Metro has been busy in February and March installing and upgrading bike racks, preparing for the upcoming bicycle season. Metro’s Plant Maintenance crews installed over 70 new racks, with space for 140 additional bikes at Braddock Road, Glenmont, Morgan Boulevard, Rockville, East Falls Church, Takoma, and Dupont Circle. We continue this work under Metro’s Pedestrian and Bicycle Element of 2012-2017 Capital Improvement Program.

Metro’s Board of Directors will host six public hearings in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia beginning Feb. 27, where members of the public may provide formal testimony regarding the budget and fare proposals. Members of the public may provide formal testimony regarding the budget and fare proposals, which are included in the docket of budget actions. The proposed operating and capital budgets for the next fiscal year support the critical rebuilding of the Metro system, and improving safety and reliability. The budget also provides service enhancements such as additional rush hour rail service, improved escalator maintenance, enhanced bus corridor services, increased security and continued compliance with National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommendations.

Preceding each of the formal public hearings, Metro will host an hour-long Open Forum with multimedia stations to engage stakeholders and solicit public input. The Open Forum will include a video presentation on Metro’s rebuilding program, tables staffed by senior Metrobus, Metrorail, MetroAccess, SmarTrip and police officials who will be available to talk with participants and answer individual questions, and a third station where computers will be made available to take an online survey regarding Metro’s priorities, as well as to submit written comments for the record.

Details and directions for transit travel to the public sessions are available on Metro’s website or via the hyperlinks below. Open forums begin at 6 p.m., followed by the public hearings at 7 p.m. The hearings will take place as follows:

Monday, Feb. 27
Bethesda Chevy Chase Regional Services Center – Hearing 569
4805 Edgemoor Lane
Bethesda, MD

Wednesday, Feb. 29
Mary Ellen Henderson Middle School Cafeteria – Hearing 570
7130 Leesburg Pike
Falls Church, VA

Thursday, March 1
Matthews Memorial Baptist Church – Hearing 571
John H. Kearney, Sr. Fellowship Hall
2616 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave., SE
Washington, DC

Monday, March 5
Washington Lee High School Cafeteria – Hearing 572
1301 N Stafford St
Arlington, VA

Tuesday, March 6
St. Columba’s Episcopal Church – Hearing 573
4201 Albemarle Street, NW
Washington, DC

Wednesday, March 7
First United Methodist Church – Hearing 574
6201 Belcrest Road
Hyattsville, MD

Written statements and exhibits may be sent to the Office of the Secretary, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, 600 Fifth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001, or e-mailed to writtentestimony@wmata.com. Statements also may be faxed to 202-962-1133. Please reference the hearing number. Submissions must be received by 5 p.m. on Monday, March 12. A survey on possible options to balance the budget will be available on Metro’s website from 5p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 22 until 5 p.m. on Monday, March 12.

Additional information can be found in the press release.

Since our last update, Metro’s Plant Maintenance crews have installed new bike racks with additional space for over 140 bicycles at 7 more stations in January.  New racks have been installed under existing overhangs and other spaces at Capitol Heights, Stadium-Armory, Rhode Island Ave-Brentwood, Potomac Ave, Largo Town Center, Van Ness-UDC, and Glenmont as part of “Implementation Strategy 1″ in Metro’s Pedestrian and Bicycle Element of 2012-2017 Capital Improvement Program.

We’ve been taking pictures along the way! We took these right after installation, sometimes in the cold or rain, so there aren’t many bikes on them yet, but we hope to be all ready for the biking season to begin in the spring.  Glenmont pictures coming soon.

Metro is working with the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation (DRPT) on the Super NoVa project to identify travel needs, evaluate current gaps in transit and TDM programs, and identify a vision to improve mobility. DRPT will be hosting a set of four public meetings through northern Virginia to gather your comments/ideas on bus, rail, carpooling, and vanpooling. The Super NoVa region considers the needs of commuters in northern Virginia as well as those from Washington D.C., Maryland, and West Virginia.

Citizens are invited to learn more about the study and provide feedback by attending any one of the following identical meetings. For special assistance or information, call 804-786-4440 or TDD 711 at least 48 hours in advance of the meeting date.

Other mechanisms to participate include:

Written comments also may be sent to: Super NoVa Transit/TDM Vision Plan, 11400 Commerce Park Drive, Suite 400, Reston, VA 20191.

Si usted necesita servicios de traducción a participar, por favor manda un email: espanol@kimley-horn.com

New staircase at Rhode Island Ave-Brentwood station, including bike stairchannel

Metro completed work retro-fitting a staircase at the Rhode Island Ave-Brentwood station last week, and the new stairs include channels to make it easier to bring a bicycle up to, or down from, the station.  Metro’s Parking Office included this work as part of the transit-oriented development that is nearing completion at the station, as well as Metro’s Pedestrian and Bicycle Element of 2012-2017 Capital Improvement Program.

