Is Good Urban Form Slowing Us Down?

There has been a lot of chatter recently on the issue of fast vs slow transit.  This week is the perfect time for this discussion as two major United States transit projects of differing stripes opened up; the Metro Silver Line in Washington DC and the Tucson Streetcar.

Last week, Yonah Freemark wrote a post discussing the benefits of fast transit specifically calling out the Green Line in Minneapolis for running 11 miles in about an hour.  Now, this line has parts of what people are always asking streetcars to have; dedicated lanes. "They get stuck!"  Yet this line, as well as the T-Third in San Francisco and others mentioned in the post are still "too slow".  Yonah goes on to discuss metro expansion in Paris leaving a discussion of politics and costs of rapid transit to the very end.

To me this points to the first place where urbanism and fast transit disagree with each other, block sizes and stop spacing.  By trying to maximize connections to the community, the transit line has to stop more often, slowing speeds.  And if built into a legacy urban fabric, this also includes negotiation with tons of cross streets where designers don't give priority to the transit line.  This happens in Cleveland on the Health Line BRT as well as the Orange Line in Los Angeles, even though it has its own very separated right of way.  The Gold Line Light Rail in LA and the Orange Line originally had the same distance, yet one was 15 minutes faster end to end. A lot of this had to do with less priority on cross streets given to the Orange Line, not because it was a bus or rail line.

We continue to talk as if dedicated lanes are magic, but its a suite of tools that helps speed transit along inside of our wonderful urban fabrics.  Transit is directly affected by urbanism, if we let it be.

But then there is the other side of this discussion.  Transit's effect on urbanism.  Some New Urbanists believe that slow transit is necessary for building better urbanism.  Rob Steuteville of New Urban News calls this "Place Mobility".  The theory goes like this:

When a streetcar -- or other catalyst -- creates a compact, dynamic place, other kinds of mobility become possible. The densest concentrations of bike-share and car-share stations in Portland are located in the area served by the streetcar. That's no coincidence. You can literally get anywhere without a car.

In Portland parlance, this is the "Trip Not Taken".  When you build up the urban fabric of a city, many usually induced trips disappear.  That car trip to the grocery store becomes a walk and that streetcar trip to Powell's Books might be a bike trip now.  Or in the world of the web, that trip might change hands, from you to the delivery truck.  In Portland at the time they calculated a 31 million mile reduction in VMT from the housing units built along the streetcar route.

To increase the viability of streetcars in a world dominated by a "cost effectiveness" measure dependent on calculations of speed, the "Trip Not Taken" was refreshing.  Many transit lines were being built without regard to neighborhood or were cheap and easy.  But they were fast!  You can see how the "cost effectiveness" measure intervened with elevated rail through Tyson's Corner (yes I'm still annoyed) or the numerous commuter rail lines on freight rights of way in smaller regions that probably should never have been built.  But they were fast!

Yes the streetcar helps with creating place in the minds of developers and urban enthusiasts, but no it doesn't do the whole job.  The Pearl District and Seattle's South Lake Union were perfect storms of huge singular property ownership, massive investments in additional infrastructure, proximity to a major employment center, lack of NIMBYs, and a strong real estate market.  But look at the results.  It's hard to argue that the streetcar didn't help develop this massively successful district in one of planning's favorite cities.  But it's also hard to give it all the credit.

The crux of the argument is that place making should be the ultimate goal and slowing things down makes things better.  And many cities see the streetcar as some sort of fertilizer that makes it grow and a reason to change zoning code. Because of very stringent local land use opposition (read NIMBY), this makes a lot of sense.  If a streetcar can lead to the restructuring of land use or the fulcrum of a district revitalization, I see that as a benefit. But again, don't give it too much credit.   

From a safety standpoint this slowing down idea makes sense.  The Portland Streetcar has been in collisions, but no one has died or been seriously hurt, unlike a number of high profile collisions in places like Houston, where drivers can't seem to follow the rules. Our society also puts up with over 30,000 deaths a year to get places faster on interstate highways as well.

But...

Ultimately the base success of a transit line isn't in the amount of development it has spurred or the zoning it has changed.  It's the ability to get a lot of people where they want to go, in a timely fashion.  A commenter on Jarret Walker's Human Transit Blog says it best.

But the romantic impulse towards slow transit wears away quickly if you have no choice but to rely on it all the time! I don't have a car, so I rely on buses that travel excruciatingly slowly, wasting much of my time.

