A Fetish About Flexibility

Peter Newman talks about Rail and Bus in Perth. He also talks about many transport planners fetish with flexibility.



H/T ASD

The BRT Week or Biggest Rant This Week

Peter over at SF Bike Blog has been ranting about BRT all week. I just thought I would point you all over there to take a look at the weeks commentary.

Problems with BRT Part 1
Problems with BRT Part 2
President Bush Loves BRT
The Case Against BRT Melbourne
Dehli BRT Mows Down Peds
No Proof BRT Works
Giving Cities to Cars a Big Mistake
BRT Not a Stepping Stone to Light Rail
Transmilenio in Pictures and Words
True BRT: Bike Rapid Transit

Now while I agree with some of the points in his posts, there are a lot of things I don't. But I invite everyone to take a visit to the largest anti-BRT rant I've ever seen in one week and on one blog. If anything, it will create some interesting conversation.

Repaving on the Orange Line

While the transit agency is blaming the contractor, the contractor is blaming the weight of the buses. The total cost will be about $2 million dollars to repave to the right strength. I wonder how soon the pavement will deteriorate on the rest of the line that was built correctly. Does anyone know how long until they fixed the Pittsburgh busway? I can't seem to find any information on it.

Would Berkeley be "Destroyed"?

Regressive progressives are at it again in Berkeley. The November vote will determine if buses can have dedicated lanes in the City Limits and whether denser development can occur on transit corridors. The response by the opposition is fear:

"This election is huge," said Laurie Bright, president of the Council of Neighborhood Associations. If voters reject Measure KK and approve LL, she said, the combined effect could "destroy Berkeley as we know it."

This is a perfect example of the idea that things should always stay as they have been. People are really afraid of change and expect others to take the brunt of what is coming anyway (growth). This was highlighted by opposition at a recent meeting that claimed they should build dedicated lanes in places that "needed it" like Walnut Creek. It's always exporting things to somewhere else rather than taking initiative and controlling it yourself. It's also a direct contradiction of Wendell Cox and others who believe that Smart Growth policies are the bain of housings costs. It actually seems as if its general NIMBYness.

Mountain View Corridor?

I haven't been following this project as closely as I probably should have, but perhaps some locals can shed light on the Mountain View Corridor downgrade. In the past there was a pretty big fight between those who wanted transit in the center of the freeway (usually a bad idea) versus building a freeway that was basically serving sprawl. Now it seems they'll be getting a surface boulevard. More info at the UDOT MV Corridor page. Below is the transit alternative and the light rail lines it would connect.

Toronto's Rapid Transit Plan

Steve Munro as usual has the plan. Again, as I said before, they are spending more money on transit in this one city than we do through the federal new starts program. Priorities?

Orange Line Full, Driving Away Riders

We've covered this issue before, but here's an article written by a suit and tie guy that loves to ride this bus who is getting fed up with the crowding. It again shows that Americans are not the same as Brazilians and are not willing to put up with that type of passenger crush load in its buses. Thus the comparison to Curitiba again gets fresh debunking.

I take the line at least once a week, sometimes two or three times. That’s not bad for a guy in a suit and tie. We’re a rare breed on the busways of Los Angeles and a segment of the population that the MTA wants to attract. I live near one end of the line at the Chandler subway in North Hollywood and work at the Business Journal at the other end of the line in Warner Center.

So he's even reverse commuting away from downtown Los Angeles but to another major job center that is surely growing. Yet the end to end run time is getting slower. As said before, the Gold Line is the same length and 15 minutes faster. It's also been able to take the ridership hit because of two car trains and now we see ridership jump to 27,000. Over the last year, that's a 39% increase versus the constrained 8% of the Orange Line.

And the buses seem to be getting slower. It’s supposed to take 45 minutes to cross the Valley on the Orange Line. It’s five minutes longer than that many times. That may not seem like much, but if I’m spending 50 minutes traveling I might as well be in my car and in control.

