Twenty is plenty in Boston, according to its elected officials. The City Council voted unanimously this week to lower the default speed limit on most residential streets to 20 mph — and not for the first time.

Photo: John Stephen Dwyer/Wikipedia

Speeding is the number one complaint council members hear from residents. And on Boston’s narrow streets, packed with pedestrians, driving 40 mph — as people regularly do — is especially dangerous.

The current speed limit is 30 mph, and, unfortunately, changing it isn’t as easy as passing a City Council rule. The state of Massachusetts sets default speed limits, and when Boston tried to lower its speed limit before, state law prevailed.

“In the past the state has been reticent to change the prevailing speed limit because of the way it would affect so many towns,” says Walk Boston’s Brendan Kearney. “Potentially every single little city or town would have a different speed limit.”

Jackie DeWolfe at Livable Streets Boston says advocates are hopeful this time will be different, but it won’t be easy.

Boston launched a Vision Zero task force last year, and that is raising awareness of the speeding problem. One encouraging sign of progress was that during this round of City Council discussions, Boston Police testified in support of lowering the speed limit.

“It’s a really important symbolic thing that can be done to tell residents and visitors the kind of community we’re trying to create here” said DeWolfe told Streetsblog.

State Representative Denise Provost, of Somerville, says winning statewide approval for such a change is a difficult political task. She’s tried unsuccessfully in previous sessions to pass legislation enabling cities to lower speed limits.

Provost said it’s probably too late for a bill authorizing Boston to lower its speed limit to pass before the legislative session ends in July.

Perhaps a revised approach may help, she says. Provost was inspired by New York City’s successful bid to lower its default speed limit to 25 miles per hour, which also required state approval. She said perhaps if a handful of Boston-area cities, like Boston, Somerville and Cambridge, sought a combined regional speed limit, they might prevail.

“If they could agree on an urban core speed limit then maybe we could get this legislature to do what [New York] did,” she said. “The regional approach is a way that has not been tried yet, but it will need the agreement of probably at least three municipalities”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Heavy trucks kill. They account for as much as 32 percent of cyclist deaths in New York City and 58 percent in London, far out of proportion to their share of traffic. Across the U.S., 1,746 bicyclists and pedestrians have been killed in collisions with commercial trucks over the last five years.

For cities looking to reduce traffic fatalities, the dangers posed by heavy trucks must be addressed. London is a global standard bearer, but some American cities are also making progress on truck safety. A report from the Vision Zero Network [PDF] highlights some of the best policies.

1. Mandate side guards and crossover mirrors for city trucks

American cities don’t have the power to regulate vehicle designs the way British cities do, but they do have control over their own fleets. Applying effective safety standards to municipal truck fleets is a good first step for cities.

The 2012 death of 23-year-old Christopher Weigl drew attention to the problem of truck design in Boston. One feature the city’s trucks lacked was side guards, which prevent severe injuries in the event a truck driver sideswipes a pedestrian or cyclist, keeping the victim away from the path of the rear wheels.

In nearly half of cyclist fatalities involving heavy trucks, the victim was initially hit by the side of the vehicle. The same is true for about a quarter of pedestrian victims. In the last five years, 556 pedestrians and cyclists lost their lives in this type of collision, according to the Volpe Center, a U.S. DOT research institute. Side guards could have saved them.

After the UK required side guards, cyclist fatalities in side impact collisions fell 60 percent, and pedestrian fatalities fell 20 percent, according to the Vision Zero Network. A number of countries in Europe and South America also require them, as does Japan.

In 2013, Boston passed a side guard ordinance and started installing the them on public works vehicles and garbage trucks. Each side guard cost the city about $1,800. (U.S. DOT estimates side guards cost around $900, and if designed properly can improve fuel economy enough to be cost-neutral [PDF].)

The Volpe Center recently published a voluntary side guard design standard, which can serve as a guideline for cities that want to improve safety.

New York City began installing side guards on city-owned vehicles as part of its Vision Zero initiative, launched in 2014. According to the Vision Zero Network, New York has installed side guards on 500 trucks and hopes to double that number in 2017. Mayor Bill de Blasio has mandated them on 10,000 vehicles — mostly garbage trucks — by 2024.

Both Boston and New York also require crossover mirrors, which are mounted on the hood to reduce blind spots in front of the vehicle, on city fleets. New York City requires them on all trucks, thanks to a state law allowing that regulatory authority. Trucks registered in other states that are driven into NYC are not covered by the law, however, and federal regulators have failed to close the loophole.

2. Insist on safe trucks for contractors

Cities don’t have the authority to require side guards on all trucks, but they have leverage with their contractors. Boston is the first city to take advantage, requiring side guards not only on its own fleet but for contractors who do business with the city as well. Next year London will begin using its authority to deny work to firms that use the most dangerous types of trucks.

While this strategy won’t cover every truck, it’s one more tool cities can use to improve the safety of commercial vehicles. New York City’s rules stop short of this but do offer incentives to private waste haulers that install side guards [PDF].

3. Restrict freight traffic to specific streets

Cities also have the authority to limit where heavy trucks can travel. A number of American cities have limited where trucks can legally operate by designating truck routes, said Alex Engel, a spokesperson for the National Association of City Transportation Officials. However, this takes careful planning, he added, because often the same routes that are desirable for biking also make sense as freight routes.

New York City limits where freight traffic can go based on destination — inside the city or outside — and truck size. Truck drivers are only allowed to stray from truck routes to reach their final destination. The system is supposed to keep trucks away from most streets unless making local deliveries, but the laws are not well enforced.

Trucks longer than 55 feet also require a city permit to operate anywhere within New York City, and trucks of that size aren’t allowed on surface streets at all unless the cargo is “non-divisible,” such as construction beams. However, the rules are frequently broken, Streetsblog New York reports, and deadly collisions involving oversized trucks are common.

