Tag: megabus

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Development News Opinion Transportation

PHOTOS: Washington D.C.’s Model Transportation Investments Paying Dividends

H Street Infill

Washington D.C. has, perhaps, the nation’s most prosperous and booming urban economy. It is a city that has also become defined by its highly educated, young workforce.

Over the past decade or so, the nation’s capital has also been transforming its transport network in a way to make it more multi-modal and improve mobility.

One of the most striking things upon arriving in Washington D.C. is the sheer number of bike lanes. And not just bike lanes, but protected bike lanes. As many cities have begun noticing in recent years, striped bike lanes next to moving traffic are not enough, and that protected bike lanes that separate cyclists from moving traffic with bollards or on-street parking are far superior.

As a result, you see many of the newer bike lanes in Washington D.C. receiving this treatment, and many of the older lanes being transitioned over, as possible, to protected facilities. To this end, it should come as no surprise that the city has one of the nation’s highest percentages of people commuting by bike.

In addition to that, Washington D.C. launched North America’s first bikeshare system in 2008 when SmartBike DC opened with 120 bikes at 10 stations. After some initial struggles, a new system called Capital Bikeshare was launched in September 2010 and currently boasts more than 2,500 bikes at more than 300 stations.

This new system extends beyond the District of Columbia into three additional nearby jurisdictions and stands as one of three biggest bikeshare systems in the United States along with New York City’s CitiBike and Chicago’s Divvy.

I used Capital Bikeshare to make an approximate two-mile trip from near the U Street Metro Station to Washington Union Station. The journey was a breeze and preferable, to me at least, to using a taxi or the city’s well-functioning transit system.

Upon arriving at Union Station I met a friend to check out one of Washington D.C.’s other marque transportation projects at this time. The H Street/Benning Road modern streetcar line terminates here and extends approximately 2.4 miles to the east, and is part of a larger 37-mile streetcar network that will include five lines in total.

The $137 million starter line is in the final stages of construction, with train vehicles and their drivers currently being tested and trained along its route. Project officials expect it to open to riders in early 2015.

Walking the route was not all that pleasant thanks to the hot temperatures and only brief areas of shade along the busy street, which serves a bevy of transit operations including Megabus, Greyhound and Bolt intercity buses, articulated city buses and now the streetcar. Fortunately a mid-afternoon stop at a local Mexican eatery, with plenty of guacamole to go around, made the overheated outing more tolerable.

While H Street is a largely a hit-or-miss commercial corridor, its immediately surrounding residential streets are expectedly charming and offer a good foundation from which to build. Some development has already begun to spring up along the line, including a slew of residential projects and a 41,000-square-foot grocery store. There are also signs of renewed interest in many existing buildings that have new restaurants and shops opening up within them.

Of course not everything that is happening in Washington D.C. is related to infrastructure or transportation enhancements. There is, overall, just an extraordinary amount of new construction taking place and a far-reaching sense of vitality. One cannot help but think that there is at least some connection between these policy decisions and investments, and vibrancy on the ground.

EDITORIAL NOTE: All 39 photos were taken by Randy Simes for UrbanCincy between Wednesday, September 3 and Friday, September 5.

Categories
News Opinion

CNU22: The Nation’s Strong Urbanist Movement is Rooting for Cincinnati

Main Street being converted to allow automobiles again.

The journey to Buffalo was filled with smoke and flames. As the towering inferno that was our Megabus burned away into chard wreckage along the Interstate highway, I looked on as firefighters doused the flames. The highway was closed, but we were whole. No deaths or injuries. Not a single piece of luggage singed. We rode school buses to a nearby town, Fredonia, and hopped on a local bus line that stopped at many small New York towns.

At last in the distance, bending around Lake Erie, I could see the silhouette of a skyline next to rows of turning wind turbines. I struggled with my iPhone, trying to catch up on the CNU preview episodes of the StrongTowns podcast. This being my first Congress, I had no idea what to expect.

The bus arrived, we checked into our hotel, went to get our badges. The whole day had been wild. Was the bus fire even real? We sat in on a session about urban retail where we found Cincinnatian Kathleen Norris of Urban Fast Forward. It was great to see a familiar face.

Ken Greenberg’s opening plenary was fantastic. He was able to highlight the challenges of urbanity in a way that made sense to everyone. And after the session we were able to speak with the new Chair of the CNU Board, Doug Farr. We met people and new friends, most of them Canadian.

We arrived at the Hotel Lafayette just in time to snap a group photo with the CNU NextGen pub crawlers. That night I had already met so many people and discussed with so many people urbanism and Cincinnati.

The next few days I attended sessions; many of which were informative, but it was a very different experience than a typical conference. There were so many conversations, ideas and new people.

We hung out in an old grain silo. Silo City as Buffalo natives called it. It was like old school Grammar’s (circa 2009) on a massive scale.  A news reporter approached us for an interview. I bravely stepped forward. It was on everyone’s mind, what could we say about Buffalo?

Buffalo is a rust belt city, more the style of Detroit or Cleveland than Cincinnati. Its downtown still quieted by the abandonment and neglect. Its old factories still silent. I have no compass to gauge its trajectory or past mistakes, although signs of that are visible. Cincinnati’s downtown has it good compared to Buffalo, at least from what I had seen.

The CNU NextGen peeps were playing bocce ball on a parklet outside the hotel. Inside the hotel, attendees were spouting ideas; debates and even a late night show happened. At one point we may have even crashed a private party hosted by James Howard Kuntsler.

