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.

Photo courtesy of Ozgur Coskun/Getty Images. Click here to view the original story.

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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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.