Five city transportation chiefs -- Phildelphia's Rina Cutler, Chicago's Gabe Klein, NYC's Janette Sadik-Khan, San Francisco's Ed Reiskin, and Boston's Tom Tinlin -- shared their perspectives today on how cities have innovated by necessity.

The leaders of the nation’s big city transportation agencies have formed a tight-knit circle, brought together by the National Association of City Transportation Officials to share best practices, and yes, battle scars.

As NACTO’s first ever national conference drew to a close Friday, transportation chiefs from Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago and New York all talked about the progress their cities have made and shared their frustration at the lack of attention to cities and transportation in the state and national political arenas.

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg set the tone by blasting the state government in his introductory remarks. “Our economy is dependent on transportation,” he said. “But our state refused to give us money for a new subway line, so we said ‘screw you’ and took city taxpayer money to extend a subway line.”

NYC Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan put it even more starkly. She said that instead of the old New Yorker cartoon, a New Yorker’s view of the world, in which the map falls off dramatically after the Hudson River, “Washington’s view of the world is made up of Iowa, Ohio and lots of highways. And some dollar signs on the map where New York and Los Angeles are.”

Despite the lack of attention from Congress and the presidential contenders, Sadik-Khan explained that transportation innovations at the city level can cumulatively affect the nation’s economy, echoing the previous day’s plenary speaker Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution. “You’ve got two-thirds of Americans living in top 100 metropolitans areas, where three-quarters of US GDP is generated,” Sadik-Khan said. “Yet there is no mention of cities in presidential debates.” Added San Francisco Municipal Transportation Commissioner Ed Reiskin, “There was no mention at all of transportation in any of the debates.”

Given the progress that cities across the country are making on transportation reform, the question arises: How much more can cities do without the active support of Washington and state governments?

In Boston, where Mayor Menino recently declared “the car is no longer king,” the regional transit agency, the MBTA, is drowning in debt. According to the city’s transportation commissioner, Tom Tinlin, Boston has decided that it can’t wait for the state to fix the transportation system. They are creating bike lanes and using bike-share to help supplement reduced transit service and ensure that their residents can keep moving. Reiskin agreed: “The most cost-effective transportation investment we can make is in bicycle infrastructure.”

Many of the panelists discussed the increasing importance of public-private partnerships, particularly in terms of bike-share and car-share programs, to expand transportation options. They also voiced the need for cities to use their leverage in these partnerships to ensure equitable delivery of services to residents of all socio-economic classes.

Other panelists, like Philadelphia Deputy Mayor of Transportation and Utilities Rina Cutler, called on state and federal governments to wise up. “The deficit we have now is nothing compared to what it will be if we don’t make smart investments now to maintain what we have… We cannot afford to just kick this down the road.”

So why aren’t state governments and Congress keeping up with cities? Chicago DOT Commissioner Gabe Klein proposed that it’s because city residents — especially younger residents and entrepreneurs — expect their mayors and city governments to move at a much, much faster pace. City governments have to be much more creative and nimble to respond to these demands or else risk losing the residents and businesses that power their economies.

Philadelphia’s Cutler countered that cities need to make a better case for themselves. “We have still not made the sale in terms of what a dollar’s worth of investment gets us,” she said. She says we need to a better job of making this case to convince constituents and to put pressure on state and national leaders. “We need to get really loud,” she said. “We have two years before next federal transportation bill, and we need to focus on economic and livability messages around federal investment in infrastructure.”

Eschewing the faddish steps local governments sometimes take to retain and attract young professionals, Massachusetts has cut to the chase with a common-sense plan. Governor Deval Patrick is catalyzing walkable residential development as an official state policy in hopes of retaining young people by appealing to their needs and preferences.

Massachusetts is hoping to jumpstart walkable, transit-accessible residential development with a new set of incentives. Photo: Boston.com

Yesterday, Patrick announced a program called Compact Neighborhoods, which will provide incentives for the development of multi-family housing near transit centers. The Boston Globe reported that state officials hope the program will spur the creation of 10,000 new housing units annually. To be eligible for the incentive, developers will need to plan on at least eight units per acre for multi-family homes and four units per acre for single-family homes.

The announcement came after researchers and housing experts publicly made the case for a shift in housing to reflect changing demographic realities.

Barry Bluestone, director of the Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University, told the Globe that over the next eight years housing demand will be dominated by young families with significant debt and older people looking to downsize.

The new program is a step forward but may be just the beginning of what Massachusetts needs to meet demand for walkable neighborhoods. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, an urbanist, said that he doubted 10,000 homes a year would be enough to meet demand.

“I think it is going to take stronger medicine,’’ he told the Globe.

A hit-and-run truck driver has escaped prosecution for killing a cyclist in Massachusetts after a grand jury failed to indict on vehicular homicide charges. Alexander Motsenigos, 41, was killed last August while riding his bike along a suburban road in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where he lived with his wife and six-year-old son. The driver never stopped.

Hit-and-run victim Alex Motsenigos. Image: Boston Herald

The hit-and-run death outraged the community and sparked a through police investigation. For a moment, it looked like the perpetrator might face criminal charges for his fatal recklessness behind the wheel.

According to the local police department: “Investigators spent over three months and countless hours identifying and interviewing witnesses, reviewing and processing substantial amounts of evidence that was recovered at the scene and on the truck involved in the crash, executed multiple search warrants, completed a systematic accident reconstruction which included consulting with experts in the trucking field to conduct a simulation of the crash.”

Authorities brought vehicular homicide charges against Dana McCoomb, a semi-truck driver with a long list of driving infractions. But earlier this month a grand jury failed to bring those charges against the accused killer.

This weekend the Boston Globe fired off an excellent editorial blaming “anti-cyclist bias” for the miscarriage of justice and even suggested judges should screen jurors for bias against cyclists the same way they do for racial and ethnic prejudices:

Many accidents involving bicycles and motor vehicles can be traced to road design, inclement weather, or attention lapse. But law enforcement traced Motsenigos’s death to truck driver Dana McCoomb, a man with an extensive history of driving infractions who fled the scene after striking the Wellesley cyclist from the side. Witness statements, video footage, and subsequent police analysis of the scene suggested that the deadly collision was more than an unavoidable accident.

Sharing the road with increasing numbers of cyclists can be frustrating for drivers. But disregard for the safety of cyclists has reached pathological levels among some drivers. And this contempt, whether conscious or subconscious, may well have played a role in the minds of grand jurors. There are widespread misconceptions that cyclists should ride on sidewalks — which is dangerous for pedestrians — or that it’s up to cyclists to stay out of motor vehicles’ way.