Sure the Gold Line was a bit more expensive to build but the Orange Line won't be able to take much more growth, so something will have to be done soon that will make the Orange Line much more expensive than it had to be. Hopefully things will get fixed before more people start talking like this.

The point of all this: I don’t really want to ride the Orange Line anymore under these conditions. A champion of the service has become disillusioned. And considering this city’s track record on mass transit, I’m skeptical things will be fixed.

Space Race Update: Denver's Whiners

I like the Fastracks program. What it has done is lead the way for other regions to start thinking about how transit is being built in this country, usually one line at a time over many years. But now that the budget has gone up a few times, a lot of people are freaking out, mostly the people that didn't want the project in the first place, like the Rocky Mountain News. Part of the problem is that they never saw the importance of the project, but another part is that they are stuck in the car oriented world of roads are the greatest thing since sliced bread.

An editorial at the Rocky Mountain News this weekend states that Fastracks should be pared down in order to deal with the cost, which sounds reasonable when you think about it, until you read what they feel like should be the priority instead.

Some of those new revenues could come from whatever tax plan for transportation emerges from the legislature in the coming years. But transit should be far behind highway and bridge construction as a priority for state transportation planners. There simply isn't enough new revenue likely to materialize.

Because new highway construction to make the problem Fastracks is trying to help solve worse is a great idea. Look, for over 60 years in Denver, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on road infrastructure just like everywhere else. I don't see why making even a $10 billion investment in transit is such a big deal.

I do think RTD is doing the best it can with a bad situation created by the people that love roads anyways. It's not their fault that costs have skyrocketed because of issues outside of their immediate control, but to say that because of the cost, this type of project shouldn't be completed is wrong headed and short sighted. In fact, if the money for expanding (not fixing) freeways in the state was shifted to transit to complete the project, they would get done faster and help direct growth more intelligently sooner. The funds used on expansion would have just allowed people to sent more of their money to foreign oil companies and increase VMT.

There was a poster who replied to the editorial saying he was tired of North Denver getting the shaft when it came to funding allocations. The favored quarter of the Southeast is getting a lot of the investment and the northern end is paying for a lot of it, yet there is a lot going on in the Northwest as well.

I can see where the corridor gets even more congested between Boulder and Denver as population fills in the gap between the two cities. The need for an alternative development strategy is great and its not going to happen with BRT going down the center of a huge freeway, contrary to what people think. I have a lot of problems with the southeast corridor light rail because it was run down the side of the freeway. Many of the stations including those in the area of the tech center are not able to help the district turn into a more walkable pattern because the stations are on the other side of the freeway. The line should have shot through the center of the building density, not around it.

But I digress. We should be measuring mobility projects on whether they can get us out of the hole we have dug. The Denver projects move the region in that direction and the locals will have to step up and push against the road building interests of newspapers and the status quo.

Don't Drill, Invest in Community

An op-ed on Huffpost by Geoff Anderson and Shelley Poticha discusses why we should be eschewing drilling and investing in America's future with better transit and communities.

Encouragingly, Congress has begun to hear their constituents' calls for help. The U.S. House voted overwhelmingly for the Saving Energy Through Public Transportation Act, authorizing $1.7 billion over two years to help transit agencies stave off fare increases and keep pace with ballooning ridership.

But while critically important and timely, this measure is only a minor down-payment on what is required to meet the growing demands on our transportation network. Still needed, urgently, is relief for residents of small cities and rural areas. And longer term, we have to keep pace with demands for public transportation, and give this country a reason to be proud of its high-speed trains, light-rail lines, and both rapid and conventional bus transportation options.

We need to make more of our streets safe and convenient for walking and biking to work, school, shops and public transportation stops. We have to create incentives for developers to invest in our close-in suburbs and urban centers, to meet the huge demand for affordable homes in convenient locations. Americans are not dumb: given the real choice, we would much rather invest in well-located real estate than in gasoline.

I'd like to add that again, we don't need any more carbon in our air or oil dependence.