As someone who has gotten rid of my car and considers myself a walking, bike riding, transit loving (and sometimes zipcaring) urbanist, I find it very annoying that it takes an hour to go three miles here in San Francisco on the bus.  And if I need to get downtown, I take the Subway which is a half mile away versus the streetcar which is half a block away because time does actually matter.  We see this decision play out every day when people choose to drive cars over using transit.

But if we are going to spend so much money, we might as well figure out a way to transport the most people possible. Sometimes that might be streetcars.  Other times it's not.

But back to urbanism and transit.

In Portland, dedicated lanes on the North/South parts of the line wouldn't make as much difference because it has the same issues we mentioned with the Green Line above and narrow streets.  Streetcars have to deal with urbanism.  I think streetcars are ok as a circulator in downtowns, because these are the trips that help people get around dense places that are proximate.  You can bring your groceries on when its raining and disabled folks can load their wheelchairs with dignity. Tourists like the certainty of the tracks and little kids love the ride.  We see that even on 20 minute headways, 13,000 riders are on the line every day.  It's hard to argue with that, given it's more riders than many first choice bus lines in some major cities without rail. 

However for linear route based transit operations, we need dedicated lanes and signal priority to at least make the expenditure worthwhile and play nice with our urbanism.  Once you get outside of a district, people want to get places.  I like subways and wish we had more, but it seems politics and money seem to get in the way like Yonah mentions above.  Some might even argue that before we even think about building fixed guideway lines, we should focus on our buses.  Perhaps we should have a threshold system ridership before putting in rail, to determine whether all options for increasing ridership have been exhausted.  Houston's new network plan could be a good guide.  And personally, I don't think BRT should be special. It should be the norm. Luckily the new 5339 bus facilities funding guidance could allow for BRT and Rapid Bus funding (they are NOT the same thing). 

But there's a new report out which discusses which factors drive ridership for fixed guideway transit once we decide to go that route.  Employment and residential density around transit lines, the cost of parking downtown, and grade separation were found to be the most effective measures when put together to drive ridership according to a recent TCRP report released earlier this month. Individually employment had an r squared of .2 while the others had negligible impacts.  Only taken together as a whole did these measures drive the most ridership as seen below.

The report goes on to say "The degree of grade separation is likely influential because it serves as a proxy for service variables such as speed, frequency, and reliability that may lead to greater transit ridership."

But determining success is hard.  In fact, its so hard that of the transit projects surveyed, the only thing that transit agencies seemed to agree on (it has dots in every project below) was that the line would be cheap!  We discussed this briefly above. 

"Provide fixed guideway transit in corridors where inexpensive right of way can be easily accessed"

Which is many times why we end up with slow transit.  It's cheap. We're cheap. Streetcar costs are below that of light rail or subways and since its in a mixed traffic right of way, it will be cheaper politically than BRT.  Commuter rail on freight rights of way is the best to them though even though its the worst at creating ridership.  To me it's is even cheaper because it usually ignores the chart above with the focus on employment and residential density.

So all of this is to say that Streetcars are not the worst transit ever and urbanism will affect transit, and transit will affect urbanism.  We just need to decide what the appropriate ways are for intervention such that we maximize people's ability to get to the places they want to go and build great communities.  Let's not swing the pendulum too far to either side, it might tip the balance against us. 

Local Control and Negotiation Politics

In 2000 a man many people called the Hammer decided that Houston Metro wasn't going to get any funding for a light rail project that scored very high on the FTA's cost effectiveness index because he didn't like it.  Tom Delay kept Metro from getting money that would have saved Houston local funds.  The city decided the line was worth it and built it anyway.  The line now has the highest ridership per mile of any new light rail line in the country.  Later on Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison got Houston some money for credit, but the precedent had been set.  Conservative House members were now going to insert language in appropriations bills against individual transit projects they didn't like.  This was the precursor to last weeks THUD appropriations bill which featured not one, but three transit projects which had individual language against them. 

This morning I got an email this morning from a friend pushing back against Cincinnati area Representative Steve Chabot who had put language in the T-HUD appropriations bill that forbids the Cincinnati Streetcar from receiving federal funding.  While I understand the rabid Tea Party sentiment that wants to kill transit projects, I don't quite understand the need for suburban representatives to write riders in bills that would keep locally popular projects from moving forward.  I guess it means they can say they tried to kill the project, but that Senate was just too much for them.  If you live in Ohio, contact Senator Brown to say this isn't cool. 