A host of observers have sought to explain wider societal antipathy toward cyclists. Writing in Slate last fall, Jim Saksa pinned it on a logical fallacy based on perceived “otherness.” The BBC pointed to a mental evolutionary glitch in humans that seeks to punish rule breakers.

The Motsenigos case is an unfortunate reminder that even in cases where law enforcement does a thorough job of investigating a fatal crash, cyclists remain at a disadvantage in our justice system.

Beacon Street in Somerville, just outside Boston, is perhaps the most biked route in the state of Massachusetts. It also has a terrible safety record. There have been 154 collisions involving cyclists on the corridor between 2002 and 2010, according to the state Department of Transportation [PDF].

Vehicular cyclists are undermining a proposal for a protected bike lane on Beacon Street, just outside Boston, that has attracted opposition because parking spots will be eliminated. Image: Somerville Patch

“There are more bikes going down Beacon Street in a sort of subpar bike path than anywhere else in the city,” said Pete Stidman, executive director of the Boston Cyclists Union. Having a safe and protected space to bike “would increase cycling numbers exponentially.”

Working with officials from the city of Somerville, bike advocates have been promoting a safe solution. And it looks like it’s on the way: The city recently presented preliminary designs that include the addition of a protected bike lane.

The Somerville proposal is the latest sign that as protected bike lanes gain currency, this type of street design isn’t just for big city transportation departments. Evanston, Illinois, an inner-ring suburb of Chicago, recently built a protected bike lane linking residential areas to its downtown.

As with protected bike lanes in other cities, Boston-area advocates are running up against some opposition in their bid to make Beacon Street safer. The dynamic in this case is a little unusual: A handful of dyed-in-the-wool vehicular cyclists are giving a big assist to residents who value on-street parking in front of their doorstep more than street safety.

Somerville’s plan calls for eliminating about 100 on-street parking spots on Beacon for the mile-long stretch where the bike lane will be installed. Although a local parking study found that there was more than enough on-street parking capacity to accommodate the reduction, some local residents have been grumpy about the proposed change. At a recent preliminary design meeting with the community, one neighbor called the plan “discriminatory” (against drivers) and said it violates their “right to park” in front of their homes.

“I want my parking place; I think this is a dumb project,” said Somerville resident Marty Filosi.

Further complicating the matter is the fact that a handful of vehicular cyclists in the region have opposed the plan. One of them is John Allen, a prominent local follower of John Forester’s transportation theories, which — against the preponderance of evidence — argue that dedicated cycling infrastructure makes cyclists less safe.

Beacon Street's current conditions make cyclists vulnerable to dooring and fail to create an environment that's safe for all ages. Image: Wicked Local

Vehicular cyclists have long held inordinate sway in the Boston area. For many years, the city’s bike planner subscribed to this philosphy, said Stidman. As a result, Boston had very little dedicated bike infrastructure until recently.

Protected bike lanes are a relatively new street treatment for the Boston region, Stidman said, and the lack of familiarity with these designs may be exacerbating the current conflict. There are only a handful of protected bike lanes in the Boston area — two in Cambridge and one in Boston proper. This would be the first one ever constructed in Somerville.

Planners hope to complete the project in 2015, but this protected bike lane could be in jeopardy. State Senator Patricia Jehlen — apparently responding to some of the parking gripes — recently spoke out against the protected bike lane.

“That’s really strange because typically she’s supporting issues that have to do with children and family and elders,” said Stidman. “Those are precisely the people we’re trying to help out with adding a piece of bike infrastructure.”

The $5.5 million plan is being led by the city of Somerville and funded by the state. Stidman and other Boston-area bike advocates hope the city will follow through on making the corridor safer for all instead of buckling in the face of irrational complaints.

Percent change in average residential sales prices relative to the region, 2006-11. Image: APTA and NAR

If you live close to a transit station, chances are you’ve weathered the recession better than your friends who don’t.

Your transportation costs are probably lower, since you can take transit instead of driving. Transit-served areas are usually more walkable and bikeable too, multiplying your options. And while home values plummeted during a recession that was triggered by a massive housing bubble, your home probably held its value relatively well – if you live near transit.

The National Association of Realtors and the American Public Transportation Association commissioned the Center for Neighborhood Technology to study the impact of transit access on home values during the recession. For the report, “The New Real Estate Mantra: Location Near Public Transportation” [PDF], CNT looked at five metro regions — Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, and San Francisco.

While nearly everyone in hard-hit cities experienced some setback from tanking housing prices, transit-served areas were largely insulated from the worst of it, CNT found:

Across the study regions, the transit shed outperformed the region as a whole by 41.6 percent. In all of the regions the drop in average residential sales prices within the transit shed was smaller than in the region as a whole or the non-transit area. Boston station areas outperformed the region the most (129 percent), followed by Minneapolis-St. Paul (48 percent), San Francisco and Phoenix (37 percent), and Chicago (30 percent).

This is consistent with a study released last year by the Center for Housing Policy showing that access to rail transit created a “transit premium” for nearby home values of between six and 50 percent. That study, like CNT’s, looked at Minneapolis and Chicago, as well as Portland. The Center for Transit Oriented Development has also looked at this phenomenon and found transit premiums as high as 150 percent.

Not surprisingly, not all transit types fared the same in CNT’s research. Stations with frequent service that are part of a well-connected transit network gave the biggest boost to home values. Those households, naturally, have better access to jobs and lower transportation costs.

Additionally, there’s variation because different types of transit serve different types of neighborhoods. Commuter rail station neighborhoods tend not to be as walkable and compact as those served by high-frequency, well-connected transit like subways, light rail, or BRT — and one WalkScore point reportedly worth an additional $3,000 in a home’s value. In examining office rents in walkable and non-walkable areas, real estate developer Chris Leinberger attributed two-thirds of the walkable areas’ better performance to walkability.

In Boston, close-in residences lost the least value (dark green) compared to those in the suburbs (dark orange) but even close-in commuter-rail-served areas got hit hard. Image: APTA and NAR

Phoenix is not known for being a transit-rich city. Indeed, only 2 percent of the region’s households live within a half-mile walk of a Metro station. Even within the transit shed, just 9.1 percent of workers commute via transit. Still, even a relatively weak transit system showed substantial benefits for nearby homeowners: Their home values outperformed the area by 36.8 percent, with apartments faring the best.

Apartment living also paid off in Boston, a far more transit-rich city, where a third of workers with transit access use it to get to work – and more than half of transit-served residents commuting via transit, biking, or walking. Those folks didn’t just save on transportation – their home values fared 226.7 percent better than the region as whole if they were served by rapid transit. Homes served by commuter rail actually declined even more than the regional average, even in relatively close-in areas. As in Phoenix, apartments lost the least value.