Seattle and New Orleans both restrict where heavy trucks can go. New Orleans does not allow trucks over 36 feet within the French Quarter. Seattle requires a permit for oversized trucks within a special downtown zone.

4. Improve truck driver training

San Francisco requires city truck and bus drivers to take a class about vehicle blind spots. London also provides special training to truck drivers through its Fleet Operator Recognition Scheme. Some of these courses — e.g. “vulnerable road user awareness” — are taught by bicycle advocacy groups.

Last week, the engine on one of Boston’s Orange Line trains overheated and ignited some trash, filling traincars with smoke. Passengers broke windows to escape. Three people were hospitalized for smoke inhalation.

The scare focused attention on long-standing maintenance problems for the T: It’s underfunded, upkeep is falling behind, and the quality of service is suffering. Orange Line trains, many of which are three decades old, were in line for replacement later this year. Not soon enough to prevent last week’s meltdown.

The MBTA is mired in debt and has a $7.3 billion repair backlog. Following the Orange Line debacle, Mayor Marty Walsh called for a new funding source.

“The problem we have is a problem of literally decades of disinvestment,” former Massachusetts DOT director Jim Aloisi told Streetsblog.

The MBTA operates the nation’s fifth-largest transit system, serving about 1.3 million trips per day. And ridership has been growing rapidly.

But state and local support for the MBTA is far below what peer agencies receive, according to TransitCenter, leaving the agency at the whim of federal funding sources. Compared to New York’s MTA, for example, the share of the agency’s capital budget that comes from federal sources is nearly two-thirds higher. If state and local support for MBTA capital expenses were proportional to the MTA, it would add $3 billion to the agency’s five-year capital budget.

While funding issues may not account for all of the MBTA’s troubles, they explain a lot. And the origins of the problem go back a long way.

An internal MBTA report from 2009 said the agency was “born broke” and remains stuck in a “financial quagmire.” In 2000, the state legislature passed a law called “Forward Funding” that took the MBTA off the state’s books and established a separate funding stream — a one-cent, statewide sales tax. As part of the transition, $3.3 billion in debt was transferred from the state to the MBTA.

Revenue from the sales tax barely grew in the 2000s, averaging about a 1 percent annual increase, compared to 6.5 percent in the 1990s, according to the report. Short of funds, the MBTA delayed maintenance and refinanced its debt, in some cases trading lower principal payments for higher rates.

By 2015, 22 percent of the agency’s budget was going to debt service. In other words, nearly a quarter of the MBTA’s operating budget could not be spent on providing bus and train service.

The 2009 report called for the state to relieve the MBTA of the original $3.3 billion in debt transferred to its books, about half of which was incurred by transit improvements the state had to build in order to proceed with the “Big Dig” highway tunnel project.

Aloisi thinks that debt relief would be a good start. And some conservatives in the state, like the Pioneer Institute, agree (albeit with a lot of strings attached).

Several governors have come and gone without addressing the MBTA’s structural budget problems. And current governor Charlie Baker doesn’t seem inclined to take action. After the Orange Line fire, he blamed the mess solely on “protocol issues,” not the MBTA’s maintenance backlog.

To give the Boston region the transit system it deserves, says Aloisi, the state will have to think bigger. Options like a parking tax or a tax on driving mileage, with revenues devoted to transit, should be considered, he said.

“We have a long way to go in Massachusetts before we have a transportation system that reflects our values and our needs,” he said.

Boston’s Beacon Street is notorious for speeding and tragedy. Two years ago, a young couple was walking along the street when they were struck by a driver who ran a red light, hit another vehicle, and then flipped. Jessica Campbell, 27, and Jack Lanzillotti, 28, were both killed.

Last year Beacon Street was the site of another high-profile crash. Two men were allegedly drag racing at speeds of up to 60 mph, when one jumped the curb and struck a 28-year-old pedestrian, inflicting non-fatal injuries. Residents of this area of the Back Bay told the Boston Globe that dangerous driving is the norm.

Also in 2016, Mayor Marty Walsh committed to a Vision Zero action plan to eliminate traffic deaths by 2030. Beacon Street is exactly the type of high-risk roadway that Walsh’s administration should act decisively to redesign for greater safety, but local advocates say the lack of action to fix Beacon Street is emblematic of the city’s timid approach to the problem.

The Vision Zero Coalition, which includes organizations like the LivableStreets Alliance, the Boston Cyclists Union, and Walk Boston, recently released a report calling on Walsh and the City Council to devote more resources to street redesign and staff up agencies like the DOT and Department of Public Works, address Boston’s traffic safety problem.

Traffic fatalities in Boston fell last year, but there was a jump in pedestrian deaths, according to Andrew McFarland of the LivableStreets Alliance. The group estimates 15 pedestrians were killed within city limits in 2016, up from nine in 2015. (Official city data hasn’t been released yet.)

The city won a major victory last year, getting approval in the statehouse to lower the default speed limit from 30 to 25 mph. That took effect a couple of weeks ago. Walsh’s administration has also done good work identifying dangerous streets and intersections.

But the coalition says City Hall isn’t taking steps to redesign streets that are commensurate with the scale of the problem. Last summer, for instance, the city installed a protected bike lane on a single block of Beacon. The coalition would like to see these treatments scaled up to include the entire street.

The agencies working on Vision Zero street redesigns in Boston don’t have as much to work with as their counterparts in other cities. Boston allocates $3.1 million toward its Vision Zero action plan. That’s less than $5 per capita. Meanwhile, New York City has dedicated about $13 per capita and San Francisco about $75, McFarland says.

The coalition wants to see the city’s next budget significantly increase funding for Vision Zero projects.

“They really need to up their game in terms of increasing funding and expanding staff to make sure that projects get implemented on the ground,” McFarland said.

A Boston bus stop that left riders on an awkward sidewalk island surrounded by speeding traffic nearly won Streetsblog’s “Sorriest Bus Stop in America” competition last year.