But Cincinnati is not the only place this is happening.  San Francisco's Central Subway, which isn't anyone's favorite project yet still zombies forward with the support of Chinatown merchants and big time DC politicos, is also under attack from Rep McClintock.  While I'm no fan of the project, I'm also not a fan of wasting more money on the project by delaying it even further, especially since we know it will get built. It's also annoying to have someone representing Tahoe to the Oregon border getting involved in San Francisco transit issues.  I don't think Rep. Nancy Pelosi would ever step in because some road project in Truckee wasn't to her liking.  But if these guys really cared about keeping costs down, they would do more to stop building worthless freeways and subsidizing endless sprawl.

But this THUD bill individual project hate doesn't even stop at Cincinnati and San Francisco!  No our old nemesis Representative John Culberson is at it again and put language in the bill that would deny funding to the University Light Rail Line in Houston.  Where did he learn how to do such things?  Why Tom Delay's great example of course.  Now Culberson's district is on the edge of this line, but he and the neighbors can't stand the fact that it would go through a major employment center.  This has been going on with him for at least 6 years and he can't let it go.  In fact, the first post on this blog was about Culberson being a jerk.

Some things never change, and lots of transit opponents apparently don't want cities making their own decisions about transit projects.  Even though many of those projects go through stricter approvals in the New Starts process than any freeway ever built.  But get ready to see more and more of these riders with a Tea Party slanted house.  Like with the transportation bill, they are just going to throw more stuff at the wall to see if it sticks.  And we end up happy that they didn't cut transit, when all the crazy stuff they tried to pull was just a way to rig the negotiating table.  The more times an individual project can get stuffed into a bill, the easier it is for them to use it as leverage against things that transit backers want.  Perhaps we should start throwing stuff against the wall as a counter bargain.  Where is my Geary Subway?

Ding Dong the Witch is Dead

Well sort of. Today the 2005 dear colleague letter that then FTA Administrator Jennifer Dorn released on the world requiring that all New Starts projects have a medium rating on their cost effectiveness has been rescinded. Many have hailed this as a huge step forward for livability advocates but honestly its only half of the picture. One of the reasons I believe that the medium rating was imposed was to build more cheap BRT projects and cut out subway and lrt projects. But another reason was to cut all the junk projects out of the funding loop. With only about $8 billion dollars available for new starts projects in the last transportation bill, it leaves the need for regions to pick up the hundreds of billions more needed to build out transit networks. One estimate pegged the total at approximately $250 billion dollars. That is a huge gap.

So while some newspapers including the New York Times believe that this is opening up the funding floodgates, they are sorely mistaken. It does however change a few dynamics that have been holding projects back. The Central Corridor in Minneapolis is a curious case. They have been wanting to add a station in St. Paul to serve lower income community however it slowed down the travel time just enough to push the line over the index. This is just one example of how suburban to downtown speedy travel is emphasized over shorter trips in denser communities by the existing cost effectiveness index. Yonah has specifically mentioned another Minneapolis project that I also believe is headed in the wrong direction.

Dropping the medium requirement also takes a step towards making us think harder about what we're really building transit for. Is it for existing population or the future population or both? A common comment about the current cost effectiveness rating is that it would have never funded the DC or New York Subways. But DC and New York would not have gotten to where they are now in terms of density without the investments in the subway. Really this is a chance to start thinking about how to make transformative investments in transit around the country. It's an opportunity we've been waiting for, but as with all big ideas, it needs money.

"We Don't Dwell"

Yay FTA Models. You totally rule at figuring out ridership in new light rail cities. You did a bang up job in Minneapolis (24K in 2020, current 26k), really got those Houston numbers right for 2020 (33k in 2020, current 38k), and Charlotte was right on target(9k opening, current 14k). Note: the APTA daily numbers are a bit wonky. I don't know if I completely trust them to the rider but they make the point.

Now we can add Phoenix to the list of FTA model lowballing:

The rail was projected to attract 26,000 riders per day, but the number is closer to 33,000, boosted in large part by weekend riders.

What kills me about all this lowballing, is what the cost effectiveness number was, and what it SHOULD have been. Ultimately that is what decides projects. And it's a little messed up that the FTA keeps getting it wrong, especially when they can kill a project because of a CE below Medium. Oh, and here's the money quote from the opponents:

Starlee Rhoades, the spokeswoman for the Goldwater Institute, a vocal critic of the rail’s expense. “I’ve taken it,” Ms. Rhoades said, slightly sheepishly. “It’s useful.” She and her colleagues still think the rail is oversubsidized, but in terms of predictions of failure, she said, “We don’t dwell.”
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“We are also proponents of paying your own way, and we think the light rail remains too subsidized.”

