One of the biggest stumbling blocks we run across in Topeka (and everywhere else) when trying to convince council members and other decision makers to embrace more bike-friendly roadways is the dreaded money question.  ”That’s all well and good, but how do we pay for it?”

Even in Portland, Oregon, a city where one cannot swing a dead cat without hitting a cyclist (or three), the same concerns dominate the discussion.  However, there are some great resources to consider, and to bring to the attention of lawmakers when having this conversation.  The following is a post which originally appeared on portlandtransport.com directing advocates for cyclist friendly streets towards some excellent strategies to bring to the table when it comes time to address the money question:

As the “Portland Bicycle Plan for 2030″ moves toward City Council adoption, the question that moves front and center is “how do we pay for it?”

The estimated price tag runs into hundreds of millions of dollars over 20 years – but is still small in comparison to our other transportation investments. In a discussion on Bike Portland, editor Jonathan Maus lamented that

“… this is about a game of politics and money and so far it looks like bike people are simply being outplayed… which is too bad because we all agree bikes are the best investment and they have the most beneficial impact on our city.”

I do agree that bikes have the greatest potential to reshape our transportation landscape at the lowest cost – and have vocally said so as the plan moved through the Planning Commission, even to the point of saying that I would give priority to bicycle funding over Streetcar funding (but I also believe that they will very seldom be in direct competition).

So if we need to play a better game, what are the lessons we can take from Streetcar and other transportation initiatives that have been successful in attracting funding?

Here are some thoughts gleaned from what I’ve observed over the last decade advocating for a variety of transportation projects:

Federalize the Effort

Roads and Transit have dedicated federal funding from the Highway Trust Fund (gas taxes are the primary source of these funds, but Congress is now getting into the habit of supplementing this with general revenues as gas tax buying power declines).

This is a critical factor, because elected leaders will quite rationally invest local dollars where they will leverage new money into the community. If $40 of local funds will bring in $60 of “New Starts” federal money for Light Rail, guess how hard leaders will work to find that $40.

Where is the advocacy for a Federal bike funding program? None existed for Streetcar, so we helped create a national Community Streetcar Coalition (former Lake Oswego Mayor Judie Hammerstad chairs it) with over 60 cities looking at streetcar investments advocating for federal involvement. This resulted in the creation of the “Small Starts” program from which Portland just received $75M for the Streetcar Loop project – the first Federal Transit Administration Streetcar grant.

For cycling, we won’t need to invent a national advocacy organization – the League of American Cyclists has existed for more than a century. Portland advocates need to get busy with the League to plot a congressional strategy for a dedicated funding program for bicycle infrastructure. Then let’s get our projects in at the front of the line.

[BTW - why is there no one from the USA's premiere cycling city on the board of the League?]

There’s an interesting immediate opportunity emerging here. Transit projects have previously been allowed to use Federal funds for bike and pedestrian improvements that help get folks to the transit line, but those improvements had to be relatively close to the transit line. Now, under the auspices of the joint urban livability effort between HUD and the US DOT, the definition is being expanded. According to a proposal in the Federal Register (PDF, 59K), FTA is seeking comment on extending the ‘catchment area’ distances to one half mile for pedestrian improvements and 3 miles for bicycle improvements.

How much of Portland’s proposed bicycle network is within 3 miles of proposed high capacity transit corridors? A lot. Portland advocates should:

1. Immediately comment favorably on the FTA proposal. (I have)
2. Get out their compasses and figure out the 3-mile envelope around the Milwaukie LRT and Lake Oswego Streetcar corridors (the next two projects that will seek FTA funding). Let’s try to get all the improvements in those areas matched 60/40. Yes, you’ll have to convince TriMet and others to expand the project definitions and help assemble more local match, but as I said before, local leaders are all about bringing home more Federal dollars.

Regionalize the Effort

The history of transportation funding in this region suggests that Portland-specific efforts are always met with a degree of skepticism at JPACT. Projects that reach all parts of the region do better.

It’s not a random occurrence that the most recent Light Rail project, and the next one, both touch Clackamas County – it’s “their turn”. It’s also not coincidental that the next Streetcar line in the pipeline will go to Lake Oswego.

Portland advocates need to work with the rest of the regional and get cycling projects moving all over the region. Metro’s Intertwine effort is an ideal framework for this.

This will also help with the Federal effort. JPACT travels back to DC and speaks with one voice to the Congressional delegation, and that voice better talk about bikes if we want to be successful in creating a significant Federal funding program.