Now Boston’s MBTA is in the midst of a systematic review of its bus stops to identify dangerous conditions.

The agency told state officials yesterday that it sent two-person crews to evaluate conditions at each of its 7,600 bus stops [PDF]. The MBTA is looking at the safety of pedestrian crossings, the quality of shelters and seating amenities, and the presence of physical barriers like guardrails.

With all but about 100 evaluations completed, the MBTA has identified 209 stops of immediate concern because they lack safe walking access or require bus riders to board in the street. The agency will either eliminate or modify those stops to address the problem.

The agency says it may eliminate 133 stops, according to the Statehouse News Service, but only bus stops within 750 feet of another stop will be removed. Service will not be affected.

A 2016 survey by TransitCenter [PDF] found that most frequent transit riders walk to access the bus or train, and that they value bus shelters highly.

Only about 8 percent of MBTA’s bus stops have shelters, the agency’s review found. Another 7 percent have benches but no cover from the elements.

TransitCenter’s Jon Orcutt says the MBTA deserves credit for taking the initiative but that the process so far is more of a “minimum first step.”

“Transit riders would be best served by a bus stop program that plans and provides for safe, inviting walking access to stops and well-designed, functional shelters,” he said.

The MBTA says it will work with the municipalities where the stops are located to get them fixed or removed.

Here’s a look at two of the stops the MBTA deemed to be unacceptable.

At the Landmark Interchange by Fenway Park in Boston, people trying to walk across the street sometimes have to wait as long as two minutes for a signal. And that, says Northeastern University Civil Engineering Professor Peter Furth, is dangerous.

Two minutes is an unreasonably long time to ask someone to wait — especially in one of the nation’s most walkable cities. Faced with that delay, says Furth, people will try their luck crossing against the light. To compound the danger, the signal phasing that delays pedestrians is designed to speed cars. So pedestrians crossing against the light will have to negotiate high-speed traffic.

The signal timing that puts pedestrians at risk is baked right into traffic engineering conventions, Furth told the Boston City Council in December [PDF]:

Synchro, the standard software [traffic engineers] use, is based on minimizing auto delay, and it doesn’t even calculate pedestrian delay. “Level of Service” criteria give engineers an incentive to minimize auto delay, often at the expense of pedestrian service (which isn’t measured). That’s how we get designs with 30 second delay for cars with 120 second delay for pedestrians.

Also, standard traffic engineering rules (from the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices) say it’s OK to allow only enough time for pedestrians to cross to a median, and wait there for the next cycle to continue crossing. This can be appropriate in some contexts, but certainly not at high volume crossings.

Boston is at least paying attention to these risks and seeking the expertise of people like Furth. In most other places, pedestrian-hostile engineering standards go unquestioned.

Part of the problem, Furth says, is that transportation engineers have standards for measuring motorist delay but not pedestrian delay. He has developed a tool to assess delay at intersections for pedestrians and cyclists, recommending that Boston weigh those factors in its signal timing.

Disregard for the walking environment is also embedded in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices — a point of reference for engineers. The MUTCD does not require pedestrian-specific signals at crossings, treating them as a judgment call even in urban locations.

The MUTCD does not even “warrant” (i.e. allow) a signalized crossing for pedestrians unless at least 93 people per hour try to cross the street, or five people were struck by drivers within a year.

Meanwhile, there are no such thresholds for motor vehicle signals. Regardless of traffic counts, the MUTCD gives engineers permission to install traffic signals on major streets to “encourage concentration and organization of traffic flow” — i.e. to make things go smoother for drivers.

Ian Lockwood, an engineer with the Toole Design Group, said this institutional bias helps explain why the U.S. has struggled to reduce traffic deaths.

“When a traffic engineer says they’ve optimized a traffic signal, that typically means they made it the best for the motorists,” he said. “There’s a pro-speed, pro-automobile bias that’s built into the traffic engineering culture dealing with these sorts of issues.”

When a pedestrian is killed, Lockwood says, engineers tend to blame the victim for not complying with the standard road design, instead of questioning how the street design created deadly risks.

Quick — what should a city do to improve access to a rapidly developing area near a bus rapid transit station? In Boston, officials have settled on an expensive plan to subsidize driving and traffic.

The Boston Globe’s Jon Chesto reports that the city of Boston and the Massachusetts Port Authority are planning to spend more than $100 million to add 2,100 parking spaces in Boston’s Seaport District. As you can see above, this area — a competitor in Streetsblog’s 2015 Parking Madness tournament — is already an ocean of surface parking. But recent development has caused the market for parking to tighten up, so the government is stepping in to rescue “suburban commuters who [don’t] want to pay downtown Boston prices or use public transit.”

The city will pay $22 million to add 550 parking spaces to an existing parking deck, Chesto reports, while the Port Authority is paying $85 million to build a 1,550-space garage nearby to bring parking prices down:

Massport officials have taken to calling the project a “transportation center” because it would include a shuttle bus stop, possibly a taxi or Uber stand, and a Hubway bike-rental station. The project would include a covered walkway along the World Trade Center Avenue viaduct to connect Summer Street, the garage, and the World Trade Center station on the MBTA’s Silver Line.

City Hall officials are also watching a steady stream of employers move into the district and recognize more parking is needed.

More recommended reading today: David Levinson at The Transportist spoke to NPR about the shaky economics of Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan. And Modern Cities looks at Target’s new strategy of entering urban markets with smaller stores.

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has carefully cultivated the image of a business-minded Republican intent on running government more efficiently. Not only did he manage to win office in liberal Massachusetts, Baker’s 71 percent approval rating is nearly the highest of any governor in the nation.

But when it comes to transit, Baker’s spending priorities are not consistent with his pragmatic persona. His decisions regarding which Boston-area transit projects to fund, which to threaten with cuts, and which to ignore entirely, appear rooted in political image-making rather than economic criteria.

Four proposed rail extensions tell the story.