That's right, you're in the New York Times saying the light rail is useful and full of people after you said no one would ride it. In fact, your institute is just like every other that goes around and spreads doom and gloom everywhere. And what is the fascination with subsidies? I guess I'll never get that end of the argument.

Depending on Obama's FTA

A lot of people are depending on Obama's FTA to change the rules to let them build streetcars and other projects. I'm hoping that he doesn't let them down by continuing to delay the transportation bill. In Charlotte, the city council overrode a veto by Mayor McCrory to spend money on a streetcar study hoping that the FTA would change cost effectiveness rules aimed at speed instead of placemaking and short extended walking connections.

But the council's Democratic majority said it was important to get the project started. They hope the federal government will change its rules to pay for streetcar construction, and they argued by spending the money now the city would be first in line.

Get Off My Grass Track

John McCain hates transit. We would be living in an extended Bush nightmare if he were President today. It shows because it seems as if he knows absolutely nothing about how the Federal Transit Administration does competitive grants. I would somewhat understand the pork argument if he was targeting projects randomly inserted such as a bridge to nowhere, but many of the target projects actually have full funding grant agreements with the FTA after going through the highly competitive New Starts program. Much of this money seems to be for the annual allotment the FTA pays out for projects that sign their FFGA.

I would also say that many highway projects that are being built today wouldn't make it through this process so to call them pork shows the lack of understanding. The Mayor of Stamford who has a BRT project in final design even goes as far as to say McCain doesn't get it.

The SUT project will also be a model of livability and sustainability, optimizing the use of the SITC and its 225 commuter trains and hundred of buses a day, supporting the development of LEED-certified and green buildings for 12,000 new residents and highly-paid workers, and reducing vehicle miles traveled by 18,900,000 per year.

True colors coming through every day. 18 million VMT is a lot less foreign oil.

Future Planning

It looks like Shanghai has long term plans for it's metro system.
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Developers are looking at TOD around HSR stops in California.

“I think not only is it something that is a good thing, it’s certainly going to be a phenomenal planning tool for the next generation of growth,” said Perry Dealy, president of Dealy Development. “The opportunity to take the high-speed stop hubs and convert them to maximize their mixed-use, high-density potential is great. You’d have what I’d call a TOD, transit-oriented design, starting with residential, work-live, retail, entertainment and other kinds of venues that are part of the mixed-use characteristics.”

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Yet another transit line starts out already worrying about costs more than connecting people with places they want to go.

“Dorfman says the projected cost of the line ranges from $1.2 billion to $1.8 billion, depending on the final route. Those numbers put the proposal give the project a Cost Effectiveness Index of $30 per rider for the length of the line, just outside the range required by the Federal Transit Administration for federal funding.

In order to move into the next step which would be to begin preliminary engineering you have to reach that $29 CEI number, so we’re very close to that,” she said.

The CEI is messing up basic planning. I can appreciate getting rid of some of the insane gold plating that is rampant in LRT planning, but I can't understand how a single computer index based on modeling that everyone knows is bs can decide that a route that goes where people want to go is too expensive. So instead, we'll build the cheap route because its cheaper, not because it's better.

Magical Matching Funds

It looks like Senator Murry pulled a Pelosi in setting the terms of her own matching funds which again shows how the New Starts system is broken. People will continue to write in these rule changes for specific projects if the system continues to not work for them.

Murray's provision requires the FTA to count money from tolls and state gas taxes as part of the expected 40 to 50 percent of the light rail line paid for from "nonfederal" sources.

The historical precedent for this was set by Nancy Pelosi when she decided that the Third Street line could be the match for the Central Subway and wrote it into law. Supposedly Houston has a similar deal writing in the Main Street Line as a match for the future network as well, but it hasn't really been mentioned much.

Included language allowing Houston METRO to get credit for state and local funds already spent on the design and construction of the existing Main Street light rail. This means METRO will be credited an additional $324 million for future FTA-approved transit projects.

The point is that if lawmakers are going to continue to toss these things in, it probably means they are ready for a cleaner transportation bill that allows regions to spend money on what they need, instead of what there is money for specifically.

The Short End of the Stick Is Still Long

The transportation bill is stuck and as its written might increase transit's share of funding by a whopping 2% and the road people are already going nuts.