In Chicago, home prices dropped by nearly a third between 2006 and 2011, but if you lived near transit, your home lost almost 30 percent less value than the region at large – especially if you lived near the L, in which case you did 47.3 percent better. Commuter rail-served areas got a somewhat smaller boost at 22.7 percent. In Chicago, it was townhouses, not apartments, that saw the smallest decline.

San Francisco has the most widely-used transit service of any of the study areas, with 40 percent of workers with transit access riding it to get to work and another 21 percent walking or biking. San Francisco’s housing prices were among the hardest hit of the five regions, but those served by Muni outperformed the rest of the region by 61.6 percent. BART access added only about 35 percent, with transit access in general helping boost home values, relative to the region as a whole, by 37.2 percent.

This week’s mayoral elections yielded good news for transit and safe streets in both Houston and Minneapolis. In Boston, meanwhile, the results are less straightforward.

Annise Parker, right, won her third term as Houston's mayor this week. She has been a proponent of safer streets. Image: Houston Tomorrow via Culture Map Houston

Transportation reformers in Minneapolis are generally pleased about the election of City Council member Betsy Hodges (runoff votes are still being counted, but the second-place contender has conceded). Hodges is a strong smart growth proponent and a supporter of the city’s streetcar plans. Some transit advocates are concerned her strong support for rail will mean less investment in buses. But she definitely speaks the livable streets language.

“In my vision of Minneapolis,” she told Streets.mn this fall, “our streets are for all residents of Minneapolis regardless of the mode of travel they choose. Our neighborhood commercial corridors should not be [our] raceways out of town, but vital destinations — in and of themselves.”

In addition, Minneapolis City Council candidates with strong transit bona fides also knocked off a few incumbents. Sam Newberg wrote today in Streets.mn that “now is the time to make some very real and meaningful changes to the development of our city.”

Meanwhile, Houston incumbent Mayor Annise Parker fought off two relatively conservative challengers to win her third term in the nation’s fourth-largest city. Parker, one of the country’s first openly gay mayors, recently instituted a complete streets policy in Houston by executive order. She has also helped move forward the city’s light rail system, building a diverse coalition around transit. Parker has been ranked as one of the country’s top 10 “green mayors.” She has promised to help make cycling safer in the city and joined in on some group rides.

In Boston, labor leader and state lawmaker Martin Walsh scored a surprise upset over City Councilor John Connolly in the race for mayor. Advocates in Beantown report that Connolly was clearly the more progressive choice on transportation. Connolly’s campaign featured bike rides around the city to highlight his complete streets plans; Walsh’s campaign focused more on bread-and-butter economic issues. Only three of the 12 mayoral candidates skipped a forum on transportation held by the nonprofit group Livable Streets in the run-up to the election, according to Boston Streets. Walsh was one of them.

While he’s not expected to be a visionary leader on transportation issues, there’s reason to think he’ll move the city in the right direction. He has stood for lower speed limits in urban areas. In his transportation plan, Walsh said his priorities include dedicated bus lanes in underserved areas and making neighborhoods more livable by improving conditions for walking and biking.

Brighton Avenue in Allston is sporting some new “super sharrows.” Image: Boston.com

Behold, Boston’s new “super sharrows,” a spin on the often-derided shared-lane marking. Boston’s new twist is meant to give the feel of a bike lane, even when the space for one is lacking. The official term for this street treatment is “priority shared-lane markings,” and they were debuted in the last few weeks on Boston’s Brighton Avenue.

City Bike Czar Nicole Freedman told the Boston Globe that only a few cities in the country have tested this kind of bike marking, which was first proposed by civil engineering professor Peter Furth in a 2009 research paper.

What do you guys think? Would this make you feel safer or more confident?

A wave of new residential construction projects in places like Seattle, Boston, and Miami are showing that, yes, modern American cities can build housing without any car parking on site.

A rendering of the new 175-unit condo development, Lovejoy Wharf, in Boston. Image: Curbed

Officials in Boston gave their approval last week to what Curbed called the city’s “first big-time parking-less condo,” a 175-unit project named Lovejoy Wharf. The “plan was met with disbelief in some quarters,” according to Curbed, but the city’s redevelopment authority approved it unanimously.

Portland developers have been building housing sans parking for a few years. Last summer, NPR reported that about 40 percent of Portland’s under-construction housing was parking-free. Portland’s zoning rules have allowed zero-parking developments since the aughts, but builders and lenders weren’t pursuing that type of project until recently, the Oregonian reports. Unfortunately, the city pulled the rug out from under parking-free housing this summer, responding to car owners who feared increased competition for curbside parking spots. Portland’s new rule requires some parking in apartment buildings with more than 30 units.

Meanwhile, other cities are marching ahead. In Seattle, parking-free housing developments are becoming more common. Mark Knoll, CEO of Blueprint Capital, led the development of a 30-unit building with no parking in one of the city’s “urban villages.” These designated areas, chosen for their walkability and proximity to transit, have special zoning rules that allow Seattle developers to forgo parking. These relaxed parking requirements were set in motion by Washington state’s Growth Management Act in the 1990s, which was intended to combat urban sprawl. Since the new zoning rules came online in Seattle in 2010, between 20 and 30 parking-free projects have been developed, Knoll estimates.

Car parking is expensive: Each space in a city garage costs tens of thousands of dollars to build and hundreds of dollars annually to maintain [PDF]. Eliminating on-site parking brings down the cost of apartment construction, Knoll estimates, between 20 and 30 percent. That makes it possible for developers to deliver more affordable housing. Knoll’s California Avenue development, for instance, is targeted at people making 60 percent of area median income, or about $15 per hour.

“There’s been quite a few developments [of this type] and they’re quite popular,” said Knoll. “There’s a waiting list for these types of housing.”

Parking-free housing is attracting buyers at the upper end of the spectrum too. Luxury apartments and condos are now appearing in cities like Miami and Portland without any car parking. Miami’s under-development, 352-unit Centro Lofts will have just five Car2Go spaces, covered bicycle parking, and a space for a future bike sharing station. No storage for private cars. That doesn’t seem to be hurting demand, according to the Miami Herald:

If you think this sort of thing won’t fly in auto-centric Miami, guess again. Half of Centro’s 352 units are sold even though the building hasn’t broken ground. Prices start at $220,000 and top out in the mid-$400,000s.

“These types of projects are really the wave of the future,’’ Oscar Rodriguez, the developer, told the Herald.