Baker has brushed off bipartisan calls to build the transformational North-South Rail Link, saying it is unaffordable. But at the same time, he supports the low-impact South Coast Rail and South Station Expansion, conventional commuter rail projects that nevertheless cost almost as much together as the North-South Rail Link. A fourth project, the Green Line Extension, is also fairly high-impact, and was funded in previous administrations, but as costs grew, Baker threatened to cancel it unless there were budget cuts.

The pattern is that Baker threatens or refuses to fund projects based on how big they look, rather than their merits.

The North-South Rail Link, or NSRL, is a proposed tunnel in Downtown Boston, about three miles long, connecting the city’s two train terminals, North Station and South Station. This would enable through-running trains between the South Side and North Side commuter lines, creating a modern regional rail network like the Paris RER.

NSRL’s Major Investment Study from 2003 projected 327,000 commuter rail trips per weekday, up from about 130,000 today. The estimated cost is about $6-8 billion, but Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton says $2 billion would be in line with international costs of comparable projects. Despite the benefits, and the support of previous governors Mike Dukakis and Bill Weld, Baker only briefly considered NSRL before deciding against it on the grounds that it was too expensive.

Fiscally conservative think tanks raised the specter of cost overruns. However, large overruns on NSRL are unlikely. NSRL was planned in the Dukakis administration to go under the I-93 Central Artery tunnel as part of the Big Dig, but was not included in the final project. However, during construction of the Central Artery tunnel, the ground immediately underneath was cleared — it’s now just dirt, with no geotechnical surprises.

In other words, the work that typically triggers cost overruns for many urban rail tunnels has already been taken care of. While the region’s rail advocates know this, fiscal conservatives still assume NSRL has as much cost escalation risk as any other rail tunnel.

While Baker has refused to spend $6-8 billion on NSRL, he has paid little attention to high costs of the incremental South Station Expansion and South Coast Rail projects, which combined rival NSRL’s pricetag but promise just a fraction of its benefits.

South Station Expansion, or SSX, would add tracks to South Station so more trains can terminate there and sit idle at midday, at a cost of $1.6 billion. Building NSRL, which enables through-running, would certainly obviate SSX. But Baker has suggested that SSX could be built first and NSRL later, at even higher expense than doing just one of the two projects.

Another project Baker seems comfortable will is South Coast Rail, or SCR — a proposed reactivation of a 45-mile commuter rail branch to Fall River and New Bedford, two deindustrialized cities about 50 miles south of Boston. The cost has increased by a factor of 13 since the line was first proposed in 1995, after adjusting for inflation, and now stands at $3.42 billion. Per mile, this is costlier than most greenfield high-speed rail lines in the world. The weekday ridership projection is only 4,600, making for a projected cost of $740,000 per rider, far higher than the normal urban rail range is $15,000-50,000 in the U.S. and $5,000-$25,000 in Europe.

The limited benefits of SSX and SCR has led most Boston-area transit advocates to oppose both. But Baker seems uninterested in canceling them and diverting the money to higher priorities, even though their combined cost is close to that of NSRL.

While Baker appears unbothered by SCR costs, he has threatened a far more useful project that’s undergone similar cost overruns. The Green Line Extension, or GLX, is a light rail branch that the state is mandated to build as mitigation for the Big Dig. The 4.3-mile GLX is now estimated to cost $3 billion, with 52,000 projected weekday trips. The high costs have caught the governor’s attention, and he threatened to cancel the project unless significant savings were found. The savings since identified involve scaling back useful parts of the project, : for example, to reach some station platforms, passengers would have to cross the tracks at-grade.

Clearly, Baker is capable of threatening projects he considers wasteful. The question is, how does he decide what is wasteful? This is not about actual costs and benefits. It isn’t about demographics, either: NSRL would primarily help middle-class suburban commuters, many of whom voted for Baker, and the GLX is in rapidly gentrifying Somerville. Racial discrimination doesn’t explain Baker’s stance.

A more likely explanation is that Baker cares deeply about appearances. He isn’t basing transit expansion policy on cost-effectiveness or budget risks, but on whether the projects look big. NSRL is a tunnel with the potential to transform the region, so it must be unaffordable. SCR and SSX are incremental projects, building on the existing paradigm of commuter rail, so they must be sensible. GLX is somewhere in between, so it can be funded provided costs are cut.

“Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM,” the saying goes, and nobody gets voted out of office for building a status quo infrastructure project. While NSRL has low geological and economic risk, its political risk is high. Precisely because it is such a big change, if the state goes forward and builds it, the media will watch carefully and criticize every misstep.

In contrast, low-profile investments are politically safe. The limited scope of SCR ensures that it is not a major political issue: It was originally a cheap project, and the political system still thinks of it as one, so the cost overruns have not led to scandal. SSX is even smaller in scope, since it doesn’t provide any visible service. GLX is again intermediate in visibility.

Given high construction costs, in Boston as well as elsewhere in the U.S., states could use political executives who approach transit policy as pragmatic, no-nonsense managers. Unfortunately, leaders like Baker still end up engaging in theater: It is more important to them to be perceived as prudent than to make smart investment decisions. They manage their appearances and not the states they have been entrusted to run.

It’s Parking Madness season at Streetsblog, and if you’re just joining us, this year’s competition is all about how we sabotage transit by surrounding stations with huge fields of parking.

On Friday, we kicked things off with a match between transit station areas in St. Louis and Sacramento, with St. Louis advancing.

Today, first round action continues as Toronto takes on the Boston suburb of Malden.

Toronto — Kennedy Station

Reader Ian Wood submitted the parking lots around Kennedy Station, which is the fifth busiest subway station in Toronto, according to Wikipedia.

The city has spent the last 25 years infilling parking lots like mad, and even its inner suburbs have seen wave after wave of densification.  (No city outside Asia has built more condos this century).