I met a native who was volunteering at the Congress and we engaged in a lengthy discussion. He was a software developer who had moved to San Francisco, then back to Buffalo, then to New York City, and eventually back to Buffalo. He said he always had an interest in growing his home town and that now, he felt, was the right time to start setting down roots.

Before I left I also had the opportunity to visit Allentown where I dined at the Anchor and had some trademark buffalo wings. During our stay, I also had dinner at a spiffy Italian restaurant a few blocks away. I didn’t stay very long at the final party at Larkin Square. Our bus back to Cincinnati was calling. Fortunately this time it did not catch on fire.

Randy asked me to write about my takeaways from the Congress. I attended some great sessions, and I met a lot of people – many of whom are heroes in the small world engaged in urbanism – but I think my greatest takeaway is this:

We are not alone. There is a whole network of people who have the talent, the ideas and the drive who are making this change on a national scale. These people may not always agree, but from what I heard, they are all on the same page about Cincinnati. They’re encouraged and they’re all rooting for us.

Categories
Business News Politics

EDITORIAL: Improve Efficiency, Grow Revenues with Urban Advertising Program

Cincinnati City Council made the well-intentioned decision to prohibit advertising within the public right-of-way. The idea was to rid the city of what some perceived as unsightly bus bench advertisements and invasive and heavily lit billboards.

As is often the case with new regulation, it has created unintended consequences including the inability for Metro to collect advertising revenue from their bus shelters and stymieing the ability for Cincy Bike Share to properly advertise on its planned system in order to pay for its annual operating expenses.

As a result, the City of Cincinnati should toss out the ordinance approved last January and replace it with a new comprehensive Urban Advertising Program that protects residents from unsightly additions in their neighborhoods, while also preserving the flexibility for the city and its various agencies to collect revenues that reduce the burden placed upon taxpayers.

SORTA Non-Transportation Revenue

Public Right-of-Way Advertising Lease
Under UrbanCincy’s proposed plan, the City of Cincinnati would lease their advertising assets. These assets would include a predetermined set of advertising locations (bus benches and shelters, newspaper stands, bike share kiosks, car share and taxi cab stands, and intercity bus stops).

The lease with the private company that would manage the system would then include a small upfront payment for the rights to the assets and annual payments to an authority that would oversee the program.

Such agreements are commonplace in many other North American cities and are often undertaken by companies like JCDecaux, Clear Channel and Lamar.

Program Membership & Representation
In this proposed arrangement the City of Cincinnati would be one entity, albeit the primary one, in the overall program since they control the right-of-way. The Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority (SORTA) would also be involved so that they could have representation for their Metro bus and streetcar systems. Cincy Bike Share would then be a third organization that would need to be represented, along with a representative for private taxi cab, car share and intercity bus companies.

The City’s established Community Councils should also have representation on the board, and potentially even share directly in the revenues generated by the program outside of those funds paid to the City of Cincinnati.

The share of the annual revenue payments, of course, would not include any of the private companies operating within the public right-of-way, such as Megabus or Zipcar, but their representation on the board would ensure that their interests are in fact considered in the oversight of the program.

Essentially their lack of collecting annual revenue payments would serve as their annual payment to advertise their particular operations within the public right-of-way without needing to go through the private company managing the assets. This allows those companies to advertise for their services in the public right-of-way, which is currently prohibited.

The members appointed by these various agencies and companies would then become the decision making board governing the new program. This board would also be responsible for contracting out the management of the program.

Urban Advertising Program Org Chart

Economies of Scale
Bringing all of these various entities under one roof, with one unified leasing strategy, will increase the value of public right-of-way advertising. Businesses could work with their advertising representatives to ensure the exact market saturation, exposure and risk aversion as is desired. They would have one contact point that could manage their advertisement campaign in a comprehensive, city-wide manner.

This would also mean that the various government agencies and private companies operating in the public right-of-way involved would not need to have their own full-time staff equivalent to manage their own individual advertising program. Instead, they would collectively decide upfront on an initial value assessment of their various assets, and an ongoing value share agreement based on the contracted annual payments.

Standard Guidelines
The appointed board would be able to determine what kind of content to allow to be advertised. This would need to be a decision made up-front and in conjunction with the private operator so that there is no confusion later. But this would, in theory, allow advertising to return but in a regulated marketplace, thus preserving neighborhood character and integrity.

This is not something that can be accomplished without a separate operator involved, since the City and other public entities are not allowed to decide who and who cannot advertise.

Right now none of these entities are able to take advantage of the potential advertising revenues that would otherwise be available. And if they were, the total profits from the system would be severely diluted due to the fractured and duplicative management and oversight needed.

This Urban Advertising Program would solve those problems by allowing for the capture of an unrealized revenue stream in a well-regulated manner that would protect the integrity of our neighborhoods.

But perhaps even better is that the program is scalable and could include other cities like Norwood, Covington and Newport to opt in should they so choose. All that would change is the representation on the board and the share of the annual revenue payments.

Advertising is part of everyday life. By prohibiting our local governments and public agencies from benefiting from the revenues that come with it, we are only tying their hands and placing an even greater burden on taxpayers. There is certainly a balance to be struck, but UrbanCincy is confident that the representatives that would make up this board would be more than capable at striking that right balance.

This is the third part in a series of proposals offered by UrbanCincy that would help grow city revenues, enhance public services and make for a more efficient local government. If you are interested, you can read our proposal for shifting to a Pay As You Throw trash collection system and our eight-point plan for fixing the city’s broken parking system.