Bostonians making polite requests for a clear path on one of the city’s key bike routes were met with disdain from the state agency responsible for maintaining the paths.

With a rapid-response social media campaign, Boston residents put a face on the purported “.05%” of cyclists who bike through the winter. Photo: Boston Cyclists Union

Here’s how one unnamed official from the Massachusetts’ Department of Conservation and Recreation responded in an internal email thread to a message from a Boston resident asking for better snow removal on the Southwest Corridor, an important off-street bike path. The leaked email was published on the Boston site Universal Hub (emphasis ours):

Frankly, I am tired of our dedicated team wasting valuable time addressing the less than .05% of all cyclists who choose to bike after a snow/ice event… We should not spend time debating cyclists with poor judgement [sic] and unrealistic expectations, and stick with [the staffer]‘s recommendation that they find other transportation. If someone is completely depending on a bike for year-round transportation, they are living in the wrong city.

Bikes advocates in the Boston region didn’t take those remarks lying down. The Boston Cyclists Union, working with Allston-Brighton Bikes and Southie Bikes, asked local cyclists to share photos of themselves on social media with the slogan “I am the .05%” to demonstrate their numbers and their normalcy. Local cyclists also took to tweeting under the hastag #winterbiker to explain why biking in cold weather months is their best option.

Those efforts appear to have found their target. The Boston Cyclists Union and MassBike are reporting today that DCR has agreed to meet with local cyclists to discuss their concerns regarding snow and ice clearance on bike paths.

And, for the record, cold weather cities that put real effort into making it safe to bike see little drop-off in cycling during the winter. Copenhagen, for instance, retains 80 percent of its peak-season bike traffic in the cold months.

Austin, Texas, built this beauty of a bike lane by the University of Texas campus while it was participating in round one of the Green Lane Project. Photo: The Green Lane Project

More than 100 cities applied for the second round of the Green Lane Project, the program that helps cities build better bike infrastructure, including protected lanes.

People for Bikes, which runs the program, announced its selections for round two today: Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, and Seattle.

“The selected cities have ambitious goals and a vision for bicycling supported by their elected officials and communities,” said Martha Roskowski of People for Bikes. “They are poised to get projects on the ground quickly and will serve as excellent examples for other interested cities.”

Several of this year’s choices already have good wins under their belts. Indianapolis, Atlanta, and Seattle had protected bike lanes on People for Bikes’ list of the country’s ten best new protected bike lanes last year. And Pittsburgh, with its star urbanist mayor, seems poised to make big strides.

Beginning in April, the selected cities will receive expert assistance, training, and support over a two year period to build safe, comfortable protected bike infrastructure.

During the first two years of the Green Lane Project, the number of protected bike lanes in the country nearly doubled from 80 to 142, People for Bikes reports. More than half of those new lanes were in its six first-round focus cities: San Francisco, Chicago, Portland, Memphis, Austin, and Washington.

The newest tool for doctors in the fight against obesity? That’s right: Bike-share.

Doctors in Boston are now prescribing Hubway memberships. Photo: Hubway

This week in Boston, doctors introduced a program called Prescribe-a-Bike, offering low-income residents struggling with obesity an annual Hubway bike sharing membership for the low price of $5. The program is being administered by Boston Medical Center in partnership with the city of Boston. Qualifying patients will have access to Hubway’s 1,100 bikes at 130 locations. Participants will also receive a free helmet.

“There is no other program like this in the country,” Mayor Marty Walsh told Boston Magazine. “Prescribe-a-Bike makes the link between health and transportation, and ensures that more residents can access the Hubway bike-share system.”

Local officials hope the program will result in about 1,000 additional memberships, according to the Boston Globe.

In the medical community this type of recommendation is known as an exercise prescription, and it is a growing practice. More doctors are prescribing exercise, the CDC says, as “lifestyle diseases” like obesity, heart disease and diabetes have become some of the leading killers in the United States. In addition, policy measures like the Affordable Care Act are providing incentives for the healthcare industry shift focus from treatment of disease to the promotion of wellness.

For a while in the last decade, one of the leaders in this movement, Kaiser Permanente, experimented with prescribing sedentary patients pedometers so that they could track their daily walking.

“Physical inactivity has become the greatest public health problem of our time,” said Dr. Robert Sallis, a leading proponent of this type of medicine, “and finding a way to get patients more active is absolutely critical to improving health and longevity in the 21st century.”

U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx praised bike infrastructure as a way to get more value out of existing U.S. streets. Photo: Green Lane Project

Staring down a highway trust fund that he described as “teetering toward insolvency” by August or September, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said Monday that better bike infrastructure projects are part of the solution.

“When you have a swelling population like the USA has and will have for the next 35 years, one of the most cost-effective ways to better fit that population is to better use the existing grid,” Foxx said.

Foxx made his comments to a gathering in Indianapolis of urban transportation experts from around the country, welcoming six new cities into the PeopleForBikes Green Lane Project, a two-year program kicking off Tuesday that will help the cities — Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh and Seattle — add modern protected bike lanes to their streets.

“I know you are the vanguard in many was of these issues, and we at U.S. DOT want to do everything we can to be supportive,” Foxx told the crowd.

PeopleForBikes Vice President for Local Innovation Martha Roskowski singled out Indianapolis, the host city, as a particularly bright light in the constellation of towns using using curbs, planters, parked cars or posts to create low-stress streets by separating bike and auto traffic.

“This city is on fire,” Roskowski said. “You look at the Cultural Trail, you look at the other projects in the works. … You don’t really know that you’re at a tipping point until later.”

Roskowski praised Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard, a Republican, for six years at the front of an Indianapolis transformation that has seen the city use better bike infrastructure “to be resilient, to be sustainable, to be competitive and to beautiful.”

“Five years from now we’re going to look back and say, we really changed how we thought about transportation in America,” Roskowski said. “Yes, we’re all going to drive cars still. But there are other elements to transportation.”

Six focus cities

The eight-mile Indy Cultural Trail brought comfortable biking to the streets of central Indianapolis. Photo: Green Lane Project

Launched in 2012, the Green Lane Project works with U.S. cities interested in quickly installing protected bike lanes. The on-street lanes, separated from traffic by curbs, planters, parked cars or posts, help organize the street and aim to make riding a bike an appealing option for people of all ages and abilities. Selected cities receive financial, strategic and technical assistance from the Green Lane Project in building protected bike lanes, valued at more than $250,000 each.

In the last two years, the number of protected lane projects on the ground around the country has nearly doubled. The country’s first multi-city study of the ridership, safety and political performance of protected bike lanes, completed by the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium at Portland State University, will be released early next month.