Utah transportation officials fear a proposed six-year federal highway-spending bill will siphon money from new roads in growing states like Utah and reward transit systems instead.

Why these strikes extreme fear into their hearts I don't know. Perhaps because they know that people are starting to change their minds about the great freeway subsidy experiment. What I do know is that it's a little bit funny that on the same day that the Moving Cooler report came out supported by government agencies including the Federal Highway Administration, a new website from AASHTO came out as well touting 'REAL' solutions to climate change that include cars, cars, and did we mention cars? Their big suggestion? Reduce annual growth in driving through smarter driving. But initially they were on the committee for Moving Cooler but were conspicuously absent from the final report pages. It seems as if someone decided to take their ball and go home because the results didn't cater to them.

But it's interesting that AASHTO was trying to cut them off at the pass after being part of the team. It's also likely that groups like AASHTO are more aligned with county and state DOTs than they are with cities, which means that if AASHTO exerts its power on congress, it's likely to push further away from the interests of cities. In the stimulus and in the climate bill, cities have been getting the shaft even though they are the nation's biggest economic engines and have the most to lose.

Washington's omission is troubling to metropolitan areas like New York City and Chicago because they are the dominant source of carbon dioxide in their regions and will face the earliest impacts.

Those in the status quo of road building have much to lose as well if we are to believe thier howls, even if the opposite of Transit expansion will benefit places like Salt Lake more.

Utah's reluctance to embrace more transit money puzzles him {Rob Puentes}. The Wasatch Front's train system is growing, he noted, and he believes it makes no sense, at a national level, to fight carbon emissions with energy policy while ignoring them in transportation policy.

The Utah Transit Authority finds the bill a possible upgrade because it streamlines the grant process for new projects, spokesman Gerry Carpenter said Tuesday, although it's too early in the legislative process to comment on details.

Yeah, you know that broken new starts process. Congressman Oberstar gets this which is why I'm glad he's on our team:

"When highway planners sit down to build a roadway," Oberstar said today, "they don't go through the gymnastics of a cost-effectiveness index," as transit planners are currently required to do. "They sit down, get the money, and build a road." Expanding transit, the House chairman concluded, is difficult "if you've got a millstone around your neck."

But all of this leads to the fact that Salt Lake City and other regions need to do something other than the status quo proposed by AASHTO (people are already lowering driving habits because of the economy), because on many days of the year, look how well the AASHTO way works out for them:

Direct Result

A direct result of poor ridership estimation or purposeful underestimation for new lines is not enough capacity to supply service to the people that use the system. Minneapolis has decided to shut down parts of the Hiawatha line this weekend to lengthen the platforms for three car trains. This is going to happen on the South Corridor in Charlotte as well in time. It's unfortunate but this is something we're going to see in San Francisco on the Central Subway as well. Whoever thought cutting platform length to save money now instead of saving money later was a good idea was very very short sighted. These types of cost cutting decisions on the front end really need to stop.

Night Owl Links

Here's a little something to keep you going:

Edmonton planners hope a TOD plan in the suburbs will reduce the need for driving every trip.
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When is Mayor McCrory or Charlotte gonna realize that their transit goals aren't compatible with this loop obsession?
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Crosscut now talks about how to do density right. Hugeasscity links to all the times they were against it.
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The Green revolution in Iran will continue with available subway operations.
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HNTB is part of the dinosaur establishment in transit engineering that thinks the cost effectiveness measure is going to be the end all be all for capital transit funding. Wake up, it's gonna change. Ray LaHood has been telling you over and over and over again.

Wee Hours Linkage

I'm kind of a night owl and its sometimes nice because the next days news comes out right before I go to bed. It's also bad because the next days news comes out right before I want to go to bed :)

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Apparently the TA really likes BRT on Geary. Whatever. After riding the bus on the HOV/BRT lane from LAX to Union Station I realized why the rubber tires just don't cut it. I couldn't read the news on my Iphone without getting seriously ill. I feel bad for the people who will have to ride that bouncefest in from the Richmond every morning. Sure it will be a faster bouncefest, but a bouncefest nonetheless.

The next sick part though, the completely ridiculous cost estimate of $5 billion dollars for surface subway. If it really does cost $100 million a mile and it's a ~6.5 mile line with ~2 miles of subway, why the hell would 2 miles cost $4+ billion dollars???!!! And why does it cost $100 million a mile on the surface? It's not like the T-Third with drawbridge retrofits. Someone at the TA is a little too close to those medical hash dispensaries. Plz to have new engineers!!!

