and Transportation Burdens of Working Famillies, which looks at the housing and transportation expenses paid by lower income families in a number of cities. The report, published by the Center for Housing Policy, a K Street think tank, finds that lower-income families in central cities spend significantly less on the overhead of life than suburban and exurban ones.

On Friday, Department of Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall stood up in front of 600 people at Borough President Stringer's Transportation Policy Conference and said that her agency was serious about reducing car use in New York City. It was a great policy speech.