Here’s a brief look at each of the six cities selected to join this year’s cohort. We’ll be spending the next month filling out some of these stories and taking a close look at how each city has landed in a leading role on bike infrastructure.

Atlanta

Atlanta’s work on better bike infrastructure has just begun, but its plans are ambitious. A robust network of protected bike lanes will link downtown to the popular Beltline Trail. With strong leadership from Mayor Kasim Reed, Atlanta has 15 protected lane projects in the works, using a wide array of public-private partnerships to speed project delivery. Coca-Cola is planning a protected lane in front of its headquarters and is supporting the construction of new lanes to link to a second downtown location with 2,000 employees recently relocated from the suburbs.

Boston

With its 113,000 university students, compact urban form, robust but jam-packed public transit system and its even more crowded freeways, Boston has already made rapid leaps in the last few years with relatively small investments in biking. Two high-visibility, high-impact downtown projects are in the works that will change the way Bostonians and visitors experience the city, whether they ride a bike or not. Coupled with the successful Hubway bike share system, the Connect Historic Boston project will be a national showcase for protected bike lanes.

Denver

One of the nation’s most physically active cities, Denver has the bones of a good bike network in its off-road paths but little on-street bike infrastructure of quality. Now, as the central city booms, business leaders in the Downtown Denver Partnership see better bike accommodations as a part of a smart economic development strategy. The group is working with the city and county of Denver to develop a master plan for protected lanes that will make Denver a model for other growing Western cities.

Indianapolis

The success of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail, which is a national model of a public-private partnership to create a revitalizing landmark destination, has inspired an ambitious list of further projects. Mayor Greg Ballard, who sees bike infrastructure investments as an economic growth strategy, is among the most bike-friendly leaders in the country. His advocacy and the Cultural Trail’s popularity have created broad community recognition of great bike infrastructure’s benefits.

Pittsburgh

This city has the winters of Minneapolis, the hills of San Francisco, the narrow streets of Boston, and the long-term population and tax base decline of other rust belt cities. Yet it is poised to succeed on bikes in spite of its challenges. Mayor Bill Peduto is bold, ambitious and has publicly committed to Pittsburgh’s first protected lane projects with strong support from many local business and community leaders. This fall, Pittsburgh will be the epicenter of protected bike lane information when it hosts the ProWalk/ProBike conference. Bikes are an integral part of Pittsburgh’s inspiring resurgence.

Seattle

Seattle’s newly adopted Bicycle Master Plan is a national model of what it takes to build a bike network for all ages and abilities, with sophisticated network planning that uses protected lanes as the tool for busy streets that are essential to the network. The ambitious multi-modal redesign of Broadway combines a two-way protected bike lane with streetcar and storm water management along a booming commercial corridor. Amazon is moving a significant portion of its operations into downtown Seattle and is building a protected lane at its front door.

You can follow The Green Lane Project on Twitter or Facebook or sign up for their weekly news digest about protected bike lanes. 

Transit officials lined up today to make clear that holding transit spending at current levels — as the Senate’s transportation authorization bill does — will put transit systems at risk of falling further into dangerous disrepair.

Beverly Scott of the MBTA warned that current funding levels, as continued by the proposed Senate transportation bill, are “woefully insufficient.”

The backlog for transit maintenance and replacement stands “conservatively” at $86 billion, according to the Federal Transit Administration. That backlog is expected to keep growing at a rate of $2.5 billion each year without a significant infusion of funds.

To put it another way, the country needs to spend $2.5 billion more per year — from federal, state and local sources — just to keep the state of the nation’s transit systems from getting even worse.

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) was determined to expose the shortcomings of the bill Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) recently shepherded through the Environment and Public Works Committee. While the bill’s transit title hasn’t been written yet, EPW has been clear about its intentions to keep spending at current levels plus inflation. That means no help toward the $2.5 billion boost needed to keep things from getting worse.

Menendez chaired a hearing today of the Banking Committee — the very committee tasked with writing the transit title within the framework established by EPW — to demonstrate the problem with the bill’s funding levels.

“By a simple yes or no,” Menendez asked the transit officials before him, “does anyone on the panel believe that current funding levels are enough to help you achieve a state of good repair?”

“They are insufficient,” answered Joseph Casey, general manager of Philadelphia’s SEPTA.

“Woefully insufficient,” added Beverly Scott, head of Boston’s MBTA and a nationally respected transportation visionary.

“No sir,” said Gary Thomas of Dallas Area Rapid Transit.

“And if federal funding remains flat, does anyone believe that additional state and local funding alone could cover the cost of starting to dig down the backlog?” Menendez then asked.

The answer to that was also a resounding no, although the officials made it clear that recent state action — notably the Pennsylvania transportation bill and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s reforms — got them partway there.

“We appreciate and we respect at the local level that we need to step up and do our part as well,” Scott said. “But we are definitely in great need of continued support by the federal government.”

Menendez put the question to the FTA’s Dorval Carter, too: “If federal funding remains flat in the coming years, do you believe we can make any progress toward eliminating the $86 billion backlog?”

“No sir, I do not,” Carter responded.

Indeed, flat funding does not mean a flat backlog. It means an accumulating backlog.

Carter said the biggest challenge is the nation’s rail systems, which account for about 63 percent of the state of good repair backlog.

“These deficiencies have a direct impact on riders,” he said. “They undermine the resiliency of our transit systems and they drain resources that could be better spent on timely replacement and expansion.”

“The older a system gets, the more challenging the simplest of tasks become,” Carter said. “For instance: Where do you find parts for 100-year-old equipment? No one makes them anymore; you can’t get them off the shelf. Your options are to either cannibalize existing assets or to make the parts yourself.” Carter said that when he worked at the Chicago Transit Authority, he had seen them resort to both measures.

When track deteriorates, agencies often implement “slow orders.” If you’ve ever been on a train that inexplicably slows to a crawl at a certain turn or bridge or tunnel, you know how it impacts your travel time when an agency orders trains to slow down in certain segments. Sometimes agencies impose weight limits. And sometimes they need to shut down segments altogether.

Casey of SEPTA and Scott of the T represent old systems with desperately aging infrastructure. Boston’s subway opened in 1897, making it the oldest transit system in the country, “which still operates today at crushloads.” The region’s commuter rail system was originally laid out in the 1830s. “Some of the MBTA bus facilities date to the early 20th century,” Scott testified, “having been initially designed to serve horse-drawn omnibuses.”

