Create one slow street in a city

Cities need to take one street and make it usable at 15 mph. That means a bike freeway. Make it comfortable. Take away stop signs. Put in diverters so that automobiles don't have a direct speedway but can still use the street to get to and from home. Obviously an arterial with bus traffic won't qualify.

Bicyclists complain about the lack of space on the road. And about the need to defend that space from cars. And the scare caused by speeding traffic. And the fumes they breathe and the difficult choices at intersections and the problems with large vehicles like buses slowing down to stop.

Pedestrians have essentially the same issues including the unpleasantness of having it to walk on the sidewalk while traffic zooms by only feet away.

Even drivers have these problems preferring to enter their parked cars when blocked off from traffic by a bike lane.

A slow street would make for a pleasant neighborhood street.

Getting there takes energy

We know how to build pedestrian friendly cities and we know that they are low carbon cities. We lament the fact that bicycle use is dropping in China from 60% a few years ago to 25% today. And while we know all this we don't know how to incetivize pedestrian friendly cities.

Community is illegal today because regulations that limit the ingestion of poison are against the law. In some communities its against the law to hang your clothes out to dry. Lowering speed limits to keep children from getting killed and saving energy is illegal. The hybrid Prius, energy-efficient appliances, florescent bulbs, bicycles, and clean air regulations are examples of policies that have addressed failures of the market place and show how dinosaur industries have shot themselves in the foot.

Buildings are no different. A buildings location is very important with respect to how much energy it uses. We can't keep planting them like rice in remote places and expect a better plane to a hybrid commute plan.

In a study on the transporation energy footprint of a building
http://www.buildinggreen.com/auth/article.cfm?fileName=160901a.xml
these conclusions are drawn

The fact remains that the additional energy use from more employees driving to work may well exceed the energy savings realized by a green building.

Buildings are responsible for much more energy use getting people to and from those buildings. For an average office building in the United States, calculations done by Environmental Building News (EBN) show that commuting by office workers accounts for 30% more energy than the building itself uses.
For an average new office building built to code, transportation accounts for more than twice as much energy use as building operation.

Measures to reduce transportation energy use can have very significant ancillary benefits relating to water runoff, urban heat island mitigation, and habitat protection, while creating more vibrant, livable communities.

Transport spending is making our lives worse

Here's the problem with MTC RTP 2035. I and my friends already ride our bikes and walk. The government can take the $109B transport budget for the Bay Area and blow it on Iraq. We don't need another road or transit, or livable community or Transit Oriented Development. What we need is more people doing what we do. And how is that going to happen if the average person says "you would never walk if you saw the way I drive!"

We would benefit from incentives for everyone to use the present infrastructure the way we do. And so that MTC might actually complies with its air and water quality goals and meets its SIP. Incentives, such as parking cashout, and systemic traffic calming like bicycle boulevards, and eliminating the CA speed creep and speed trap laws so that prima facie and safety laws can be enforced and speed limits reduced. Of course MTC does not have law writing capability but it can provide incentives for reduced speed and bike boulevards.

There is no attempt to reduce the growth in driving infrastructure except for redirecting about $1B from the $109B over the next 25 years to bikes and peds. Examples of external costs subsidized by this $108B include air pollution, noise, 10,000 traffic deaths a year, pollution and speeding from road construction and repair, traffic law enforcement, facility expansion at the expense of walking and biking, get out of jail card for hitting a pedestrian or a bicyclist, reduced health care for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity, inflation reduction of the vehicle license fee and gas tax, future generation indebtedness from bond financing, lack of text books in schools, no school buses, no health care, etc. Of course if none of this paid for in the real cost of driving we don't get enforcement, clean air, drivers in jail, reduced CO2, working emergency clinics, etc.

RTP 2035: http://www.mtc.ca.gov/planning/
CA SIP:
http://www.epa.gov/fedrgstr/EPA-AIR/2005/January/Day-07/a346.htm
Parking Cashout: http://www.arb.ca.gov/planning/tsaq/cashout/cashout.htm
Bicycle Boulevards: http://www.sfbike.org/?page
Speed Trap laws: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d17/vc40802.htm
Prima Facie Speeds: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d11/vc22352.htm
Speed Safety: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d11/vc22358_4.htm
Speed Limits Reduced: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/320/7243/1160