I guess it really doesn't matter. The Richmond is never going to get a Metro, BART or otherwise. I'm sorry guys, you've been deemed second class citizens to the TA and Muni. Well maybe third class, because everyone who rides Muni is already second class.
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And we wonder why a ton of suburban roads get built?

The city of Charlotte has 75 percent of Mecklenburg's population, but only has 1 of 9 voting members on the MTC.

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I think we need new engineers in the bay area. All these cost estimates are insane. The airport connector is just another example of it. If there is one place I would like to see intelligent design, it's here. And 80 foot buses? Come on Transform, you know thats not possible. The Orange line had to get special permission from Caltrans to run 65 footers, just five feet longer than the usual artics.
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If Microsoft wants a light rail extension so bad, why can't they pay for it. It's thier own fault that they located so far away from the center of the region. Job sprawl has consequences, one of them being high capital cost for extensions. Papa Gates should foot the bill for this one.
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Does the Peninsula want to pay for a tunnel? I'd be interested in seeing a poll on the issue of a tunnel. I wonder if the NIMBY's would get rejected for thier high cost plans.

Elections Do Matter

Even in the transit world...

But supporters of the Portland expansion as well as transit advocates nationally said that making the announcement so early in the new administration and allowing the Portland project to leap over other projects sends an unmistakable message of federal support for transit.
...

Wyden and DeFazio, both Democrats, were more direct.

"The real answer is, elections matter," Wyden said. "The priorities are different now, and they are very much more in tune with the needs of the people of Portland."

DeFazio agreed. "The Bush administration had set up a black box test that no streetcar proposal would have ever been able to pass," he said. "They were not following the law, and this administration is."

It's interesting to see how the cost-effectiveness measure will be used by the Obama FTA. Considering the problem is that there isn't enough money for all projects, there will have to be a way to figure out which projects deserve funding and which don't. Will it be now the lack of livability planning with transit?

Guestimate

Why must they cost so much!!!??!!! Surely this is just the result of the engineers throwing in the cost of reconstructing Tryon, the sensitive nature of some wetlands near the University, and some crazy aerial structure that doesn't really need to be built. Also when was this estimate performed? Not when stimulus projects were coming in 30% under budget right?

No one will ever build light rail if it continues to cost this much. It's ridiculous that people aren't asking harder questions to the engineers, such as do we really need that overpass there? Can we single track it here with room for double if needed later? Can we hop on another agencies train order? etc etc etc. Cut out the gold plating!

Betterments

Part of the problem with costing complaints for light rail is that everyone wants to throw everything into the project. From repaving the street to urban decor such as special pavers and street lamps. I'm all about these "betterments" but we need to understand that attaching them to the light rail project only makes it more expensive and gives opponents fodder when they go on about cost per mile estimates. In reality, the repaving of a street curb to curb should not penalize a project. If anything it should create a better mobility score for increasing the number of people that can use a street. Where's the transit SYSTEM user benefit for that?

But because such improvements are underfunded in general, cities see FTA funds as a gravy train for getting these important elements done. If we can figure out a way for these pieces of the overall puzzle to be eligible for another funding pot dedicated to pedestrian mobility that would be great. But we shouldn't have to. This is just another reason why the cost effectiveness measure that can kill a project based on a penny over a certain standard is dumb.

LRT Number Crunching

I got into a debate on Streetsblog about passenger miles and capacity and saw a calculation I had never seen used as a reason that light rail sucked. It's an interesting calculation but it tells me nothing. GaryG states:

You simply multiply vehicle revenue miles by vehicle capacity in passengers to get total revenue capacity in passenger-miles. You then divide actual passenger-miles by revenue capacity passenger-miles to calculate the share of capacity that was actually used to transport passengers in revenue service. The calculation works out to an average occupancy of about 14 passengers per light rail vehicle. Each vehicle has a capacity of 140 passengers or more.

This makes no sense what so ever to me. First off, averaging anything over the whole day seems silly to me. Do we talk about roads being a waste when they don't carry cars at midnight? Another thing is that there's no filter for the peak period which is what of these lines relieve pressure on. The telling thing is that when we looked at the New York Subway, it was only 28 passengers per car. It reminds me of that calculation done a few years ago that all transit systems except for BART are worthless.