Like Boston, Philadelphia has a state-of-good-repair backlog of about $5 billion. Out of 103 bridges that have hit their 100th birthday, SEPTA can only address 18 in the next five years, Casey said. SEPTA has seen 50 percent ridership growth over the past 15 years on its regional rail system, and Casey said there’s great potential for significantly more growth — if he were able to invest more in capacity.

The current transportation bill has a mixed record on transit maintenance. MAP-21 created a new state of good repair grant program and increased maintenance funding for rail. And Carter praised the transit asset management requirements that were part of MAP-21, saying they would help agencies “get a more accurate picture of true need, enabling local decision-makers to allocate resources more effectively system-wide.”

But discretionary grants for buses and bus facilities became a formula program, and according to Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), the result has been that smaller transit districts are “buying fewer — therefore not getting group bus discounts — and they’re keeping inefficient buses that needs high levels of maintenance on routes for longer, at the detriment of the agency.”

Scott would like to see the next bill focus more on performance so that the funding system is “not rewarding bad behavior.” But what keeps her up at night, she said, is workforce development. Too many of her specialized staff are nearing retirement. And in general, she said, Congress just needs to “get out of that old thinking.”

“All this siloing: ‘This is a road dollar, this is a transit dollar, this is a ped dollar,’” she said. “We’re all talking about mobility and access. We’re all so integrated and inter-connected.”

Casey said what he’d like to see out of the next bill is just a funding solution. “The pot just has to grow.”

Assembly Station in Somerville, outside Boston, is a great example of how older transit systems can draw more riders with new stations in strategic locations. Image: MBTA

Yonah Freemark at the Transport Politic calls them infill stations: new transit stops built in gaps along existing rail lines. Current examples include Assembly Station just outside Boston in Somerville, DC’s NoMa Station, and the West Dublin/Pleasanton BART station.

Infill stations are a pretty brilliant method to get the most out of older rail systems without spending very much, Freemark says. He’d like to see more cities adopt the strategy:

The advantages of infill stations result from the fact that people are simply more likely to use transit when they’re closer to it — and from the fact that the older transit systems in many cities have widely spaced stations that are underserving potentially significant markets. Erick Guerra and Robert Cervero, affiliated with the University of California-Berkeley, have demonstrated that people living or working within a quarter mile of a transit station produce about twice as many transit rides as people living or working more than half a mile away. In other words, with fewer stations on a line, the number of people willing to use public transportation as a whole is likely reduced.

Assembly Station, which has been in the works for several years, promises significant benefits — 5,000 future daily riders taking advantage of a 10-minute ride to the region’s central business district, at a construction cost of about $30 million. The station fits in the 1.3-mile gap between two existing stations and is the first new stop built along Boston’s T rapid transit network in 26 years. When combined with the $1.7 billion Green Line light rail extension planned for opening later this decade, 85 percent of Somerville’s residents will live within walking distance of rapid transit, up from just 15 percent today.

The cost-per-rider comparison between the two Somerville projects is indicative of the value offered by infill stations: While Assembly Station cost about $6,000 per rider served, the Green Line Extension will cost $38,000 per rider served — six times more. Both projects will provide benefits, but the cost-effectiveness of infill stations in terms of attracting riders is clear. While infill stations will reduce transit speeds to some extent, within reason the number of new riders they attract will more than make up for the change.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Strong Towns comments on perverse transportation engineering standards that create dangerous streets in the name of “safety.” Systemic Failure says Caltrain will have to choose between bikes and bathrooms in its new electrified trains, and it should go with the former. And Beyond DC shares a quote that gets to the heart of the reason protected bike infrastructure is so important.

2nd inbound orange line track to Boston isn’t even cleared of snow between Oak Grove & Malden! #MBTApocalypse #MBTA pic.twitter.com/hQV9oEbtNq

— Cory Thomas (@coryt3) February 11, 2015

Cross posted from the Frontier Group.

As you may have heard, we’ve been experiencing a few public transportation problems here in Boston of late. Record-smashing snowfall, coupled with extreme cold temperatures and some questionable decisions by public officials in the early days of Snowmageddon have left the city with a subway and commuter rail system that is, as I write, barely functioning. It has also focused public attention on fiscal train wreck that is our local transit system, the MBTA.

One meme that has surfaced in the recent debate is that the MBTA should not spend a dime on further expansion until it can run the core part of its system reliably. It’s a compelling argument in many ways. Clearly, one should not invest in building a new addition to one’s home if the roof is caving in. It is also clear that ensuring the smooth functioning of the city’s core subway lines – some of which rely on cars that date from the late 1960s and infrastructure that dates from God knows when – is more critically important than adding new stations and service.

But the idea of putting further expansion and improvement plans on hold indefinitely is not a perfect solution either. Doing so essentially commits Boston to a 20th century (and in some places, a 19th century) transit system – albeit, perhaps, a well-functioning one – for years, if not decades, to come.

The tension between improving the functioning of our current, inadequate transit systems and building new, modern systems comes up over and over in debates among transportation experts and transit advocates.

Is it, for example, a smart idea to spend tens of billions of dollars on a modern high-speed rail system in California at the same time that Amtrak struggles (and often fails) to provide First World-quality service on the rest of its network? Should we consider major investments in new rail lines at a time when bus service in many communities is so substandard?

One reason we are forced into these unsatisfying debates, in my opinion, is because America failed to build functioning 20th century rail and transit systems during the actual 20th century. Below is one of my favorite charts – it’s derived from a 2010 Congressional Budget Office data set that estimated total infrastructure spending by all levels of government since 1956. Between 1956 and 1974, according to the CBO analysis, total government capital investment in the nation’s rail system was zilch – $0. Public capital investment in mass transit systems during that same period totaled $40 billion (2009$) – compared with $1.3 trillion in investments in highways.

Indeed, one could argue that, with liquidation of streetcar networks, passenger rail lines and associated infrastructure across the country in the postwar years, net investment in those services was actually negative. Cumulative Federal, State and Local Capital Spending on Highways, Transit and Rail, 1956-2007 (source: Congressional Budget Office)

Graph: Frontier Group

Boston was a slight exception to these trends, largely due to the tenacious fight put up by local activists and advocates in the 1970s to stop the construction of urban freeway projects and transfer the funds to public transportation (as well as later work to wrest a commitment to MBTA reactivation/expansion projects as a concession for the large expansion of highway capacity represented by the Big Dig.)

Even then, however, as this animated map shows, it is not as though the MBTA has been growing by leaps and bounds in recent decades, and those expansion projects that have occurred have largely been successful. The extension of the Orange and Red Lines in the 1970s and 1980s has clearly been well rewarded in terms of ridership and transit-oriented development, while the new Silver Line bus rapid transit along the waterfront is already overwhelmed by demand.