But Toronto is a young city, with a postwar rail system. While Toronto’s GO Transit is one of North America’s larger commuter rail stations, from the beginning it was designed as a car-to-train model, and most stations are surrounded by enormous parking lots, usually in the middle of highways and industrial areas.

This area is already surrounded by schools, housing, and job centres — and more is coming. But the subway station remains an odd crater in the middle of it.

Definitely the kind of space that would make Donald Shoup cry.

Malden, Massachusetts — Wellington T Station

An anonymous reader submitted this site outside Boston. Despite the picturesque setting by the Malden and Mystic rivers, the Wellington T station is hemmed in on all sides:

The station is sandwiched between a massive parking lot, a major highway and a train maintenance yard. There is also a parking garage just west of the station. I am not sure how anyone from the neighborhoods north get to this station on foot/bike.

The polls are open until Wednesday at 2 p.m. Eastern Time.

Bridj, the premium app-based “microtransit” service that tailored routes and prices based on customer demand, has folded after exhausting its funds.

“We made the strategic choice to pursue a deal with a major car company,” CEO Matt George wrote in a post on Medium. “Despite assurances, and all parties acting in the best of faith, that didn’t happen. With this in mind, we have made the difficult decision to begin winding down.”

The company, founded in 2014, had launched in Boston, Austin, and Washington, DC, before beginning a partnership with the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority. That program, which cost the authority $1.3 million, served just 1,480 people in a year before ending in March. Most of its users were younger and wealthier than the typical Kansas City area resident, and many potential riders indicated that the service wasn’t robust enough to be useful to them.

The company’s largest market was its hometown of Boston, where it operated up to 50 vehicles at a time, according to the Boston Globe. Bridj had proposed offering late-night bus service in partnership with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, but never reached an agreement with the T.

Former Massachusetts transportation secretary Jim Aloisi, who had been hopeful about the prospect of app-based van services as a complement to traditional transit, said Bridj’s demise is an opportunity to reflect on what people are looking for from transportation providers.

“It never fulfilled the promise that some people thought it might have fulfilled, because when you think about Bridj, at the end of the day it’s a fancy bus that’s stuck in traffic with everyone else,” Aloisi told Streetsblog. “This only underscores the need for Boston to invest in Bus Rapid Transit.” Just a few weeks ago, the Barr Foundation announced up to $100,000 in funding for Boston-area municipalities and transit agencies investing in upgrades to improve bus speeds.

Bridj isn’t the first app-based private transit service to shut down. Leap Transit, which raised $2.5 million from big-name Silicon Valley venture capitalists to offer $6 luxury bus rides across San Francisco, folded in 2015.

One of Bridj’s competitors, Chariot, remains very much in business, with plans to expand to eight cities this year, thanks to the sort of backing that Bridj never secured. The company was purchased by Ford last September for more than $65 million. Ford CEO Mark Fields has positioned Chariot at the heart of its move to “smart mobility” — i.e. transportation as a service, not a private vehicle.

Having access to a deep pool of capital seems necessary for companies like Bridj to survive long enough to develop a viable model and scale up. Even then it might not be enough. “This is expensive stuff,” Aloisi said of transit services. “It’s not clear that even companies like Uber are going to be able exist for any long period of time if they keep losing substantial amounts of money.”

Boston’s latest do-it-yourself bike lane intervention might seem a bit sketchy — because it uses comics to prod City Hall for needed safety improvements.

Last night, volunteers installed eight large black-and-white comic cutouts, printed on waterproof boards and mounted on metal poles, in buckets filled with concrete and flowers. They dropped the comics into the buffers of protected bike lanes along a few blocks of Massachusetts Avenue and Beacon Street.

In one, Irish-American step dancer Michael Flatley tells drivers to “keep this area clear for swinging doors and my swinging legs!” Another features a woman on a bicycle telling drivers to “look for bikes before opening your door.” A third features a “parking coach” with a whistle around his neck, yelling, “Line it up, people!”

“Introducing some whimsy to the street is just one strategy. It’s about expressing my displeasure with how we treat the streets now,” said Jonathan Fertig, an architect who came up with the project.

“I wanted something that was quirky and random and came from a place of absurdity, rather than a place of anger,” said Bekka Wright, who collaborated with Fertig and drew the characters in the style of her web comic, Bikeyface.

One of the comics features Boston Mayor Marty Walsh telling drivers, “C’mon guys. You can pahk better!” Actor Matt Damon, standing next to Walsh, suggests the mayor install bollards to keep the bike lanes clear.

The city has installed flexible plastic bollards along the bike lanes, which did not initially have the barriers. But Fertig and Wright say the flex-posts went missing on Massachusetts Avenue over the winter, and the bike lane filled up with snow and parked cars.

Wright wants to see the city pick up its pace and install more high-quality protected bike lanes. “It’s gonna take hundreds of years for Boston to actually have a bike network,” she said. “I know things take time, but they need to go a little faster.”

Fertig began working on the project in his spare time last fall. After a radio interview last week in which Walsh blamed the victims of car crashes for getting injured, he felt compelled to go live with the intervention.

“Pedestrians need to put their head up when they’re walking down the street, take your headphones off… you’ve got to understand, cars are going to hit you,” Walsh told WGBH, two weeks after a cyclist was killed by a hit-and-run driver. “People need to be more cognizant of the fact that a car is a car. Even bicyclists, when you’re riding; a car can’t stop on a dime.”

Street safety advocates protested Walsh’s remarks at City Hall over the weekend.

Boston’s advocacy groups for walking and biking welcomed the intervention.

“We think the timing of this is great, and the tone is one that we wish was promulgated more widely on our streets,” said Boston Cyclists Union Executive Director Becca Wolfson. “Rather than fuel animosity, we hope that both drivers and the city — especially Mayor Walsh — can see that while the issue of safety on our streets is a serious one, we can approach it with some lightness, compassion and come together to work towards the same goal.”