The staircase reopens a pedestrian connection from the station to the south side of Rhode Island Avenue, and makes it easier for customers to bring a bicycle as well.  The stairs had closed late last fall for a retrofit.  Pedestrians can once again connect from the bus loop area to the surrounding neighborhood.  To bring your bike on the stairs, put both wheels into the channel along the side, tilt the bike inwards a little, and push/hold your bike so it rolls alongside as you walk.

New staircase at Rhode Island Ave-Brentwood

The stairchannel, sometimes called a runnel, is a new kind of facility for Metro that we hope can help accommodate bikes in difficult areas with steep grade changes.  We welcome your feedback to help guide potential future installations!  Have you seen or tried the stairs? What do you think of them?

State of the Commute Survey Results

Last summer, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (MWCOG) posted the results from the 2010 State of the Commute (SOC) Survey. Metro planners are reviewing the results now in support of our Regional Transit System Plan, which is looking to better connect areas of concentrated growth, such as the regional activity centers, and increase core capacity through 2040. The survey is conducted every three years to help MWCOG’s Transportation Planning Board better understand commuting trends and evaluate the effectiveness of its Commuter Connections program, which provides information about and benefits for commuting by transit and carpooling instead of single-occupancy vehicles (SOV).

Read more…

In December, Metro installed new bike racks for over 100 additional bicycles at Metro stations, and more are on the way.  We are trying to install racks where demand is high, space is available, and/or where we can fit bike parking under existing overhangs or shelters for weather protection. These actions represent initial steps under “Implementation Strategy 1” in Metro’s Pedestrian and Bicycle Element of 2012-2017 Capital Improvement Program, and have been taken up by Metro’s Plant Maintenance team (PLNT). PLNT has energetically taken on the role of installing these bike racks, which are in addition to their normal duties of grass mowing, snow removal, cleaning and painting, etc.  Their work is a real support to the bicycle and pedestrian program!

So far we’ve installed at Benning Road, Silver Spring, Shaw-Howard U, West Hyattsville, and L’Enfant Plaza, and have scheduled more for January.  We’ve been taking photos along the way:

Back in August, we posted information about our latest endeavors to improve bike and walk access to Metrorail.  We have since completed our field work and now have a laundry list of more than 3,000 individual projects throughout the Metrorail system that we identified through that effort.  The projects range from the small and simple (e.g., Vienna racks) to the larger and more complex (e.g. additional Bike & Rides).  Metro’s Pedestrian and Bicycle Element of 2012-2017 Capital Improvement Program (1.1 MB, PDF) summarizes the findings by category, and provides an overview of the methodologies we employed to prioritize projects, as we identified a larger need than is currently funded.

And, although the  primary goal of this project is to provide a list of needed bike and pedestrian access projects to be funded through Metro’s Capital Improvement Program (CIP),  the list of needs developed in the inventory also will help better inform our partnerships on transit oriented development (TOD) and other projects near our stations.  Many of the projects improve the links from our station property to that of other property owners and will be instructive as stations undergo development transformations.

Project Highlights

Field teams were out evaluating conditions all over the system.  They highlighted desire lines to stations, bike parking needs, sidewalk & pathway improvements, intersection improvements and other pedestrian and bike needs.  Below are some high level summaries to give you a flavor of what we found out there:

Sidewalks and paths: Our field work identified hundreds of small sidewalk and pathway projects typically on Metro property that will improve access to our stations.  Each project tends to be small, say 200 to 500 feet long, but added together from end to end, they would stretch 10 miles.  Most of these projects are at suburban stations, where our entrances tend not to be directly located on the street network.

Intersection improvements: We looked at the intersections that serve our stations for places where new crosswalks, curb ramps, crossing islands or other improvements were needed and found 700 locations for such improvements.  Many of these are located off of our property on adjoining streets, so we plan to work with the local jurisdictions to address these.

Bike parking: More than 400 potential locations for future bike parking were identified, including the type and expected capacity of parking.  The field survey explored potential locations for additional Bike & Ride parking facilities and covers for bike racks.  Our plan is to build or reserve space for bike parking in the amounts needed to help us reach our mode share goals of 2.1% by 2020 and 3.5% by 2030.  To make these numbers work, we’ll continue to work with our local bike/ped planning partners to improve the on- and off-street connections to our stations so we can fill this bike parking.