The extension of commuter rail service to the southern suburbs in the 1990s – perhaps the most questionable investment in recent years – wasn’t really even an “expansion” project at all, but rather a restoration of previous service that was ended in 1959. Recent projects, including the ongoing extension of the Green Line to Somerville and the creation of infill stations along the Fairmount commuter rail line, have been all about improving transit connectivity and sparking development in already dense portions of the metropolitan area.

These are projects that are highly likely to succeed, and years overdue. Truly transformative and imaginative projects – such as the Urban Ring and North-South Rail Link – have continually been put on the back burner. (Indeed, proposals for circumferential transit service around Boston date back to 1923.PDF) My worry is that anti-expansion fervor will do the same to the MBTA’s plan to build out an “urban rail” network akin to Paris’ RER and Germany’s S-Bahn systems – a service that would make the MBTA far more functional, relieve the clogged core subway system, and open new parts of the region to much-needed residential and commercial development at relatively low cost in infrastructure investment.

Boston, like many cities across the United States, has emerging 21st century transit needs – needs that are not being served and cannot be fully served by our existing infrastructure, no matter how well it is run. As a rider who is dependent on one of the MBTA’s legacy subway lines, I obviously want to see sufficient investment to enable the core system to run well.

But as someone who cares about building a 21st century Boston that can accommodate strong population growth, provide homes for people of all socio-economic backgrounds, sustain a high quality of life, and meet the imperative to reduce the impact of our transportation system on the global climate, I also want to see that system to grow and improve.

As for where to get the money, that’s a difficult and complicated question. But given the extraordinary amount of resources we invested in our highway network over the last half century – and the fact that there always seems to be money in the banana stand for another highway boondoggle – perhaps we can now shift at least some of those resources toward building out the rail and transit networks we should have built 50 years ago, operating those and other services at a high level of quality, and planning for the needs of the next century.

This 40-foot snow tunnel made an important biking and walking path useful again. Image: Dragonbeard on Youtube

For every pedestrian and cyclist who’s had your journey interrupted by an impassable mound of snow, we bring you this story from Boston. Earlier this month, Beantown resident Ari Goldberger found his journey to the Wellington Station T stop impeded by a “15-foot mountain of snow.”

He registered his complaint to the powers that be, but he got the run-around.

“Rather than waiting on hold for a million years calling the MBTA, I posted the picture online and said, ‘If nothing is done about this, it’s going to take months to melt,'” he told BDC Wire.

So Goldberger and his friends took matters into their own hands, and after a long, beer-fueled digging session, tunneled their way through. Now people can use this route to bike or walk again, and the excavators are heroes. He’s a look at what it’s like to ride through it. Pretty awesome.

Update 2/23/15 1:27 p.m.: The tunnel was destroyed by an unknown entity late Saturday, according to Mashable. So this story has a sad ending after all. 

The Casey Overpass will be replaced with an at-grade street. Image: Arborwaymatters via MassDOT

This month, Boston is demolishing a monument to 1950s-era car infrastructure: The Casey Overpass, a short elevated road built in 1955 to whisk drivers over the Forest Hills MBTA station in Jamaica Plain without encountering any pesky things like intersections or pedestrians.

The last car drove over the decrepit 1,600-foot-long structure just a few days ago, and construction crews have begun taking it apart. Soon the residents of Forest Hills will say goodbye forever to the hulking eyesore blighting their neighborhood.

The lovely view beneath the Casey Overpass. Photo: Arborwaymatters

In its place, the state will construct an at-grade street with three lanes in each direction and a protected bike lane.

The road removal encountered its share of resistance along the way, including from a local bike shop owner, but the arguments for the teardown won out.

Removing the overpass will enable the creation of a more walkable street grid and reintegrate the neighborhood with Boston’s beloved “Emerald Necklace,” the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed park system.

Tearing down the overpass also saved a lot of money compared to rebuilding it — about $21 million, according to the Boston Globe.

Boston’s MBTA has been having a tough year.

Photo: Wikipedia

Following a disastrous winter season marked by extreme weather and service disruptions, the agency has been inundated with charges of mismanagement.

While the MBTA has its flaws, the charges against it don’t stem from a good government campaign so much as an ideologically-driven assault, filled with exaggerations and lies and backed by groups affiliated with the Koch brothers. Transit advocates view the sustained effort to discredit the agency as an attempt to undermine public support for expanding the rail and bus network in the growing Boston region.

The charges against the MBTA stem from a few interconnected sources. Fitting a pattern that Streetsblog reported on last year, a Koch-funded “think tank” has sown misinformation about the agency, which has then been picked up by politicians with Koch ties. In June, conservative groups won a major victory, passing a law that opened the door to privatizing some parts of the MBTA.

Leading the attack is the Pioneer Institute, which has published multiple reports filled with misleading claims about MBTA spending. (The Charles Koch Institute lists the Pioneer Institute as a “partner institution.”) Piling on recently was Governor Charlie Baker, a co-founder of the Pioneer Institute. Baker ordered a report on the MBTA in the wake of last winter’s fiasco.

Any legitimate watchdogging of the MBTA has been buried underneath a pile of exaggerations and misleading claims originating from Pioneer and its allies. Let’s examine a few of them:

The Claim: The Pioneer Institute reported that the MBTA outspent all its peers on capital projects, claiming it was “the fastest growing major transit agency” in the country, which Baker then repeated.

The Facts: An analysis by the Frontier Group compared MBTA growth in three categories — miles added to system, total service hours, and total service measured in passenger miles — to the 45 largest U.S. transit systems. By those measures, MBTA is far from the fastest-growing agency.

Chart: Frontier Group

The Claim: Baker’s report found workers missed an average of 57 days per year and calculated the absenteeism rate at 11 to 12 percent. The report said that rate was twice that of “peer agencies.”

The Facts: The report authors neglected to mention that the “57 days” included vacation days and other types of scheduled leave. Workers miss an average of 22 unscheduled days per year, for an absenteeism rate of 8.6 percent. But even if you include the scheduled absences, the Globe pointed out, that still amounts to 9.9 percent, not the 11 to 12 percent claimed by the Baker report. That rate is more in line with comparable agencies.

The Claim: The governor’s report found the agency had failed to spend $2.2 billion in federal funds.

The Facts: A good chunk of that money — “hundreds of millions” — has yet to be spent but will be, because it’s obligated to projects like the Green Line extension.