Ridership Posting, Charlotte Almost at 2025 Number

The Charlotte Observer reports that ridership on the Charlotte Blue line is 16,479. The 2025 ridership for the line was projected to be 18,100. Getting awfully close. This is far from the doom and gloom that was projected from opponents who got drubbed when the sales tax was kept on a vote of 70% to 30%.

So this continues the trend in which the FTA has massively underestimated ridership recently on new lines. Cases in point.

Minneapolis - 24,000 Projected 2020 26,000 Q108
Houston - 39,000 Projected 2020 40,000 Q108
Denver - 38,100 Projected 2020 36,000 10.07

In other ridership news, Gold Line ridership in LA is up 31.8%. From bottleneck blog:

Seems to me that it's easier to ride and more convenient than other busways that only increased by 4% in a corridor that has greater population. Also, we got a comment from a reliable anti-rail buddy Tom Rubin in the last Orange Line post. He's most recently been trying to work in Milwaukee for the Reason Foundation but was shutdown by Len Brandrup of Kenosha Transit. I thought his joke at the end of his comment on the last Orange Line post was quite funny. What do you all think?

"OK, now I'll say something nice about BRT in this alignment -- it wasn't nearly as dumb as LRT would have been."

EPA, Regressive Progressives, A Green Link

The EPA is saying that the EIS for the Columbia River Crossing doesn't consider growth from Sprawl or water and air pollution caused by increased driving. Don't get me wrong, I think its important to look at these things but the EPA has been super schizophrenic as of late. Perhaps this is the wing of the EPA not controlled by Bush lackeys? You know, the ones that reduced the value of life...really. From the Oregonian:

The critique is drawn from EPA's review of the Columbia River Crossing's 5,000-page environmental impact statement, and it extends to other areas as well. Among those are whether doubling the congested I-5 bridge from six to 12 lanes will promote suburban sprawl; whether the combination of air toxics, noise and other pollution will punish North Portland communities living close to the I-5; and whether massive pile-driving efforts will stir up toxic sediments, compromising federally protected migrating salmon.

In other environmental news from the bay area, BRT booster Charles Siegel writes a fairly scathing critique of Berkeley residents which has become a city of regressive progressives r.

These hard-core anti-environmentalists seem to believe that they are fighting to protect Berkeley’s character against growth. They don’t realize that Berkeley’s early character as a walkable streetcar suburb was disrupted by auto-oriented development. Transit corridors were filled with drive-in uses, and they ended up being more like strip malls than like walkable Main Streets. Even in downtown, there were surface parking lots, tire stores, a strip mall, a car wash, and other drive-in uses that made it less pleasant to walk.

Obviously I'm not a fan of BRT in these corridors that used to be Key System lines, especially when its not electrified but the grounds on which this proposal is being opposed is a bit silly. It makes Berkeley residents look bad. Eric covers the worst of it.

Meanwhile, one quite confused speaker claimed that giving buses a dedicated lane would cause them to “get stuck,” and that what we really needed was “flexibility.” She suggested that with “flexibility,” AC Transit could run buses every three minutes, while implying that three-minute headways would be impossible with a dedicated bus lane. Just incredible.

It's at this point when you kind of just have to throw up your hands and say uncle. These people are never going to get it. And its sad, because even though BRT is a small step up in service, it represents a giant shift in priorities (people over cars) and better service than what exists now.

And Green News from BART, all of their peripheral systems are going solar. Pretty cool.

Mayor Funk Releases KC Transit Plan

After looking at the map, I'm very underwhelmed. It might be because I'm not from the region and don't quite have a handle on the topography or geography but it seems to be overly serving of regional car commuters at the expense of the core. At first glance it reminds me a bit of San Jose.

Much of the express bus mileage seems to be on freeways which won't affect or change development paradigms in the region and the light rail seems cut short. I don't quite understand the streetcar either. Is it supposed to be a loop? Is it only a feeder? Where is the central city circulation? The commuter rail looks good though, connecting what looks like a few job centers from the road patterns. I'm sure KC Light Rail will have more. But for the moment, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me from an outsiders perspective. Anyone else have some insight on this one?