“We do typically see these [street interventions] when the public is pushing back against officials when they’re dismayed at the slow rate of change,” said Andrew McFarland, community engagement manager for the LivableStreets Alliance. “Let’s ask more of our city officials. Let’s not wait around for another crash to take another life.”

Fertig is no stranger to bike lane interventions. Nearly two years ago, he began installing flowers and traffic cones to keep drivers out of the Massachusetts Avenue bike lane. This time around, he doesn’t expect the comics to stay on the street very long.

“As these interventions have gained a little bit more notoriety, the city has more recently removed them a little more quickly,” Fertig said. “I’m really a thorn in their side.”

Does he have ideas in mind for his next intervention?

“I really love seeing this growing movement of people using toilet plungers. That’s a really fun one,” Fertig said, referring to plunger-protected bike lanes in Wichita, Providence and Omaha. “I’ve considered placing a bulk order for some plungers at some point.”

Updated 2:10 p.m. ET: “We appreciate the intent of the cartoon cutouts to inform and educate people about bike safety on Massachusetts Avenue in an artistic, eye-catching manner,” said the Boston Transportation Department, which added that the city will be removing the comics. “We agree that it is beneficial to circulate these important messages and we are working each day to further enhance our streets so that they are safe and welcoming for all users. On Massachusetts Avenue, in particular, additional flex posts will soon be placed along the existing bike lane.”

A new survey conducted in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood shows that while people across different racial groups like protected bike lanes, there are variations in preferences that should inform design. In the survey, led by Anne Lusk of the Harvard School of Public Health, people of color were more likely than white people to favor indoor bicycle parking and bicycling with family and friends.

The survey focused on how to improve bicycling along Malcolm X Boulevard, which the administration of former Mayor Thomas Menino had identified as a priority for a protected bike lane in 2012. Conducted by mail and through face-to-face interviews along Malcolm X Boulevard in August 2014, it received a total of 372 responses.

The survey found that 81 percent of Hispanic respondents and 54 percent of black respondents would bicycle more if they could do it with family and friends, compared to 40 percent of white respondents.

It’s hard to have this type of social riding experience with a single-file bike lane design. “We should be creating really wide cycle tracks so people can ride side by side,” said Lusk.

The preference for protected bike lanes was strong across all races and ethnicities, with 100 percent of white, 79 percent of Hispanic, and 76 percent of black respondents seeing them as the safest of six bikeway types. But there were variations when it came to the details: 89 percent of white respondents liked trees and bushes as bike lane buffers, compared with 74 percent of Hispanic and 54 percent of black respondents — a difference that Lusk said merits further study.

When asked where they preferred to park their bikes, 52 percent of Hispanic and 47 percent of black respondents said they would rather keep them inside their homes as opposed to a shed, porch, or other outside location, significantly higher than the 28 percent of white respondents who had the same preference.

The difference could reflect the different storage options available to respondents, but it could also be linked to the fact that black and Hispanic respondents were more likely to think their bike could get stolen, and would have fewer transportation options without it. “If you’re wealthier and your bike is stolen, it’s not as difficult to replace,” said Lusk. “If you perceive that your bike is going to get stolen, you don’t want to take the risk and leave it on a railing or in a communal room.”

Lusk thinks roll-in, roll-out bicycle storage at home is an under-appreciated component of encouraging more people to bike. Ease of storage is particularly important for women and seniors, she said, who are less likely to lift bikes up stairs or above their heads. “Plan bike facilities for women and children and seniors, because they will bring to the design table a completely different perception,” Lusk says. “If you create bike environments for seniors, then they’re going to be used by everybody else.”

Boston street safety advocates welcomed Lusk’s study. “The bottom line of Anne’s research is that everyone wants and deserves safe biking infrastructure,” said Andrew McFarland, community engagement manager at the LivableStreets Alliance. “Good street design is the ultimate guarantee for better ensuring traffic safety.”

The trouble on Malcolm X Boulevard is that a protected bike lane isn’t coming anytime soon. The route, which would link busy Dudley Square with the 4.7-mile Southwest Corridor Park and its bike path connecting to central Boston, was a priority at the end of the Menino administration but has stalled under Mayor Marty Walsh, who was elected in 2013.

Cities and tech firms are deploying new technology to gauge risks at dangerous intersections. These sensors, cameras, and machine-learning algorithms are promising, especially when it comes to measuring close calls that don’t result in crashes — but the applications of this information are still getting fleshed out. In the meantime, there’s no reason to wait on designing safe streets.

Since March, sensors and cameras have been deployed at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Beacon Street in Boston, a dangerous crossing where volunteers installed pop-up safety improvements after a cyclist was killed by a driver in 2015.

The monitoring equipment is part of a partnership between Verizon and the city of Boston announced last year, reports Elizabeth Woyke at MIT Technology Review:

Verizon outfitted the intersection with 50 cameras and sensors, including “quad cameras” — each containing four smaller cameras that can pan, tilt, and zoom in different directions — and infrared cameras that can do thermal imaging, which is useful for discerning traffic activity in snow and rain. Below ground, Verizon installed dozens of magnetometer sensors that detect the velocity, number, and size of passing cars, trucks, and buses by registering a change in frequency when large metal objects move over them. Since most bikes don’t have enough conductive material to trigger the magnetometers, the site also has radars for sensing bicyclists.

This data is combined with bus location data and information on traffic signal phases to identify potentially dangerous interactions. The city has a few months of data and is still figuring out how to use it.

“We are currently working with Verizon to ensure that the data being collected by the sensors is reliable and can be displayed visually in a way that is useful for planners and engineers here,” said Vineet Gupta, director of planning at the Boston Transportation Department. “They can give us information about the speed of oncoming vehicles approaching the intersection, or they can give us data on near-misses… It’s those kinds of subtleties that will help us get a good understanding of the intersection.”

So far, the data is being used to assess red-light running and encroachment by drivers into the bike lane, Woyke writes. Eventually, the city hopes to expand the sensor program to six additional intersections along Massachusetts Avenue.