The Claim: The MBTA will be fine if it cuts costs and doesn’t receive additional revenue. The Pioneer/Baker campaign appears to be aimed at squelching attempts to increase funding for the MBTA. James Aloisi, former transportation secretary for the state, wrote in Commonwealth Magazine that Governor Baker was using his report as a “trial balloon” for squeezing efficiencies out of the agency without increasing revenues.

The Facts: While efficiencies at the MBTA can and should be found, it’s also impossible to address the agency’s problems without tackling its funding shortfall. Even the Baker administration has estimated the system needs $6 billion in investment just to reach a state of good repair — and that’s not including any expansion.

As the Boston region grows, the transit system will have to grow too, even as the MBTA fixes its core infrastructure. As Tony Dutzik wrote recently at the Frontier Group, without expanding its transit system, Boston risks falling behind its peers: “Boston, like many cities across the United States, has emerging 21st century transit needs — needs that are not being served and cannot be fully served by our existing infrastructure, no matter how well it is run.”

Boston cyclist Jonathan Fertig created a temporary protected bike lane in Boston this week using $6 potted mums he bought at the hardware store. Photo: Jonathan Fertig

Even the most delicate barrier between bikes and auto traffic can change the behavior of drivers and make cycling a lot more appealing. Case in point: An ingenious bit of tactical urbanism in Boston this week resulted in a bike lane protected by $6 pots of hardware store mums.

Jonathan Fertig told Streetsblog he was upset the city had striped bike lanes on Massachusetts Avenue, near where a truck driver killed surgeon Anita Kurmann in August, but hadn’t yet installed flexible posts that would prevent drivers from parking in the lane. So he took matters into his own hands Sunday by adding a row of potted mums, an idea he says he cribbed from the “Tactical Urbanism” manual written by Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia. Amazingly, the plants remained in place and untouched for several days, until the city returned this week to install the posts.

“The tops of the flex posts are open, so I’m actually planning to put a bouquet of flowers in each one on my way home as a statement that I’m still here, and that honestly I’m not satisfied with the city’s solution at this intersection,” Fertig said, adding that he’d like to see a more substantial protective barrier at the site.

Fertig followed up his flower pot coup with these random orange-cone curb bumpouts this week.

Meanwhile, Fertig’s efforts caught the attention of the Boston Globe, which published a surprisingly sympathetic story that put the city on the defensive over the delay in adding protective bollards.

Fertig used the platform to announce a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for future interventions of the same type. The campaign has raised more than $3,200 in just two days.

Fertig has used some of the money on projects like using orange cones as temporary curb extensions [pictured at right]. He said he simply dropped the cones on his way to work.

Given the large amount of money raised so far, Fertig said he might explore more comprehensive tactical urbanism projects, like a Better Block demonstration.

Last week, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority abruptly cut ties with four contractors working on the 4.7-mile Green Line extension to Somerville and Medford, outside Boston. The announcement came shortly after reports that the cost of the light rail project had ballooned to about $3 billion, an increase of a billion dollars.

After major setbacks, Boston’s Green Line extension will be delayed but probably not cancelled. Image: MassDOT

State officials said the decision doesn’t mean the project will be cancelled, although transportation chief Stephanie Pollack wouldn’t rule out that possibility, reports the Boston Globe.

The Green Line extension has a lot going for it. The project will serve some of the most densely populated areas of New England, and ridership is expected to be robust — about 49,000 trips per day. It enjoys widespread political support and will run along existing rail right-of-ways, so the political controversies that can accompany land acquisition are not an issue. It has secured nearly $1 billion in federal funding and benefits from a legal mandate requiring the state to offset some of the pollution effects of the Big Dig by improving transit.

So how did the cost rise so much and what does it mean for the project?

A major factor was the way MassDOT and the MBTA chose to contract out the project, according to Rafael Mares of the Conservation Law Foundation, a regional environmental non-profit.

Officials at the MBTA and the state were hoping to speed implementation with a form of project delivery called “Construction Manager/General Contractor” (CM/GC). The advantage of this method is that it allows construction to begin before the design process is totally complete. This was a new contracting method for Massachusetts and it required the approval of the state legislature.

The extension would serve Somerville, one of the most densely populated places in New England. Photo: Design Sponge

However, there was “a long list of flaws in how it was implemented,” said Mares. The MBTA more or less admitted as much in a presentation explaining the decision to cut ties with contractors [PDF]. For one thing, the agency says, there was never a “reliable cost estimate” for the project.

The state divided the project into seven different “packages” and offered White-Skanska-Kiewit — itself a joint venture between three contractors — an automatic no-bid contract if its estimate was within 110 percent of the estimate offered by an independent firm.

Rather than reject estimates from WSK that came in too high and then open the process to competition, MBTA and the state allowed the process to devolve into a “Marco Polo pricing game,” said Mares. WSK would submit an estimate and if it was higher than 110 percent of the independent estimate, the firm would come back with a revised number, until its estimate was as close to the maximum number as possible, he said.

Once WSK had the contract in hand, costs grew without a sufficient transparency mechanism in place. “Ultimately MassDOT and MBTA are responsible because it’s their job to protect us,” Mares said. “The contractor [WSK] took advantage of this process at the same time.”

MassDOT and MBTA’s decision to end the contracts will surely delay the project. But political observers doubt that the state will cancel it altogether.

For one thing, Massachusetts still has to reduce pollution under the terms of the Big Dig legal agreement. “If they don’t do this project, they’ll have to do another project that would get them 110 percent of the air quality benefits,” said Mares. “Quite frankly, I doubt that they could conceive of a project that could do that.”

Somerville is one of the most densely populated areas in the nation, but it’s underserved by transit. Few other American transit expansion proposals can match the 49,000 additional daily trips projected for the Green Line extension. “Nobody is questioning the value of this project,” Mares said.

So what’s next?

Mares says he’s not sure the project costs will drop to the level of previous estimates (around $2.3 billion). However, he says there’s a good deal of value engineering that could be done. And just opening the remaining “packages” to an open bidding process will likely save hundreds of millions, he said.

There are other sources of potential cost savings as well, but they involve some pain for current transit riders. Tolerating longer construction-related closures at existing commuter rail stations — where the extension will run — could save a surprising amount of money, Mares said. The previous contract allowed only very limited service disruptions, mostly nights and weekends — an expensive approach.

Those temporary inconveniences, he says, “would be much better than not building the Green Line or not building certain stations.”

Ultimately, a better transit expansion opportunity than this one isn’t likely to present itself in the Boston region. “This is a light rail project in the existing right of way, and they have almost a billion in federal funding,” said Mares. “If they can’t make this project happen, I don’t know what they could make happen.”