Prioritizing Projects

So, 3000+ is a lot of projects.  We’d love to be able to do them all.  However, our funding is currently constrained.  So, what do we do? – we prioritize.  And, how do we do that?  We look to our Agency goals.  At the top of the list is safety & security, delivering quality service and using resources wisely.   We took a look at how our projects stacked up against these goals and created an action plan to complete the projects that best achieved them.  There are more details about the process in the attached document, but let it suffice to say we think we’ll make some real headway in meeting these goals and their accompanying objectives as we improve access to our stations.  In the meantime, if other funding opportunities crop up – say TIGER IV, or V, or XXXII – we’ll be ready to go.

Follow Along with Us

We have already begun work on the projects identified, and planning for more projects is underway.  As we complete projects we’ll continue to post them here.  Please let us know what you think.  Have they helped?  Are there other projects you see out there?

Update January 18, 2012: Maps of all project needs at by individual Metrorail station are available below. Due to the size of the files, we’ve posted them as 8 separate documents in alphabetical order by station name. They should be readable with Adobe Acrobat 6.0 or later:

1. Addison Road-Seat Pleasant to Capitol South (PDF, 2.2 MB)
2. Cheverly to Dunn Loring-Merrifield (PDF, 2.2 MB)
3. Dupont Circle to Gallery Pl-Chinatown (PDF, 2.5 MB)
4. Georgia Ave-Petworth to King Street (PDF, 6.0 MB)
5. Landover to Metro Center (PDF, 1.2 MB)
6. Minnesota Ave to New York Ave-Florida Ave-Gallaudet U (PDF, 7.0 MB)
7. Pentagon City to Twinbrook (PDF, 3.2 MB)
8. U St/African-Amer Civil War Memorial/Cardozo to Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan (PDF, 2.4 MB)

This study measured transit's impact on congestion, roads, and parking in the Washington region.

One of the best ways to understand the value of something is to take it away, and measure the difference. So, as part of our “Business Case” for transit study, we tried taking away transit to see what happened to the Washington DC region, using MWCOG’s Regional Travel Demand Model. This model represents people’s origins and destinations, and all the different options for getting around, including detailed transit and highway capacity information. What does that model predict would happen without transit?

Read more…

To measure Metro's impact on land markets, we analyzed property value assessment records across the region. Shown above is a sample from the District of Columbia.

A Metrorail station can make the land surrounding the station much easier to get to and from. Especially if traffic is bad and parking is costly, as often happens in our region, a Metrorail station can offer a good alternative means of getting to and from an area, which gives the area near rail an advantage over areas farther from rail. Businesses can locate near a Metrorail station and reach workers around the region, more people can live in the neighborhood and get around by transit, and customers can shop or run errands there.  Economic theory tells us that the value of land around rail stations should reflect the value transit brings, as often does the density of development.  Economists would say that the accessibility value of transit is capitalized into the land value.

But what is this effect around Metrorail stations, and how much is it worth?  How much land value is associated with Metrorail, and how much property tax revenue does this generate for Metro’s jurisdictions?

To answer, we analyzed parcel-level property assessment values across the WMATA Compact jurisdiction as part of our “Business Case” for transit study.  We analyzed all properties, including residential, commercial, and federal office buildings.  The data show that:

• Metro enables value-creating activity: $235 billion of property value sits within a half-mile of Metrorail station
• About 80% of this value is from commercial properties (multi-family residential, office, retail, and other)
• 28% of the Compact Area‘s property tax base sits on 4% of its land within a half-mile of Metrorail
• The land within a half-mile of Metrorail stations generate $3.1 billion in property taxes per year for our funding partners

New York Avenue station has helped enable valuable development. Photo courtesy of NCPPP, click for context.

This does not mean that Metro caused all of this development, but it does show that Metro serves the value-creating parts of our region. Some of this development existed before Metrorail, and influenced the decision of where to build stations.  So, we ran a number of hedonic analyses (a statistical regression technique) to isolate the effect on property values uniquely from Metrorail proximity alone, or the “rail premium.”  After all, property values can be influenced by a variety of factors, including proximity to other infrastructure, desirability of the neighborhood, etc.  Controlling for all other factors, we found that within the Compact area:

• Metrorail boosts property values, adding 6.8% more value to residential, 9.4% to multi-family, and 8.9% to commercial office properties within a half-mile of a Metrorail station – all other things being equal
• Property becomes even more valuable as a property gets closer to Metro stations

Others have shown too that new Metrorail stations can attract and spur economic development, by tracing the history of development around stations, such as New York Avenue and the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor.

These findings show that Metro plays a significant role in our region’s land markets: not only is valuable development and economic activity clustered around Metrorail, but the benefits of Metrorail can be seen in actual property assessments.  Our regions’ land markets recognize and have responded to the value that Metro brings.  This helps make the case that Metro is vital to the region’s economy, and is a good investment of public funds.

Read the study’s Final Report (pdf).

Cross-posted at Region Forward.