Anyways, my argument was that we should look at cost per passenger mile to see the efficiency of each mode. There was a fight about capital costs as there always are from people who think buses can do any job rail does but it led me to the 2007 National Transit Database numbers in easily readable format. Check out some of these numbers:

Cost Per Passenger Mile 2007

Denver
34 cents Light Rail
67 cents Bus

Portland
39 cents Light Rail
93 cents Bus

San Diego
27 cents Light Rail
71 cents Bus

Houston
53 cents Light Rail
55 cents Bus

Minneapolis
42 cents Light Rail
72 cents Bus

San Jose
103 cents Light Rail
155 cents Bus

Buffalo
1.63 cents Light Rail
1.24 cents Bus

Muni
116 cents Light Rail
101 cents Bus

Perhaps light rail in San Francisco is a waste. We should just rip out the tracks, no one likes riding on rails anyways...right? Wouldn't it be nice to toss a three car train on the N or KLM? Perhaps making Muni less like a bus stopping at every stop sign in the Avenues and on Church would help too.

Phoenix Ridership to a Good Start

It's a little early to claim victory here because of all the special events that have been going on since this line opened as well as the "new" factor, but it looks promising. Current weekday ridership numbers are at 30,000 while the projections for opening day were at 26,000. Long term 2030 numbers are expected to be around 50,000. And hey, look! A low-medium cost-effectiveness rating! Again, today it takes a medium because of a 2005 Bush administration edict. This could turn into yet another ridership projection FAIL if the ridership stays at it's current level during a severe downturn.

Ridership projection FAIL = Cost Effectiveness Index FAIL.

Not Dense Enough

Even in the downturn the Charlotte light rail line beat its projections. Currently ridership is down from its highs, but it makes me think that there needs to be a working over of the transportation models at the FTA. Under the current process that requires a medium rating for cost effectiveness, Charlotte would not have made the cut with its ridership projection as it was. It had a low medium rating in 2003, yet was recommended because of its land use planning. Which brings me to a second point.

An excuse for Kansas City not going back after light rail is the usual complaint. We're not dense enough. Via the Urbanophile from the KC Star:

The city is set up for cars. As a result, most of the metropolitan area is not densely populated...Generally, an average of 6,600 to 10,000 people per square mile is needed to score federal funds. But Kansas City isn’t close to that number along the 14-mile route that voters rejected in November.

So now, since they aren't dense enough currently(even in AC's weighted density) and use that as an excuse to not move forward, there will be no change and they'll continue to drift in autodom. But the problem here is not just the lack of imagination and foresight, but also that the current FTA gives no hope of change. People will continue as long as we let them to refer to the cost-effectiveness index as god's law. It's all about the now when in reality we should be planning for the future.

The point of building a rail line today, whether it's light rail, a subway line, or a streetcar is the shape the future development of a corridor but this is something that isn't measured in the current process, at least with any meaning. This is something Congressman Oberstar is looking to fix, but we need to help.

At this point, however, the Federal Transit Administration has declared the cost effectiveness index number and not transit oriented development as the critical factor in giving a thumbs up or down to a project. It's time for the CEI not just to be amended, but eliminated, says Rep. Jim Oberstar, chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee says.

"As soon as there is a Federal Transit Administrator I will encourage that person to, by executive order, erase it from the books. And if they don't we'll do that in legislation."The cost effectiveness index became the deciding factor for transit projects in April, 2005. That's when the FTA received a letter from the Bush administration's Office of Management and Budget proclaiming the CEI's primacy.

So Charlotte gives us some clues as to what we can look forward to in terms of changing neighborhood dynamics and creating a demand for future density in transit corridors. It also shows that the cost effectiveness index does not determine the success of a project, no matter how much weight seem to put on a single metric based in auto engineering. That doesn't mean we shouldn't look at the costs and weight it against the benefits. It just means the way we're doing it now is weighted towards killing meaningful projects. Places that need subways are forced by cost shock and the CEI to look at light rail and places that should have light rail are forced to BRT and so on down the heirarchy. I hope this changes, and that the "not dense enough" canard can't be used against a city looking to change its ways ever again.

Charlotte South Corridor:

Leave Something Out?

I have to take issue with reports like these. The reason being is that it seems like these folks are operating in this vacuum and aren't considering holistically what will happen in the future with these types of investments. This is part of the problem in much of the environmental community and one of the reasons why there needs to be greater education on the values of transit not just in transportation but its affects on development and land use. There seems to be this massive disconnect and I haven't seen anyone in the main stream environmental movement quite get it yet.