On the other side of the country, in Bellevue, Washington, an effort is underway to use existing traffic cameras — no additional sensors required — to measure intersection dangers. The city has partnered with Microsoft and the University of Washington to feed visuals from its traffic cameras into an algorithm that can tally the number and types of vehicles in an intersection, as well as their direction and speed, to identify collisions and near-misses. The project relies on volunteers to help the algorithm begin its machine learning — or as Doug Trumm at The Urbanist puts it, “unpaid labor benefiting one of the region’s largest corporations.”

Developing better tools to assess the threat of poor street design and bad driving may help fine-tune safety improvements or show why street redesigns are necessary, but what’s really in short supply isn’t information so much as political courage to implement changes, says Tom Fucoloro at Seattle Bike Blog:

We already know, for example, that a wide curb radius encourages people driving to take turns too quickly and too close to people walking. Each of the red areas [in the top image] above could be addressed by extending the curbs closer to the center of the intersection or by installing a protected intersection…

But will Bellevue (or any other city that uses this technology) have the guts to redesign their intersections to put the safety of people walking above the desire for quick turns? Hopefully this data can help convince leaders, but well see.

Advocates in Boston have been pushing the city to make the hard choices necessary to improve safety on its streets, as well, including at Massachusetts Avenue and Beacon Street, but have so far been disappointed at the pace of change.

There are some things you don’t need an algorithm to figure out.

Commuter rail in the United States mostly caters to affluent suburbanites who commute to the city center. Even though these lines pass through working class city neighborhoods that stand to benefit enormously from better transit, the service they provide passes those communities by. It doesn’t have to be that way.

In Boston, the MBTA is starting to do things differently on a commuter rail line that serves one of the poorest parts of the region. But so far this remains a partial transformation that has yet to deliver the full benefits of good rapid transit. It’s important to understand what the MBTA has done right — and what it’s still doing wrong — if we want to maximize the potential of commuter lines not only in Boston but in cities like Philadelphia and Chicago as well.

The Fairmount Line, about nine miles long, is contained entirely within the city of Boston. It mostly passes through Dorchester, a low-income, mostly non-white neighborhood. Starting at the end of the aughts, the MBTA began a program of investment in the line.

Fares were lowered to match those on the T. The commuter trains do not accept the CharlieCard smart card system, but passengers can buy paper tickets for the same fare. Only the terminus, Readville, outside of Dorchester, charges higher fares.

Three infill stations have opened, with a fourth under construction. Trains also run more often, but still max out at headways of 40-50 minutes at rush hour and every hour off-peak. The line is faster than taking a bus and connecting to the subway, but it lacks the frequency of buses, which come every five or eight minutes during peak hours and every 10 or 12 minutes off-peak.

The MBTA also aggressively marketed the line in Dorchester, where commuter rail is viewed through the lens of an inverted class stigma. Neighborhood residents, disproportionately black and poor, perceived commuter rail as the domain of rich white suburbanites. The MBTA worked with community organizations, such as the Greater Four Corners Coalition, which had been pushing for better service on the Fairmount Line since the 1990s, to change perceptions.

As a result, ridership has tripled since 2012, from about 800 per weekday to about 2,300. In 2012, the line had the lowest overall ridership of all Boston commuter lines, as well as the lowest ridership per route-mile. Today its ridership per route-mile is close to the systemwide average.

Don’t get carried away though. Given its location, the Fairmount Line should be doing better than average. Marketing alone, of course, cannot get people to ride transit, and despite the recent upgrades, there’s still a lot of room to improve service.

The Boston Foundation’s report on how to further improve the Fairmount Line notes that integration with local transit remains poor, despite the fare equalization. The fact that CharlieCard monthly passes are not accepted and only one transfer per trip is free imposes additional costs on some riders. Local buses connect to the T but not to commuter rail stations, which are not always located at convenient nodes in the street network.

There are plans to increase frequency and run peak trains every 15 minutes, but no timetable or funding for such an upgrade. It’s also critically important to run more frequent off-peak service, since only 60 percent of the line’s ridership is at the peak — far below the MBTA commuter rail average of about 80 percent.

One of the reasons the MBTA’s plans to increase frequency are stuck is controversy over rolling stock. The state wants to buy diesel multiple units (DMUs), which accelerate faster than locomotive-pulled trains.

There are no plans to electrify the Fairmount Line, even though electric trains would be faster, DMUs have tended to come at a high price for American transit agencies, and one of the Greater Four Corners Coalition’s original complaints was diesel fumes from trains (which higher frequency would only make worse).

When the final infill station opens in 2019, the one-way end-to-end trip time will be 31 minutes. DMUs could do the same trip in 25-26 minutes. Electric trains, like the ones used on the Long Island Railroad, Metro-North, and any number of modern regional rail services around the world, could do it in 18-19 minutes. They accelerate faster, can run slightly faster on curves, and require less schedule padding since they break down less often. But the state has not been willing to commit to investment in electrification.

If Massachusetts ever does run frequent rail on the Fairmount Line, it could set a national example for similar commuter rail lines. These lines could also use investment in higher frequency, fare integration, and marketing to make them an appealing service for low-income riders.

In Philadelphia, SEPTA Regional Rail has been electrified since the 1930s, and opened a city center tunnel in the 1980s, enabling trains to through-run instead of terminating. But frequency remains low and the fare system is separate from the subway, trolleys, and buses.

Even though several branches are contained entirely within the city, ridership is weak. The Chestnut Hill East and Chestnut Hill West lines each have 5,500 weekday riders. They parallel the third busiest bus route in the city, the 23, which has 16,500 riders. That makes sense when the bus charges $2 for a ride and regional rail charges $4.75.

