It’s morning rush hour in the nation’s capital, and bicyclists crowd their lane six deep at an intersection. Clad in spandex and business suits, a few ride the bright green, orange, red or yellow bikes that signal a new phase of city cycling.

These shared bikes are part of an experimental network of dockless cycles.

Officials hope the pilot program changes how people get around. The District of Columbia boasts some positive results in its mission to curb gridlock and reduce pollution — like the most rapid rise in bike commuters among major cycling cities.

At stake are the city’s promises to tackle climate change and improve quality of life for its residents. Cities around the country are grappling with the same challenge as their populations rise: more cars.

Riders of these Skittle-colored new bikes unlock them using a phone app. They cost $1 an hour and can be left anywhere there’s room to drop a kickstand. That means colorful two-wheelers can be seen on sidewalks, on grassy terraces and, sometimes, in trees.

“I just saw this in front of my dorm, and I grabbed it to run to the bank because it’s a nice day and it’s faster,” said James Newell, an 18-year-old Howard University student. He was on an orange Mobike.

The new technology, which originated in China, is not limited to Washington: Seattle and San Francisco began pilots this summer. Dallas is home to three dockless bike-share companies. Boston is negotiating with firms right now.

But the sheer number of options in D.C. has made it ground zero for shared bikes. The wave began in 2007 with Capital Bikeshare, a system of docked cycles. Then came the dockless evolution: LimeBike, Mobike, oFo and Spin are four new privately funded companies. JUMP Mobility’s bikes, also new, have an electric motor, and they lock to pre-existing bike racks.

The five competing companies will duel for ridership over the next six months; they can deploy up to 400 bikes each, per their agreement with D.C. officials.

The city, facing a chicken-and-egg problem, is hoping to get more people on bikes. It is also planning to build 72 miles of protected bike lanes, more than double of what the city offers now.

“The truth is that biking in D.C. is kind of nerve-wracking,” said Alex Morgan, 29, a resident of D.C. and a gear-clad bike commuter who has not yet tried one of the new dockless bikes. “I think it’s better if more people bike so we can get more and better bike lanes and sharrows.”

ACTUAL CARBON SAVINGS?

Each company tells a rider how much carbon emissions they saved in a single ride. It’s not a coincidence.

Transportation is the second-largest source of carbon emissions in the D.C. area, behind buildings. The city aims to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2032 and 80 percent by 2050.

The gradual development of car alternatives has translated into a freeze on vehicle miles traveled and tailpipe emissions in the metro area over the past decade, according to data from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (MWCOG).

That’s despite a growing population: The city of Washington has added more than 100,000 people since 2000. Per capita, there’s actually been a regional decrease in transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions.

But to meet the region’s goals, the trend would have to accelerate significantly.

“We’re doing things that are actually making progress,” said Steve Walz, the director of environmental programs for MWCOG. “It’s a wide mixture of things, ranging from more transit oriented development being put in place, people just don’t need to drive as much, fewer younger people owning vehicles, greater numbers of people walking and biking.”

“We just need to grow the scale,” he added.

In D.C., biking advocates and their government allies have made a concerted effort for at least a decade to get more people on two wheels, and it’s starting to show.

About 4.6 percent of residents get around by bike, according to the American Community Survey, making it second place in major metropolitan areas behind Portland, Ore. The share of bike commuters in D.C. has doubled in the past five years — the fastest growth in the top seven cities for bikers, and the only positive growth in the group from 2015 to 2016.

Yet it would be difficult to estimate if the rise in biking, particularly bike-sharing, can further suppress the city’s emissions, said Susan Shaheen, director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

“There’s so many factors affecting travel behavior,” she said. “What’s going to be super interesting is whether there are different and new users, different usage patterns emerging, and if that is because it is a more cost-effective strategy in light of the docking stations being a high capital expenditure.”

It’s not just bikes. In the city, a third of residents don’t own a car. Thirty-seven percent use public transit to commute.

But the primary method by which residents commute is still the car. That’s still at 40 percent. Moreover, car and Metro commuters from outside the city nearly double the city’s population every day.

Stewart Schwartz, executive director and a founder of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, calls the low share of D.C. residents who drive to work a “success story” but the regional dependence on cars “frustrating.”