The World Resources Institute has issued a report that states BRT is better than LRT for the Purple Line. The question is how they came to this conclusion. It's littered with the usual objections to light rail with a few new ones for good measure. My favorite quip is the "we like light rail but not in this instance" which we've seen about a million times before. In the report, they even admit to thinking short term.

Major capital projects implemented in the near-term will shape the long-term future of transport in the region. WRI urges regional planners and other decision makers to consider current needs and concerns in the context of tomorrow’s transportation challenges, especially regarding traffic congestion, fuel costs, and climate change.

So what you're saying is that we should look at everything? Well you forgot a few things guys, like changes in development patterns, particulate matter and lifecycle costs in terms of construction. Replacing all the buses every 12 years is always good for the environment. Another annoying FTA related issue is the no build alternative. It's not really a no build but rather a basic bus service. Of course incremental change from a bus line to BRT is going to be more "cost effective". The other bus line doesn't even exist! Then there is this:

As illustrated in Figure 7, only the Medium and High Investment BRT alternatives reduce CO2 emissions, with 8,883 and 17,818 fewer metric tons per year, respectively, compared to the No Build scenario. All of the remaining alternatives increase annual emission levels compared to No Build.

Energy consumption from roadways decreases with introduction of LRT, but the resulting emissions reduction is not sufficient to counterbalance the effect caused by the high electricity CO2 emission factor. While we anticipate that this emission factor will decrease in the future due to increased use of renewable energy sources and likely GHG reduction legislation, these drivers have not been included in the AA/DEIS. Further consideration is given to the electricity emission factor in the following sections.

Again. The no build doesn't even exist, so how is the BRT line reducing emissions and LRT isn't? Well the truth is it is reducing emissions because the alternative isn't the no build but rather nothing at all. Both lines reduce GHGs in the transportation sense. What we don't know is exactly what the reductions in VMT are going to be from land use and whether the land use patterns will create more incentives to walk, creating even less car trips and development patterns that themselves save infrastructure and energy costs. Not to mention they say nothing about particulates from a single source of pollution versus multiple sources that spew along a whole corridor.

In all reality, the Purple Line should be a subway. Bringing it down to light rail is bad enough, but all the way down to bus rapid transit would be a wasted opportunity to change the corridor. But for once, could someone do an analysis that includes land use change, the issues of air pollution, the real lifecycle costs? This analysis shows how much affect the FTA policy has on what our future will look like, and that is upsetting. Let's stop leaving out the whole picture.

Euclid Corridor BRT Opens

The Euclid Corridor BRT opens this weekend in Cleveland making it the third true BRT line to launch in recent years (Orange Line and Eugene EMX). Expectations will be high, err low. Projected 2025 ridership stated in the Plain Dealer is 15,000. That's a far cry from the previous projections of 39,000 cited by the FTA. Given the amount of destinations and jobs on the line I doubt it will take long to get to 15,000.

They basically reconstructed the street and are running the same buses as the Eugene system. It's also another case of a project in the FTA process opening over 10 years after conception. I thought BRT was supposed to be cheaper and quicker to implement? Though if it started today, the project wouldn't even be funded under Ma Peters. It got a Medium Low in Cost-Effectiveness and cost $21 million per mile. I thought the reason for BRT projects was because they are more cost-effective. Basically what this proves is that the FTA doesn't want to spend money on projects that give transit its own ROW. No not painting lanes on the street, but a true separation from other traffic that makes it more effective. Today, its required to get a medium in CE as we've discussed before.

Those projects that do not currently have a rating of "medium" in cost-effectiveness would automatically be precluded from funding recommendation by the FTA, notwithstanding the merits of other criteria applicable to those projects.

This is part of the cutdown in projects that has been going on lately. It's recently dropped from 85 projects in the pipe before the 2005 "medium" enforcement to 2007. Not counting small starts, this year only has 31 projects in the New Starts report.

Lest you think that projects are rightly being cut, it should be noted that Denver's Southeast Corridor, Charlotte's South Corridor, the Los Angeles Orange Line, and the Minneapolis Hiawatha Line all had a Medium Low ratings. Those projects have all passed their projections yet would not have been funded under the current process. Anyone else tired of cost-effectiveness being used as a blunt object to bludgeon the alternatives that will truly get people into transit, including rail AND true BRT?

Let's see how this line goes. I still wish it would have been rail and electrified, but it's an improvement in the corridor, one that the FTA would not approve of these days.