Betting on the Wrong Horse

Switchback is a great Boston transit blog. A recent post discusses how the MBTA bet on the wrong mode with gas prices on the rise. Some of the line is run on electricity with dual mode buses, but much of it is diesel buses.

The city bet on the wrong horse, or rather, bet on the wrong bus. Within the past ten years the T has sacrificed the A line tracks and half of the E, while pushing for a “bus rapid transit” system where residents demanded light rail. A light rail network that would ultimately cost less in infrastructure than the BRT network. All of this has been prompted by a fierce anti-rail ideology at work in both the MBTA and mayor’s office.

The anti-rail, pro-bus, pro-car agenda ignores basic logic and economics. Trains hold more people, run at faster speeds through tunnels, and offer comfortable, single-seat rides to anywhere in the urban core of Boston. They do this in vehicles which can operate for forty years as opposed to the ten to twelve of their rubber-wheeled counterparts. And they’re cheaper to run.

Personally I think building a subway for buses is insane especially when you have to destroy two perfectly good light rail tunnels to do it. You can't go as fast with drivers in the tunnels and you still get that awful bouncy jerkey bus ride and low capacity vehicles. Boston will increase its budget deficit operating these schemes. Perhaps the rise in oil will change some minds. It's not too late.

Greening Car Myth + Capacity Issues

In Forbes, Michael Repogle writes an article on the problems with auto travel increases even in the face of new technologies.

A key arena for innovation will be finding ways to grow the world's communities and economies while at the same time reducing how much driving the population is doing. The forecast growth in motor vehicle traffic--60% over the next two decades in the U.S. and many times that in China and India--threatens to overwhelm gains won through increasing vehicle fuel efficiency.

Which is the main rub, that VMT will increase so much that it will overwhelm any solutions we come up with such as everyone having a Prius type gas sipper. The only way to solve this issue is with more compact development and better transit.

The key to success is to keep car traffic from growing to unsustainable levels to begin with. A 2007 Urban Land Institute study found that shifting two-thirds of new U.S. growth to compact neighborhoods where cars are not the only transportation option would save 85 million tons of CO2 annually by 2030. That figure is more than the combined annual emissions of over 16 million regular passenger cars.

While Michael claims the transit solution is BRT, I think he's been drinking too much of the Bill Vincent cool-aid. In keeping with most BRT peddlers out there, he spreads the rumor in a major print medium that BRT is cheaper than LRT. With most new BRT lines in the United States built as hybrid buses instead of trolleybuses, and just operating as express buses they are not helping the problem either. In suburban areas and less congested routes BRT will be a major part of the solution, but in urban areas, it is a necessity that we build rail lines that can have multiple car consists and have major capacity. The Orange Line in Los Angeles which is already at capacity and takes 15 minutes longer to finish the same distance as the Gold Line LRT, even with its speed limits. The LACMTA is looking to expand it but there is hardly room for more people.

The thing that bothers me most is what if a lot of people need to use transit in cities? On some lines, particularly in San Francisco, there is a capacity problem. A recent study to open up Muni for free rides showed how overwhelmed the system would be if a substantial number of new people hopped on due to free rides. This scares me a bit. New York City has been handling massive increases quite well but even they need to expand and are in the process of building new subway tunnels. If we ever have a big shock and a ton of people hop on transit, there are going to be problems. And not having the capacity of a subway system spine here, it will show the limits of buses as the only solution as peddled by many rubber tire advocates. Buses will always be the bones of a transit system, but our spine should have capacity to move more people than a 60 foot bus.