“While individual pieces of transit-oriented development are doing better, there is not enough commitment still to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to where they need to go to save our many poor from flooding in the future,” said Schwartz.

D.C.’s obstacles are several-fold.

First, the funding shortage plaguing the Metro system and the lack of options in some low-income or far-flung neighborhoods make cheap, affordable access to low-carbon mobility more difficult. One requirement of the dockless bike-share pilot is to have them in all eight wards of the city, but the vast majority are concentrated in downtown.

Second, the bikes have kinks, and people take time to adapt.

CHANGING A CULTURE

The dockless bike-shares litter the sidewalks and parks of the city, raising concerns they limit pedestrian mobility or just look ugly. They’ve appeared at the airport and the suburbs, outside the boundaries for the pilot. Some have ended up in strange places — like the roof of a car, up a tree, in a ditch or on balconies. That has spawned a fad among locals, who post pictures on Prince of Petworth, a local blog.

Some bikes have been vandalized or damaged through robbery attempts, bent frames, broken locks or torn baskets.

Similar concerns arose when Capital Bikeshare launched 10 years ago, said Kim Lucas, the program’s coordinator. But its benefits are real. Capital Bikeshare users have logged 18 million rides on 4,000 bikes. The program is planning to expand with at least 99 new stations.

“We see the new dockless bike-shares as a complement to Capital Bikeshare, and we’re excited about that possibility,” said Lucas. “The more options that we have available, the better cities will function as a transportation network.”

She said the city hopes people will use the bikes to link up with public transit, rather than jumping in a car. One of the new companies is even trying to lure motorists away from their cars by offering a different kind of motor: an electric one. JUMP is targeting users who like speed, or those who need to travel farther.

“The cool thing about bike-share in the past is that people who didn’t consider themselves bikers could use it; now, even more so, this product is going to attract an even wider market, because now they have this electric assist,” said Colin Hughes, director of strategic development at JUMP Mobility. “There is a change happening, and it’s small, but it’s snowballing.”

The dockless bike-share companies are not yet releasing their usage data publicly.

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.

23 Photo courtesy of Washington Post/Getty Images

For the first time in years, commuters in the Washington region who ride Metro four days a week outnumber those who ride every weekday — a subtle but significant ridership shift that transit officials fear may have long-term implications for the transit agency.

According to data released Tuesday by Metro’s Office of Planning, there has been a steady decline since 2013 in the average number of monthly trips taken by commuters carrying SmarTrip cards — down from 20 trips per month to 18. And data analysts contend that only about 30 percent of Metro’s recent ridership losses are due to people abandoning the system because of reliability and problems with on-time performance.

Instead, the rise of teleworking may have a more significant impact on ridership, confirming theories raised by transit officials in recent months: Rail ridership during morning peak-period hours on Fridays — a typical teleworking day for the federal government — is usually 15 to 20 percent lower than on days in the middle of the week.

That may play an outsize role in the steady ridership decline that Metro has seen in recent years. And it’s a trend that weighs heavily on Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld. Metro must improve service and reliability, he said, but teleworking is a threat to the agency’s finances — and something over which it has no control.

“It’s not even four days a week now,” Wiedefeld said at a recent meeting, citing new numbers from the federal government on rates of teleworking. “People are coming in twice and three times a month. I can’t change that. That’s going to be what it is.”

Monitoring how riders use the system — and on what days of the week frequent commuters travel — is a relatively new ability for Metro, made possible by the introduction of SmarTrip cards that allow Metro to monitor individual cards to learn about the frequency and timing of use. Metro officials say they intend to use that data to drill down into details that could explain exactly why ridership is ebbing — and how to stem the decline.

The data also paints a sobering picture of the future of Metro: Though officials continue to hope that improving reliability and rehabbing the system’s infrastructure may help win back some riders, there is a growing acknowledgment that the numbers may never return to the boom-time ridership of the early 2000s, when it increased dramatically year after year.

Ridership growth reached its apex in 2008, when it peaked at 750,000 average weekday boardings. Now it hovers just over 600,000 average weekday rides.

