Grape Flavors

Governor O'Malley will choose LRT for both the Red and Purple lines tomorrow which has been an awaited decision for a long time. I hope that the Red line will not be another stand alone line like the green line and the existing LRT line. Not being able to share equipment and operating a single line with shops etc for each line in the system seems wasteful to me. Honestly both of these lines should be Metro subway lines, unfortunately these days all we do is look at the cost first and long term benefits and value last. Such is life I guess.

Energy Question

So I've been thinking a lot about the BRT report and comments on the (edited from CCT: Purple Line) in this post. The WRI study states that BRT is better for reductions in GHGs than LRT because LRT comes from dirty sources such as coal. Ok, I'll bite. Here's Greg Fuhs (from WRI) very fair comment at the end of my last post:

What we (and MTA) are saying is that by building a medium or high investment BRT system in the corridor, this would reduce GHG emissions from current levels by getting more people out of single vehicles and moving them more efficiently along the corridor than is currently the case. The significant fuel savings from this system would lead to the reduced GHG levels.

The reason light rail would increase GHG emissions over No Build is due to the electricity source, which for this region is primarily coal-fired power plants. While people would leave their cars and move more efficiently along the corridor with light rail, the coal plant emissions generated to produce the electricity required for the Purple Line would exceed the emissions savings from getting people out of their cars.

Now I understand this argument, but I have to dive in a little deeper. I'm wondering if the following thought is true. If you build an electric system, bus or rail, more electricity has to be produced during peak periods where the rail line is more efficient than the buses burning diesel. At the same time, during the off-peak, does the powerplant have to produce extra power or does that energy already exist in the grid.

I've heard ideas about the power grid benefitting from off peak power usage because the plant was going to run no matter what, but I'm wondering if the GHG's are already being produced, therefor any other emissions such as those from the bus are on top of what already existed from the power plant whether the light rail line was there or not. If this were the case, doesn't that reduce the emissions factor of the LRVs because the emissions are already out there from the coal plant? Does anyone know the answer to this or other ideas?

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.

Extortion in Virginia

This is rich. Apparently Norfolk State University signed a deal a few years ago that would allow light rail to run through campus. A few years later new leadership has moved into the presidents mansion on campus and apparently doesn't like the idea. Instead of going with the original agreement, the University is resorting to extortion.

Norfolk State University wants the city to purchase its president’s home and build a parking deck near campus. The requests are part of a wish list submitted to the city in a letter dated March 26. They are some of the most expensive ideas offered by NSU to resolve an impasse with the city and Hampton Roads Transit over the light rail line under construction next to the campus. No price tags are available for the university’s proposals. However, city officials said the items are not in the project’s $232.1 million budget.

But good for the Mayor, he's not buying it.

Norfolk Mayor Paul Fraim said he wouldn’t support the request under any circumstances. “I don’t think we could use public dollars for that purpose,” he said.

It seems recently that there have been a lot of anti-transit campus sentiment. The purple line in Maryland comes to mind, worried about vibrations through campus from light rail and most recently the dumbfounding move by the University of Minnesota who didn't get their tunnel through campus due to our favorite cost effectiveness measure. Now they want a rerouting that would kill the line's federal funding. Something tells me that these folks know nothing about the benefits of a line through campus for students. All over the country there are college campuses that thrive on transit connections. Unfortunately these situations above will have to be forced.