Localize the Effort

Every successful rail transit project has a local stakeholder committee, including prominent representation from businesses along the alignment. We are beginning to see this kind of advocacy around major trail projects (Sullivan’s Gulch, North Portland Greenway) but we need to deepen this and get it going for more projects – probably in ways that are less about linear corridors and more about local networks. Can we get a stakeholder group formed for strengthening the bike network in a whole neighborhood or sector of a the City?

And we MUST make the connection between good cycling environments and property values. Local Improvement Districts (where property owners levy a fee on themselves to pay for a portion of the project) are the cornerstones of Streetcar project funding. We need to get an economist hired to do a serious study correlating bike traffic volumes with property values NOW.

What Else?

Watch the evolving landscape. Some kind of carbon cap-and-trade system is in our future. Let’s position bike projects as effective investments for offsets. Transit leaders are already thinking about this.

Lottery Funds. TriMet has successfully lobbied to use bonding capacity from the State Lottery to fund first the West Side extension and now the Milwaukie line. The Governor and Legislature have also allocated $100M of Lottery bonding capacity to non-road transportation (“Connect Oregon”) in each of the last two sessions. Can we convince the Legislature to use some Lottery bonding for bike projects?

Think about how we sell this to the public. I made the comment during the Planning Commission work session that my family pays (happily) about $250/year for the library levy. That helps fund about a $50M annual budget (for the whole county). We need about $25M (for Portland) annually to build out the bicycle plan. If citizens will vote to fund the library, how do we convince them to vote to fund cycling at a comparable level?

So what are we waiting for?

Indeed.

When we talk about transportation, we tend to talk about things in motion. What is often left unremarked upon, in conversations about crowded highways, is something without which those crowds would not exist: parking. That humble 9-by-18-foot space (the standard size of a spot) is where traffic begins and ends. It is the fuel to traffic’s fire.Why is it overlooked? One possibility is that parking is more typically treated as real estate, the subject of arcane building codes and zoning regulations, rather than as a part of transportation networks; given that cars spend 95 percent of their time parked, this makes some sense. Another reason may simply be that, in most of America, parking is taken as a given. Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, has estimated that 99 percent of car trips in the United States terminate in a free parking space, which means the nation’s drivers don’t have much incentive to think about parking—or not driving. In many American places, there are more parking spaces than people.

If car parking is often overshadowed in traffic talk, bicycle parking is even more obscure. For many people in the United States it might be hard to imagine what there is to talk about. Why don’t you just stick it in the garage? Or: Isn’t that what street signs and trees are for? But as the share of trips made by bicycle has grown in recent years—in Portland, Ore., for example, bicycle use has grown nearly 150 percent since 1990, and an estimated 5 percent of people bike to work—new attention is being paid to what happens to those bicycles when they are not in motion.

The most high-profile instance of this is the so-called “Bicycle Access Bill,” recently signed into law after a New York City Council vote of 46-1. The measure will require the owners of commercial buildings with a freight elevator to allow people to enter the building with a bicycle—though what happens from there depends on the building. (See this useful summary of the bill.)

While the right to enter a building with a bicycle may seem minor, the bill potentially represents a huge de facto increase in the city’s supply of bicycle parking, which is currently estimated at 6,100 racks, many of these outdoors. What’s more, New York’s City Council also passed a bill mandating that commercial parking garages provide spaces for bicycles—one bike space for every 10 cars, up to 200 cars.

Why do these measures matter? Because parking helps make commuters—a lesson long ago learned with cars. Studies in New York found that a surprisingly large percentage of vehicles coming into lower Manhattan were government employees or others who had an assured parking spot. Other studies have shown the presence of a guaranteed parking spot at home—required in new residential developments—is what turns a New Yorker into a car commuter.

On the flip side, people would be much less likely to drive into Manhattan if they knew their expensive car was likely to be stolen, vandalized, or taken away by police. And yet this is what was being asked of bicycle commuters, save those lucky few who work in a handful of buildings that provide indoor bicycle parking. Surveys have shown that the leading deterrent to potential bicycle commuters is lack of a safe, secure parking spot on the other end. (In England, for example, it’s been estimated that a bicycle is stolen every 71 seconds.)