Metro’s continued lackluster ridership numbers signal a fundamental shift for the agency’s data analysts and planners, who for years have relied on a simple theory: If the local economy is improving and the Washington region is growing in population, then Metro ridership will also grow.

But now, analysts indicated in the report, it’s clear that the old formula doesn’t work anymore. Anticipating growth on Metro has become a lot more complicated.

“[Metro] needed to rebuild its capacity to monitor and forecast ridership using new data and methods,” analysts say in the report.

And a decrease in federal transit benefits several years ago may also have resulted in some portion of the federal workforce opting to use modes of commuting other than public transit.

However, staffers were blunt in noting that unexpected delays, service interruptions, peak-period meltdowns, ill-timed train offloadings and SafeTrack maintenance projects are a significant part of the ridership problem.

“We realize that it will take some time to regain the trust and confidence of customers needed to return to the system,” the planning staff wrote in the report.

The report, which will be presented at Thursday’s board meeting, said large-scale efforts might be the best solution for the ridership decline long-term. It recommends, for example, that regional leaders take more proactive steps to encourage ridership, such as investing in the construction of housing developments near Metro stations.

They also push for infrastructure improvements that can help public transit operate more efficiently and attract riders with shorter, faster rides — such as installing bus-only lanes and instituting traffic-signal prioritization for buses, as well as fostering pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods that encourage people to walk to their nearby Metro station rather than drive.

Aimee Custis, deputy director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, said Metro’s new data suggests that regional leaders are responsible for doing more to help the transit agency regain popularity.

“There are things that must absolutely be fixed in-house at Metro,” Custis said. “But we also must deal with things that are outside of Metro’s control, or we won’t solve this problem.”

Wiedefeld said recently that he remains hopeful that the long-term prospect of development and construction in the region means that boom times may still be to come for Metro. In particular, he said, the completion of the second stage of the Silver Line could bring thousands of new daily riders to the system.

“It will still be a few years before some of that occurs,” Wiedefeld said. “But as they get rid of those car lots and stuff and build 20-to-30-story buildings . . . that will start to drive the numbers up.”

Click here to view the original story.

Congratulations, Washington-area drivers. You can now claim the worst traffic “hot spot” in the country — a stretch of Interstate 95 in Northern Virginia that averages a whopping 23 traffic jams a day, according to a new study released Wednesday.

Motorists heading south on I-95 between the Fairfax County Parkway and Exit 133 in Fredericksburg lose an average 33 minutes in backups that leave brake lights stretching an average 6.5 miles, according to the report by INRIX, a Kirkland, Wash.-based traffic data firm.

If congestion doesn’t improve over the next decade, the researchers said, that stretch of I-95 will cost local motorists $2.3 billion in wasted time, lost fuel and additional carbon emissions.

Nationwide, continued traffic congestion could cost drivers $2.2 trillion over the next decade, the study found.

Bob Pishue, an INRIX senior economist, said researchers put a dollar figure on backups studied in more than 100,000 “hot spot” road segments in March and April to help public officials target improvements. Being able to prioritize transportation spending, he said, is particularly important since the Trump administration has proposed $1 trillion in infrastructure investments.

Quantifying the costs of traffic congestion, Pishue said, will help government officials weigh the costs and benefits of improving roads or expanding transit in different areas.

Researchers didn’t say how traffic should be alleviated.

“The investments should go into areas that would get the most bang for the buck,” Pishue said. “If those funds go to where drivers are feeling the most pain, it will go a long way in gaining public support” for additional infrastructure spending.

Overall, the Washington region ranked third in the United States, behind Los Angeles and New York City, for the 10-year costs of traffic congestion. Los Angeles motorists face a potential $91 billion, while New York City drivers could lose $64 billion to backups.

Atlanta came in fourth with $29 billion in potential costs over the next decade, and Dallas came in fifth with $28 billion.

INRIX, which collects data from sensors on vehicles and motorists’ cellphones, usually ranks cities’ traffic misery by focusing on motorists, such as how much time they spend in backups.

The Washington area had two other traffic “hot spots” among the 25 worst, the study found. Northbound I-95 from an area south of Fredericksburg to Exit 143 (Garrisonville Road), also in Northern Virginia, came in seventh with 936 traffic jams over the two-month study.