Any Type of Rubber Tire Can Go on Concrete

I know I give BRT a hard time here. I've been trying really hard to see how BRT works and know that if done right, BRT can be a very effective tool. Cleveland seems to be proving that an investment in true BRT with its own lanes can be very powerful. $4.3 Billion dollars has been invested on the Euclid corridor in Cleveland. Plain Dealer:

One big reason for the energy is the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority's $200 million Euclid Corridor project, which is reshaping Euclid Avenue around a bus rapid transit line. Pundits have long derided the project, funded primarily by federal money, as a boondoggle. Media coverage has focused primarily on businesses that failed during construction, along with the hassle of negotiating a sea of orange traffic cones.

The mortgage-foreclosure crisis, which has left as many as 12,000 homes vacant in Cleveland neighborhoods, has also obscured the impending rebirth of Euclid Avenue. But the developers say they see what's coming. With the RTA project due for a ribbon-cutting in October, they're rushing to renovate empty buildings and buy vacant lots.

But in the back of my mind I'm always worried about the folks who are pushing the technology as an alternative to rail on corridors that need a higher capacity mode. A lot of these folks just want to stall the process or just don't like transit at all. They even complain that higher density development will result. Oh the horror! From the Washington Post:

Cuccinelli, Marshall and other state leaders, including Virginia House of Delegates Speaker William J. Howell (R-Stafford), acknowledge that they are in the minority. But they have long criticized the rail line to Dulles. Its costly, four-station diversion through Tysons Corner, they say, is more about helping developers reap the profits of high-density development than about moving people to the airport. Its dependence on revenue from the Dulles Toll Road to cover a huge chunk of construction costs would put the burden of any future cost escalations on commuters.
...

Howell and other critics of the project believe the solution for the Dulles corridor is in a type of service known as bus rapid transit, an express bus service with dedicated lanes and stations, allowing commuters to move as quickly as they would on a rail line without getting stuck in traffic.

This type of bus service was ruled out by local officials and business leaders because of the difficulty of building dedicated lanes through Tysons Corner and because of the increased number of riders that a true rail line would draw. But it is so much cheaper that it should be revisited, boosters say.

But here is where the wheels on the bus come off for me. Officials in Miami Dade County are discussing the possibility of expanding the South Busway to four lanes to allow for carpoolers and HOT lanes. This is the dream of every road warrior that wants to build a busway instead of a rail line. The idea that they can co-opt the line for cars is always in the back of their minds. While this is not the thought of well intentioned Mayors like Jaime Lerner of Curitiba and Enrique Penalosa of Bogota, it is the thought of many in the United States including Florida County Commissioners. From the Miami Herald:

Imagine widening the Busway from two lanes to four and giving buses and carpoolers with at least three passengers a free ride. Then sell the excess capacity to solo drivers willing to ''buy'' their way out of congestion with a variably priced toll that would rise when lanes are crowded and drop when they aren't.

Instead of encountering dozens of incredibly looooooong lights at the busy cross streets on today's Busway, imagine flying over all the major intersections as the government guarantees a reliable 50-mph journey from Dadeland to Florida City or the turnpike interchange near Southwest 112th Avenue. It may sound pie-in-the-sky today, but that pie could be baking in the near future.

At the urging of County Commissioner Dennis Moss, the Metropolitan Planning Organization and the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority are jointly studying ways to bring ''managed lanes'' to the Busway. ''It's the most exciting thing I've worked on in quite a while,'' MPO planner Larry Foutz said.

BRT is built on roads. Cars go on roads. So therefore...

Reading the New Starts Report

I cracked open the 2009 New Starts Report today and started reading through the ratings and commentary, there were a few themes that jumped out at me.

Bus Bias: We know that the FTA has been anti-rail recently from the uproar over the Dulles decision, but the new starts report is laden with pro-bus undertones. It's not just that they are for buses, but that they don't think transit is important and are looking for short term cheap solutions that don't address the problems. I suggest a look at the promotion of BRT in the Small Starts category. Take a look and see how many of them have dedicated guideways, very few, most with a small percentage of the running way. To me, just as Aaron said over at Metro Rider LA today, this is a waste of money. And as much as I like streetcars, they need their own lane if they are going to be doing line haul operations.

