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Danica Roem made history earlier this month, running successfully for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates as an openly transgender candidate. Her win was especially sweet given that she defeated Bob Marshall, a 26-year incumbent who once referred to himself as Virginia’s “chief homophobe” and sponsored an anti-trans “bathroom bill” in the previous session.

Roem has pointed out that while Marshall was campaigning on transphobia, she won by running on bread-and-butter issues that matter to her constituents. And in suburban northern Virginia, one of those issues is traffic congestion.

Danica Roem’s political achievement was inspiring and toppled a notorious bigot. But now that she’s in office, is her traffic prescription any good?

Overall, Roem’s transportation platform is pretty typical for America’s car-centric suburbs. Her flagship proposal is to make more room for motor vehicles on congested Route 28 by widening it from four lanes to six and replacing signalized intersections with highway-style interchanges.

I contacted Stewart Schwartz at the Coalition for Smarter Growth to get some more context. While the Route 28 proposal is the type of road expansion project that generates more traffic and sprawl in the long run, her full transportation platform is more nuanced than that.

Roem represents a sprawling county that faces severe congestion pressure as a result of classic planning mistakes. “We are talking about prototypical American suburban landscape,” said Schwartz. “One that has grown up in a rather haphazard way, without a connected street grid, separating retail from residential and office. Certainly as a result of bad land use planning, it suffers from some really terrible traffic problems without easy fixes.”

In her campaign, Roem said she was motivated by the terrible commutes her mother endured daily. She told WTOP, “There isn’t a conservative or progressive, Democratic or Republican way to build a bridge.”

Maybe not, but there is such a thing as smart, fiscally responsible transportation planning that will reduce traffic pressure, and Roem’s road expansion ideas don’t fit the bill. Her I-28 plan is a something-for-nothing proposition: She estimates it will cost $300 million (the three overpasses alone come in at $80 million), and that it can be paid for by tapping the existing toll revenue stream from I-66.

Like most American elected officials, Roem doesn’t support new tolls. That will severely limit any attempt to rein in traffic in Prince William County, where tolling the busiest roads at peak hours is one of the few tools that could actually reduce congestion.

But Roem’s platform includes some good ideas too, with a section of her website devoted to the need for “smarter growth.”

She opposes the construction of the Bi-County Parkway, a highway connection to Loudon County that Virginia leaders had been considering. By focusing on improving the existing roadways, and not building new, Schwartz said, she’s “applying a fix-it-first approach.”

Roem has also given some thought to what transit can do for her district.

She calls for a short western extension of the Virginia Railway Express (VRE), which currently terminates at a park-and-ride station. Roem proposes a rail extension to the Innovation Technology Park, an office park that has had trouble finding tenants.

Roem also wants to tackle the problem of high transit construction costs. She has proposed a state-sponsored investigation, saying “labor unions are much stronger in Europe than here yet our project costs are more expensive. We need to determine why that’s the case with a conclusive, data-driven study and implement what we learn from it.”

So there you have it. At the moment, Roem isn’t what you would call a transportation reformer. She ran promising a road widening that would probably increase sprawl and do nothing in the long run to improve the region’s traffic nightmare. But she’s not a knee-jerk highway booster either and seems to have an open mind about transportation policy solutions. Following her historic win, let’s see how she steers the approach to transportation and land use in northern Virginia.

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Once upon a time, a new apartment or condominium came with one or even two parking spaces, often free, a reflection of America’s love for and dependence on automobiles.

But now, parking in urbanized areas is scarce and expensive, and walkable is in. Bike lanes have gobbled up on-street parking spaces. Short-term car-sharing services such as Zipcar and Car2Go, and paid ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, have sprouted in city and suburb alike.

And municipalities across the country are allowing developers to build apartments, condos and townhouses with far less parking, eager to cut the cost of housing and convinced that fewer spaces are needed.

Arlington County is the latest local government to take action. On Nov. 18, the County Board voted to allow developers of some new projects along the Ballston-Rosslyn and U.S. 1 corridors to cut the parking they provide by as much as 50 percent, so long as they offer bicycle parking, on-site car sharing and unlimited Metrorail or Metrobus passes for residents.

“Keeping excess parking . . . has really high costs for the county,” said Katie Cristol (D), the board’s vice chair, who described the change as “not a cudgel, but a series of carrots. We’re not trying to badger anybody into a lifestyle that doesn’t match their needs.”

In Montgomery County, multifamily buildings must provide one parking space per bedroom, but less parking is required for affordable units and age-restricted buildings. Prince George’s County is working on a proposal to remove all minimum parking requirements for buildings near certain regional transit zones.

In Buffalo, minimum parking requirements were eliminated with a zoning ordinance 11 months ago. About one-third of apartments built recently near Seattle’s downtown had no parking, under a decade-old policy to reduce traffic and developers’ costs so they could build more affordable residences.

In Arlington, where the median housing value is $651,400, according to the online real estate company Zillow, and where the cost of entry-level condos has zoomed out of reach of many young professionals, one underground parking spot costs between $30,000 and $60,000 to build, a county report estimated. The board’s new guidelines will allow the county to grant approval to developers of multifamily-housing in the two Metro corridors to build between 0.2 and 0.6 spaces per unit, down from between 0.8 and 1.25 spaces per unit.

Arlington residents pride themselves on living a walkable lifestyle, taking transit whenever possible and bicycling for personal transportation and recreation. But some who testified before the board said the loss of parking spaces would be difficult, especially for those who are less mobile.

“Please do not discourage young families and parents with kids from living in this area by encouraging a ‘car-free diet’ to an extreme,” said Puja Valiyil, 35, a mother of four.

Elfreda Baptist, a resident of Arlington’s Court House neighborhood, said the proposal overlooks the needs of dual-income couples who work outside areas reachable by Metro, as well as the elderly and people with disabilities.

“This will have the biggest impact on the seniors who cannot ride a bike, who need to carry heavy groceries, who feel unsafe to take Metro at night, who have to visit doctors or family or friends outside the Metro area,” she said. “This envisions a Metro corridor filled with young, active, healthy people.”

Others noted that even residents without cars sometimes need parking spaces, to accommodate contractors, caregivers and guests.

Board chair Jay Fisette (D) said the changes will be “incremental and prudent,” and reminded concerned residents that guidelines will not affect existing residential parking. “I think a lot of angst and excitement about this is overblown,” he said.

Many senior citizens and people who live in affordable housing don’t own cars, the report said, and many multifamily residential complexes are near underused commercial parking garages.

Since summer, Arlington has had street-legal electric golf carts that ferry people free of charge along the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor.

Cheryl Cort, policy director for the Coalition for Smarter Growth, said that reducing the number of required parking places will give developers and residents “better choices.”

“So people who choose not to have a car don’t end up paying for a lot of unused parking, and we can have some buildings oriented to car owners and drivers,” Cort said.

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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.”

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