In Maryland, the eastern part of the Capital Beltway between Kenilworth Avenue (Route 201) and just east of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge in Prince George’s County ranked ninth worst with nearly 700 backups.

John B. Townsend II, a spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic, said he wasn’t surprised to hear I-95 in Northern Virginia had earned such a dubious distinction.

The highway’s 29 miles of express toll lanes, which opened in 2014, have given motorists willing to pay a faster, more reliable option and freed up more space in the regular lanes, he said.

They’ve also caused more backups where the toll lanes end and vehicles have to merge into the regular travel lanes.

“In one way they’re a godsend because they’ve lived up to their promise of creating faster commute times on I-95,” Townsend said. “But we’re seeing these slowdowns in the regular lanes. You just get these backups up and down the line . . . At the end of the day, you still save time.”

Kelly Hannon, a spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Transportation, said the state will spend $800 million over the next five years to improve I-95 in the Fredericksburg area.

She said traffic is particularly congested there because local motorists who use I-95 as a Main Street for errands mix with regional commuters, tractor-trailers and long-distance travelers.

“Any incident can cause delays very quickly,” Hannon said. “It’s just a very fragile system whenever anything unexpected happens.”

The state has started extending the express toll lanes two miles to the south and plans to build another 10 miles of them south to Route 17 (Exit 133), Hannon said.

It’s also planning to build three new southbound lanes in the median to separate local and through traffic between Exit 133 and Exit 3 (Route 3).

Stewart Schwartz of the Coalition For Smarter Growth said adding more lanes will only attract more traffic. He said I-95’s continued congestion, even in areas with express toll lanes, shows additional lanes only makes it easier for more people to drive.

He noted Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) recently proposed adding express toll lanes on the Beltway, Interstate 270 and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.

Northern Virginia’s roads won’t see relief, Schwartz said, until the region’s growth plans insist on more affordable housing closer to jobs and transit options.

“Without that,” he said, “you’re going to keep the pressure on that highway.”

Photo courtesy of Lina Davidson and the Washington Post. Click here to view the original story.

MAJOR HIGHWAY PROJECTS: Robert McCartney, Faiz Siddiqui and Ovetta Wiggins of the Post are reporting that Gov. Larry Hogan (R) on Thursday proposed a $9 billion plan to widen three of the state’s most congested highways — the Capital Beltway, Interstate 270 and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway — in what he said would include the largest public-private partnership for highways in North America.

• “This problem has been marring the quality of life of Maryland citizens for decades,” Hogan said at a news conference. “Today, we are finally going to do something about it.” The highway expansions would add two express toll lanes each way to roughly 100 miles of roadways in Maryland’s densely populated central region. Existing lanes on each road would remain free to drivers, Erin Cox of the Sun reports.
• The governor cited the costs of traffic congestion as the reason behind pushing for three major projects simultaneously, writes Bryan Sears in the Daily Record. Hogan said the state on Thursday issued requests for information seeking proposals from private-sector companies interested in partnering with the state. “I’m pleased to announce that work on all three of these major transportation initiatives will begin right now,” said Hogan. But that doesn’t mean shovels are going into the ground anytime soon.
• Montgomery County officials reacted Thursday with a blend of surprise, elation and disbelief to Gov. Larry Hogan’s proposal for a roughly $9 billion project that will include adding toll lanes on the Beltway and Interstate 270, Bethany Rodgers of Bethesda Beat.

OPPOSITION TO PROJECTS: Smart growth and transit advocates, environmental groups and some Democrats expressed their disapproval, calling the projects short-sighted, bad for the environment and sure to spur sprawl and overdevelopment. Business groups were elated, writes Josh Kurtz in Maryland Matters.

• Stewart Schwartz, of the Coalition for Smarter Growth in Washington, said his organization is urging the governor to pause and look at reasonable alternatives, such as more public transportation. He cited concerns about environmental impacts, and he said the new capacity will encourage people who found other ways to commute besides driving to return to the roads and make them congested again, Brian Witte of the AP reports.