The FTA has introduced a new metric to judge projects called Making the Case, which is highly subjective and seems to push against the choice of locally preferred alternative (LPA) by local jurisdictions. While the government might want to be watchful over money, I don't understand where they would know better than the locals about what type of transportation is wanted or needed.

A few examples from Sacramento ,Charlotte, and Orlando.

Sacramento - However, the “case” does not explain why an extension of LRT is better than anything else that can be done to meet mobility needs in the corridor. Downtown express buses are dismissed as adding congestion to downtown streets without quantifying their effect, and of not serving intermediate stations in the existing South LRT line without providing evidence of travel demand to such areas. Joint development opportunities presented in the Making the Case document are reflected in the project’s ratings for transit-supportive land use.

Charlotte - The “case” for the project acknowledges that the Northeast Corridor is low density with auto-oriented development patterns. Given the description of the existing corridor, it is unclear from the “case” for the project why the LRT line is preferred over more economical bus improvements.

Orlando - The CFRCT project would result in a new rail transit line running north-south parallel to I-4 and through downtown Orlando. The “case” for the project provides no discussion of travel patterns within this corridor. While travel time comparisons between rail, bus, and private vehicle were presented for three origin-destination pairs, there was no explanation of why these pairs are highlighted. I-4 is described as congested and getting worse, but the “case” for the project provides no justification that it will effectively serve I-4 travel markets, or why a significant investment in rail operating at 15-minute peak frequencies is necessary in a corridor in which existing bus transit service is described as “limited.”

I'll tell you why Mr. New Starts writer guy, because people don't get excited about riding a bus on a freeway. Developers don't spend money on dense development around freeway bus service. When we think of why cities build rail, which is to attract new riders, new development, and increase operating efficiency, we know now that these things don't matter any more to the folks in the Bush FTA and pushing economical bus improvements gets minimal or no ridership and land use increases. You get what you pay for.

Operations efficiency importance reduced: The operating efficiency measure that was once measured has been rolled into our favorite overarching measure, cost effectiveness. Again people will say that this is rolled into the cost effectiveness measure but not separating it out from the annualized project costs of the C/E limits visibility of the benefits. It also ignores the fact that generating greater ridership numbers by rail with lower per rider costs can grow ridership for transit agencies at a lower operations cost. Remember that the LACMTA spent over a billion dollars on buses because of the consent decree but ridership stayed flat.

As adopted in the June 2007 Guidance on New Starts and Small Starts Policies and Procedures, FTA will no longer evaluate operating efficiencies as stand-alone criteria. Instead, this document clarifies that the operating efficiencies of proposed New Starts projects are adequately captured under FTA’s measure for cost effectiveness.

Ignoring transit's ability to change land use: It seems that there is an attempt to undermine transit lines that do not go through the densest areas. We already know that when you ask them about measuring economic development, they kind of shrug their shoulders and say "we can't do it". In the most recent NPRM the FTA stated, "Although many studies have shown, ex poste, that transit projects have had an impact on economic development, few predictive tools are available in standard practice and development of new tools seems infeasible in the short run." In other words, we don't want to do it.

There is another new measure in the land use category called "Performance and Impacts of Policies". This is supposed to assess how policies to promote transit oriented development are working. Well in the North Corridor in Charlotte, its reported that the market is not there yet. Well duh, the development market follows the line, yet its penalized for not being there yet (gets a medium instead of a high). This is contrary to what we've seen along the South Corridor, which is documented in the North Corridor report.

The Charlotte CBD has seen a considerable amount of residential as well as commercial development in recent years. In the South Corridor, the pace of development has been slow but is accelerating with $300 million in projects completed and over $1.5 million proposed in station areas outside of Uptown.

Strong regional growth is forecast(75 percent by 2030) and a market analysis for the Northeast Corridor suggested that just over 5,000 acres (84 percent of station area land) had the potential for redevelopment. Current market conditions in most Northeast Corridor station areas are relatively weak, however, and barriers exist that appear to limit development potential in the near term.