A number of American cities are now waking up to the fact that providing bicycle parking makes sense. Philadelphia, for example, recently amended its zoning requirements to mandate that certain new developments provide bicycle parking; Pittsburgh’s planning department is weighing requiring one bicycle parking space for every 20,000 square feet of development* (admittedly modest compared with the not-uncommon car equation of one parking space per 250 square feet); even the car-centric enclave of Orange County, Calif., is getting in on the act, with Santa Ana’s City Council unanimously passing a bill requiring proportional bicycle parking when car parking is provided. In Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities, pilot projects are investigating turning car-parking meters—once semireliable bike-parking spots, now rendered obsolete by “smart meter” payment systems—into bike parking infrastructure.

Few cities are doing more than Portland—which has been experiencing a particular boom in bicycle commuting—to increase bicycle parking. In September, for example, the City Council will vote on code changes that would require residential buildings to have the same bicycle parking requirements as commercial buildings. Granted, Portland, Ore., is an unusual place for the United States: a place where business owners actually petition the city to build “bike corrals,” or collections of racks that tend to swap one or two car parking spaces for a dozen bike spaces, in front of their establishments, and where residents casually drop lingo like staple, meaning the type of bicycle parking structure that looks like a staple stuck into the concrete. And in a move that is sure to give John McCain fits, the city is spending $1 million of federal stimulus funds on bicycle parking at transit hubs.

Of course, even Portland’s efforts would look rather quaint in a country like the Netherlands, where an estimated 27 percent of daily trips are made on bicycle. Outside of, or underneath, Dutch railway stations in the major cities sit vast bicycle parking structures. In fact, parking is so readily available that many riders keep a bike at their origin and destination stations. The three-story parking-garage-style facility outside Amsterdam’s Central Station holds some 9,000 bikes, while Groningen has a massive, covered and guarded facility that holds 4,500 bikes. And yet even these structures do not seem to meet demand.

The spatial and aesthetic challenges of having too many parked bikes attached to every last lamppost and historic building has prompted some wonderfully innovative design and market responses. The underground “Bicycle Parking Tower“—actually a series of 36 towers—at the Kasai Station in Edogawa, Tokyo, holds more than 9,000 bicycles, any of which can be retrieved within 23 seconds via an automated mechanism. In Zaragoza and a few other Spanish cities, meanwhile, the Biceberg, a small kiosk beneath which sits a storage bay, creates spots for 92 bicycles in the same space that four cars would occupy. Another approach is to combine guarded bicycle parking in a one-stop facility with mechanics, bike stores, education, and other services, as with Brazil’s ASCOBIKE. Muenster’s “Radstation” comes complete with a bicycle wash—for $4. In the United States, the for-profit Bikestation sells secure parking (“valet and controlled access”) and provides air for tires as well as showers and Wi-Fi in its “bike-transit centers,” in cities ranging from Santa Barbara, Calif., to Seattle. At Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, a similar concept — with everything from rentals to repairs — is scheduled to open in August, a swooping shell of glass and tubes, designed by KPG and at least partially inspired by the arc of a bicycle wheel.

Of course, even in a bicycling paradise like Copenhagen, bicycle parking is hardly ideal. “Parking is the last great challenge in a bike culture,” as Mikael Colville-Andersen, who writes the Copenhagenize blog, told me. In its 2004 “Traffic and Environment Plan,” the city of Copenhagen, noting that bike parking wasn’t even assessed until 2001 (when it was found there were 2,900 spaces in the historic center), declared: “Only one third of cyclists are satisfied with their options for parking their bicycles and other road users, particularly walkers, are increasingly annoyed by parked cycles.”

This last point brings up another problem: So-called “bicycle pollution,” or the clutter of masses of bikes chained to every last railing. In a city where bikes outnumber people, this is perhaps inevitable, but it’s also a function of the inherent appeal of bikes—literal door-to-door transportation. As Colville-Andersen put it, “people prefer to park on the street, leaning the bikes up against the building. It’s all about ease-of-use. If you can’t walk out your door and get on your bike in under 30 seconds, it’s irritating.” Still, space has its limits, and in a design competition to upgrade Vartov Square, next to Copenhagen’s City Hall—which the mayor’s office notes “mainly looks like a cluttered and worn parking area”—there is a call for underground bicycle parking.

Meanwhile, back in Portland, Ore., as bicycle parking gets more respect, another bastion of the automobile landscape is getting a makeover: access, and perhaps even special lanes, for bicycles at the drive-throughs of fast-food joints.

Correction, Aug. 19, 2009: This article originally stated that Pittsburgh might require one bike parking space for every 20,000 feet of development. The unit in this figure should have been square feet. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

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Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2225511/

Republished from Slate.com

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