COUNTY EXECS WANT NOISE SUIT AGAINST BWI: Anne Arundel County Executive Steve Schuh and Howard County Executive Alan Kittleman want the state to sue the Federal Aviation Administration over what residents near BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport describe as lower, louder airplanes. In separate letters, both executives asked Attorney General Brian Frosh to sue the administration on behalf of Marylanders, reports Rachael Pacella in the Annapolis Capital.

REDMER VS. McDONOUGH: The race for Baltimore County executive heats up on the Republican side Saturday as Maryland Insurance Commission and former delegate Al Redmer announces his campaign at a sold-out event hosted by Gov. Larry Hogan. Del. Pat McDonough, who’s been running for some time, formally announces that morning at a Dundalk diner. McDonough has been sniping at Redmer for months and Thursday released a Redmer Report, a one-page summary of all his attack points against Redmer. MarylandReporter.com.

CHALLENGE TO STATE GUN LAW: A Maryland man has mounted a U.S. Supreme Court challenge to the state’s prohibition on convicted felons possessing firearms, saying individuals must be allowed to have a judge decide on a case-by-case basis whether the ban violates that person’s constitutional right to keep and bear arms., Steve Lash of the Daily Record reports.

REGIONAL ECONOMIC WEAKNESSES: A new “super regional” group of chief executives of large employers from Richmond to Baltimore has been studying the Washington area’s economy and has identified weaknesses it says are stifling growth. The region possesses valuable assets, including a highly educated workforce and the seat of the federal government, but its incomes and productivity aren’t keeping pace with other major metropolitan areas, reports Robert McCartney in the Post. The Greater Washington Partnership also said in a report released Thursday that too many talented workers are leaving the area because of greater opportunity elsewhere.

RETURN OF PHOENIX SCHOOLS? A fire led to the eventual end of Phoenix — a groundbreaking Maryland public school program for children with addiction that closed in 2012 — but the state could see institutions like it rise again from the ashes. Recent spikes in the Maryland heroin and opioid epidemic have triggered calls for substantial changes in education systems statewide, and a state work group is weighing the return of recovery schools after a Sept. 7 meeting, Capital News Service’s Georgia Slater reports.

TOWN TO PAY PURPLE LINE GROUP: The Town of Chevy Chase will not appeal a judge’s order to pay $92,000 to the Purple Line advocacy group Action Committee for Transit and member Ben Ross for the cost of their attorneys’ fees in a public information case, Andrew Metcalf of Bethesda Beat reports. Mayor Mary Flynn said Tuesday the town will pay the fees rather than appeal the order. The Town Council plans to approve a supplemental appropriation in October to do so.

CANDIDATE PHUKAN RECOVERING: Anjali Reed Phukan, Republican candidate for comptroller, is recovering from emergency surgery at Atlantic General Hospital in Berlin, to remove her gallbladder. “Maybe almost died,” Phukan (FU-kan) reported on her Facebook page early Tuesday morning. Later that day she posted “I survived.” “Next time let’s just have a little less narcotics and a little more vegetables,” said the gaming agency auditor who is a recovering addict and a vegetarian. Here’s our original article on Anjali Phukan.

SINCLAIR SEEKS SEN. HERSHEY’s SEAT: Heather Lynette Sinclair, a 32-year-old Kent County Democrat, has filed to run for the state Senate seat in District 36, challenging incumbent state Senate Minority Whip Steve Hershey (R-Upper Shore) for the seat that represents southern Cecil County, as well as Kent, Queen Anne’s and Caroline counties, Brad Kroner writes in the Cecil Whig.

BALTIMORE’s SEWAGE LEAK PLAN SCRUTINIZED: It appears that a federal judge will have to settle a serious disagreement over whether the city of Baltimore has a credible new plan for curtailing the frequent sewage overflows and chronic leaks that have long made the harbor and urban waters unsafe for recreation, Timothy Wheeler of the Bay Journal reports in MarylandReporter. A local environmental group, Blue Water Baltimore, has asked a federal judge to reject the plan, unless it is further strengthened.

A SOLDIER’s TALE: Blaine Taylor, in a commentary in MarylandReporter, questions MPT’s Vietnam Voices and whether it really represents those of Marylanders who served.

Photo courtesy of video from Governor Hogan’s Facebook page. Click here to view the original story.