I'm not quite sure how they came up with a medium rating with the information that they give above. How do they decide to rate these things anyway? I've read the land use guidance and it doesn't make it very clear either. Another thing that does not make sense to me is that even if the city has good transit supportive land use policies, the existing land use could kill it, pushing rail's value for building places instead of just transporting people down and marginalizing it. I'm sure that is their hope, and was pointed out quite well in a recent editorial in the Washington Post:

Shaping cities is both a goal and a consequence of investing in transportation infrastructure. Sadly, the Federal Transit Administration seems unaware of this.
...

But this is more than just eleventh-hour federal shock therapy over money. The FTA's stance is emblematic of long-standing, misguided national policy concerning all forms of rail transportation. America has been persistently reluctant to think long-term and to make long-term investments in transit serving both regional and national interests.

Reauthorization is coming up soon, hopefully some of these things and misunderstandings of transit's power to change its environment can be changed.

"...They Wasted Everyone's Time and Money"

Update: I wrote this post last week and this morning right after posting, there is an article in the Washington Post about Mary Peters Ideology when it comes to transit and investment in infrastructure. You can find it here.

In the Washington Post there was an article which discussed that even though the Dulles Airport Extension to Metro has gone through all of the hoops that the FTA has set up for it, it might still not get funded. Why? Because the Bushies don't like rail transit. In fact they don't like it so much that they are willing to kill it because of a famous road project that cost way more than it was supposed to and still hasn't delivered on its environmental offsets; The Big Dig.

Federal officials remain skeptical of the plan to extend Metrorail to Dulles International Airport and might reject it, even though their consultants recently found that the proposal meets requirements for full funding, government and project sources said.

Officials with the Federal Transit Administration say they are concerned about the price tag and the specter of another Big Dig, the Boston project built by the same contractor in charge of the Dulles rail line, which took years longer and cost millions more than planned, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are sensitive. In addition, the agency has been reluctant to promote large-scale transit projects.

And what is this comment about moving away from infrastructure as Quade points out? Surely that can't be true? Why didn't they say the same thing about three other projects in the New Starts pipeline that have big budgets? Seattle's line to the University($1.6 Billion), New Jersey's Access to the Core ($7.3 Billion), and the Long Island East Side Access Project ($2.6 Billion). But the Dulles project is about $2.06 Billion. So what's the rub? Why pick on this project? This screams a basic ideological bias. But tell us something we didn't know right? Congressional backers of the project even stated to the Post:

Officials on Capitol Hill, in Richmond and at the airports authority's headquarters have speculated in recent days about what the problem might be. Some say the FTA has long been skeptical of expensive rail projects; in recent years, it has more often championed bus rapid transit projects.

Bingo. There has been no recent evidence to be against big rail projects. In fact does anyone know of a big rail project that hasn't delivered recently? I know the Silver Line BRT in Boston hasn't delivered on promises and locals call it the Silver Lie but light rail projects in Denver, Houston, Charlotte, Minneapolis and St. Louis have delivered, all of them far exceeding ridership projections.

But basically the DOT is waging an ideological battle. And so far, as Ryan states at The Bellows quite succinctly, "...they wasted everyone's time and money".

As the linked Post piece makes clear, it’s not the Silver Line’s specifics that are the issue, it’s an ideological opposition to big new transit lines. I think that’s dumb, but I think it’s even more dumb to nonetheless pretend that normal operating rules apply with regard to consideration of big new transit lines only to back out for ideological reasons after all the planning has been done and construction is underway. At any moment during this process, the feds could have said, we’re not going to go ahead with this money, because we don’t like new heavy rail lines. Instead, they wasted everyone’s time and money.

This comes just a few days after the release of a National Surface Transportation Commission Report panned by DOT Secretary Mary "Bikes Aren't Transportation" Peters where the dissenting side led by the Secretary claimed falsely that there were not enough cost-effective rail projects to spend money on. Looks like there is a project in DC that needs some money and has merit. And there are more like it such as the Subway to the Sea in Los Angeles.