In Chicago, commuter rail lines are run as separate fiefs. The one that would most benefit from fare integration and added frequency is Metra Electric, which serves South Side communities far from the L. Chicago’s street grid makes it easy for buses to connect to stations, and Metra Electric is a six-track corridor with closely-spaced local stations and express trains.

When the Illinois Central owned and operated the lines there was decent local frequency, every 30 minutes per branch. But after Metra took over, it slashed frequency to once an hour. With this frequency and no fare integration with buses, ridership within Chicago is weak, even as suburban ridership is strong. Local activist Mike Payne has been calling for fare integration and higher frequency, but to no avail.

Commuter rail’s history as a mode of transportation for middle-class suburbanites has made transit agencies reluctant to make it useful for low-income riders even when it passes through low-income neighborhoods. As a result, commuter rail operations create a disparate impact: service for middle-class suburbs, pollution for low-income city neighborhoods. Cities and transit agencies need to fix this.

It’s too early to call the Fairmount Line a national model, but the MBTA has taken the first necessary steps to turn commuter rail into useful urban transit. It managed to greatly expand service in the last five years, and achieved ridership growth to show for it. What Boston and other cities need to do is go much further and make the service useful for everyone, regardless of social class.

Welcome to the first match in Streetsblog’s third annual “Sorriest Bus Stop” competition.

Readers love to send us their nominations for the Sorriest Bus Stop bracket — people ask me all year round if we’re going to put on this tournament again. It’s easy to see why.

There are just too many dreadful bus stops to count in America. Everyone knows the type — uncomfortable, ugly, scary, hard to find. Places where you ordinarily wouldn’t choose to spend a single minute, but have to wait too long as you peer down the street for the next bus to come. The people in charge should know just how bad they’ve made it for bus riders. Spotting an especially bad bus stop and sending it in to Streetsblog is your chance to show them.

This public shaming has put pressure on a few transit agencies and DOTs to take better care of their bus stops. It’s an underappreciated ingredient in providing good transit: TransitCenter surveys consistently find that riders rate the walkability and comfort of bus stops as one of the most important aspects of their experience [PDF].

On to the first match. A precariously balanced Pittsburgh bus stop takes on a highway-side stop outside of Boston.

Pittsburgh

This entry in the Steel City comes from reader Noah Kahrs. He writes:

You’d think that a bus stop this close to Downtown Pittsburgh and just half a mile from a light rail station and major bike path would be reasonably accessible, but Pittsburgh’s confusing road system gets in the way. This bus stop is alongside a four-lane highway that essentially serves as a full-speed connector between two major interstates, and has no sidewalks along the road. Instead, you can access the bus stop by a footbridge across the highway from Duquesne University, or via a lengthy rickety staircase from the bottom of a sheer 100-foot cliff.

Agencies responsible: Port Authority of Allegheny County, PennDOT.

Medford, Massachusetts

Reader “Ken” (no last name given) submits this bus stop in Medford, Massschusetts, outside Boston:

I would like to nominate the MBTA Bus Stop on their 99 route, Highland Avenue at East Border Road in Medford, Massachusetts.

Highland Avenue and East Border Road are both controlled by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (which, despite the name, is more of a DOT agency) and provide zero pedestrian access to the stop. This is compounded by the lack of a sidewalk or any place to stand off the busy street. The vehicle lanes are 17 feet wide here, which encourages speed. Vehicle commuters use this route as a parallel to Interstate 93 to avoid traffic on the highway.

At one time, cycle lanes were striped, but with low quality paint which has worn away.

As this stop is primarily an evening commute home stop, in the winter, the lack of a crosswalk on either road makes travel extremely dangerous, as most of the neighborhood is across the street and darkness prevails.

Agencies responsible: MBTA, Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.

Your vote determines which bus stop goes on to the second round.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh may kill the city’s experiment with managing the price of on-street parking, according to local news sources.

The city’s pilot program raises rates for curbside parking where and when demand is highest, in an effort to encourage turnover and prevent double-parking and traffic caused by drivers searching endlessly for open spots. The approach is based on the research of economist Donald Shoup, which several large American cities — most famously San Francisco — have translated into smarter parking management programs over the past decade.

Walsh told Hillary Chabot at the Boston Herald that the “first information I got back on the pilot didn’t necessarily show that it was doing what we thought it would do,” but he couldn’t say what the effect of the program has been:

“We did it for two reasons, one was to cut down on congestion on the roads and two was to open up spaces on Newbury Street,” said Walsh, adding that while it’s opened up some parking spaces, “I don’t know if it’s necessarily cut down on congestion.”

City Hall hasn’t released data on the pilot, and we have yet to hear back from Boston DOT after requesting the results so far. Given the lack of transparency by the city, it’s hard to tell what’s going on, but Walsh implies that the program increased parking turnover without making a major impact on congestion. If so, that’s still significant — it could mean that more people are able to use the same number of parking spaces.

Managing the price of parking often requires some trial and error. It’s entirely possible that prices of up to $3.75 per hour in Boston’s busiest areas weren’t high enough to change behavior much. Or maybe parking turnover did increase and cruising for spaces decreased, but other factors led congestion to stay constant.

What’s troubling is that Walsh seems to have reached a conclusion without fairly assessing the program and trying to make it work. Instead policy decisions are being dictated by complaints about higher parking rates, resistance from local council members, and car-centric coverage like the Herald’s story (lede: “Boston drivers could get relief from sky-high parking meter fees…”).

In San Francisco, the SFPark program led to greater on-street parking availability and less cruising for spaces, and in New York, PARK Smart has been shown to increase parking turnover and reduce traffic. The same principles at work in those cities should apply in Boston as well. If Walsh ends the parking management program at the end of the year, it says more about his lack of courage than the policy he’s abandoning.

More recommended reading today: The Urbanist reports that Sound Transit in Seattle is expanding its formal “busking program” for performers who want to entertain riders. And at Atlanta is the City, Darin Givens explains how uncomfortable a relatively short walk can still be in downtown Atlanta, especially with children.