But in addition, there have been rumors floating around that certain pieces of that report pertaining to light rail and electric transit were approved by the commission but taken out mysteriously before the final printing. When learning about pro-rail segments being taken out of the report, Commissioner,Staunch Conservative, and rail advocate Paul Weyrich stated,

“It is disappointing that after the paragraphs indicated were passed by a nine to three vote that someone without ever asking me would see to it to do away with these important policy considerations, Weyrich said to NCI. “ It is the kind of gutter politics which make people hate their government, and Washington in general."

Now we know where the battle lines are drawn. It's time for a new direction.

Houston vs. FTA Update

As it turns out, Houston had submitted documents to the FTA describing rail ready BRT lines that could be converted at some point. They just decided to go straight to light rail instead. In an article today in the Houston Chronicle, the information requested from the FTA was found to be mostly documents that Metro had already submitted. The letter that was sent seems like a last ditch effort by the FTA political appointees to scare Metro into keep moving towards the FTA's currently favored mode.

The FTA's motives for withdrawing its approval after earlier approving the planned conversion to rail are unclear, but the move smacks of partisan vindictiveness. Although Little claimed in her letter that federal guidelines required the proposal to be resubmitted, Metro officials pointed out that the document's harsh tone was a striking change from previous cooperation between the agencies.

Metro's initial plan called for rail to be laid and covered on the BRT routes in preparation for an eventual shift to trains. After the FTA allowed different formulas to be used in measuring potential ridership for the lines, Metro officials decided rail construction was feasible for all the routes.

Hopefully by next November all this political jostling will be over. However I would also like to see the transit agencies stand up to the FTA and tell their congressmen they are tried of having to deal with ideology when building their transit systems. With agencies not wanting to bite the hand that feeds them, they have just let the FTA continue to push towards higher and more ridiculous standards that keeps some cities from even applying for federal funds. Perhaps this move by Metro is the first in a set of moves by the transit industry to fight back. The Chronicle editorial says it best and speaks for all transit agencies in its comments below.

Houston needs an expanded mass transit system sooner rather than later. Our elected federal officials who support that plan need to make their voices heard at the FTA to counter rail opponents and make sure backroom power plays do not delay construction.

When Alternatives Analysis is a Wasteful Exercise

JMD at Transit in Utah points out a few projects in Los Angeles that will have to go through the AA process to get federal funding and finish their environmental assesment when it ends up wasting money. 1. The Subway to the Sea - Why would you do an AA with a BRT alternative when there is already BRT running on the street? 2. Expo Phase II - The first half is Light Rail, why require a transfer to BRT? 3. The Downtown Connector - This was supposed to connect the gold line to the blue line directly without a transfer. But why would you study a BRT connection between the two when the point was to connect the directly.

I understand doing an AA on a new corridor and in some places BRT is the best tool for the job, but forcing a study of it as an alternative when its obviously a waste of money is ridiculous. Use it to study different route alternatives instead. Besides, it looks like we are going to have to save all the money we can with the crazy inflation that is going on and the lowering of the dollar's value against other world currencies.

News From the Other Side of the State

Probably a bit overshadowed by the transit tax ballot measure in Charlotte these last few days, Raleigh Durham poked its head above water again to discuss a possible new transit plan after the FTA mercilessly cut the initial one using our favorite cost effectiveness measure. The interesting thing about this is that the region is very polycentric and its travel patterns seem a bit abnormal to me for typical hub and spoke transit operations. However there should be a line that connects the two major cities. The article cites a possible commuter rail BRT combination, but we'll be watching for more information as it comes available.

In the Triangle, rising costs and low ridership forecasts forced TTA last year to shelve its quest to build a 28-mile track for trains that would run several times every hour, 18 hours a day, from Durham through Research Triangle Park to Raleigh.

But the advisory group has not ruled out making TTA's tracks the spine of a rail, bus and streetcar network that could stretch across the region and into neighboring counties.