Podcast: Live from Rail~Volution

At Rail~Volution we recorded a podcast in front of a live audience.  We talked with Catherine Cuellar of Dallas about the arts district and her love of transportation alternatives as well as Dave Unsworth about the new Portland bridge which doesn't allow cars along with a whole host of other transit projects.  Hope you enjoy it.

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. 

New Siemens S70 LRV Debut in Salt Lake

We discussed these bad boys when the order was put in back in 2008. The thing I find interesting about this version of the S70 is that they are snout nosed and less archy on the ends than the new Portland and San Diego vehicles. This apparently was so that they could continue to run four car trains.

Here's a photo of Portland's new LRVs (with some older)


via Thomas Le Ngo on Flickr

Then the new Salt Lake City version

via Transit in Utah

I think I actually like them better. If anyone in Utah gets some photos shoot em over and we'll post them.

Monday Night Notes

Is a new business model emerging for merchants and park n ride lots?
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A drive thru in Portland apologizes after an employee refuses service to a cyclist, discusses possible cycle through lanes.
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GE is going to get some business in Africa for its locomotives
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GHG emissions in China are a quarter of the US emissions per capita.
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It's kind of annoying when cities that weren't paying into the regional transit agency want in when there is commuter rail. Cities in Texas seem to like to do this.

But most Denton County cities, including Lake Dallas, rejected membership and the sales tax requirement. When DCTA offered those cities a second chance at membership in 2006, only Shady Shores and Corinth talked seriously about buying in.

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Does the Northeast Corridor need an EIS to get ARRA funds?

Bus LOS

I thought this comment by Engineer Scotty over at Portland Transport was quite adroit.

Imagine if a transit agency acted like (and had the political and financial resources to do so) ODOT or WDOT. There would be "bus levels of service", ranging from A to F or so, allocated as follows:

Level A: Everyone can sit where they want.
Level B: Passengers have to occasionally say "excuse me" as they walk past other (seated) passengers while boarding or disembarking.
Level C: Someone has to sit next to a stranger, without an intervening empty seat.
Level D: Passengers have to look real hard to find the few empty seats that are remaining; the aisle may occasionally be blocked.
Level E: The bus is SRO.
Level F: The bus is crushloaded.

Any level of service below C would be considered an unacceptable level of service, and would cause planners to add additional buses to the route. But since this is the DOT thinking, they would be adding buses ALL THROUGHOUT THE DAY, not just during the AM and PM rush.

It says a lot, I think, that transit agencies are frequently encouraged to increase usage of existing services (i.e. add congestion), but DOTs are permitted to try and build their way out of it.

Similarly, Jarrett made a comment about how if all your favorite restaurants were empty, you'd likely not have a restaurant to eat at anymore. The ensuing comments are likely to be of interest.

Head to Head

Check out this time lapse transit line video. Atlanta was way ahead...



via @ttpolitic

Network Expansion

New Orleans is looking to build three new lines while Portland has approved a reference plan for a streetcar network. The catch, New Orleans is looking for TIGER money, which is about as scarce as, well, Tigers in the United States. All of these proposals hinge on money. What's new?

Independence Day Notes

Links and ink:

I really like the idea of setting a baseline for ridership and road usage so you can use it for performance measures later. I hope that is what they are looking at. It might also be illuminating to see regions compared to each other. I hope they would take pedestrian and bike counts as well.
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The draft streetcar network plan is out in Portland. Looks pretty extensive.
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New Jersey is expanding the transit hub tax credit to include industrial areas that use rail access.
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Smart Growth is killing cities!!! Or rather, it's more NIMBYs. Not that I can't blame them, we don't really need more high end housing in this region do we? Considering almost all of it is high end. And looking at it from a tax perspective, building four houses that are 250,000 versus a million dollar single house brings in the same taxes in property, but greater taxes in local services such as restaurants and groceries. Has anyone ever looked at those numbers?
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This is cool. Making subways rainproof FTW.
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This could bring transit sexy back.
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Colorado Railcar reincarnated?
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More NIMBY articles! This time on the peninsula HSR version. My favorite quote:

Whatever option is chosen, peninsula residents simply want a transparent process that considers their opinions, said Nadia Naik of Palo Alto, who helped form a citizens' group, Californians Advocating for Responsible Rail Design. "That would give us tremendous peace of mind," Naik said. "Nobody's done that. We get a lot of, 'Oh, you're just 50 people who complain.'"

Is it really 50?

Silo X: Single Project vs. Complete System

There's been a lot of talk over this study today. It comes at a perfect time for journalists to skim the abstract and form their own conclusions before actually digging in to the details. What the study does though is look into the life cycle costs of different transportation modes. As Jebediah states in his post:

What’s totally missing in their “complete” estimates for these various transportation modes are the virtuous effects of rail: creating denser communities where people tend to walk more, own fewer cars, live in smaller abodes, and spend less time stuck in traffic jams.

Where could we get such a look into that community? Why Portland of course where they began preliminary calculations of these things in a basic way for transportation and building emissions.

This can and has been replicated (pdf pg 53) in other places such as Over the Rhine in Cincinnati. Hopefully other places will look holistically at the benefits of the whole package instead of just these news hopping studies that continue silo thinking. It is certainly good to look over the life of projects, but as mentioned, it's only the life cycle of that individual transportation project and nothing else related.

Links for Night Owls

I often wonder what proponents of BRT mean when they say BRT. Apparently so will people in Minneapolis.
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I haven't quite gotten my head around Yonah's funding idea but check it out.
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Shocker! Only 17% of downtown shoppers drive to San Francisco. Now can we stop playing the car game?
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Tucson orders 7 cars from Oregon Iron Works. More American Made Streetcars! Boise might have an order in soon too.
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Apparently the recession hasn't beaten down Charlotte's LRT too much. It might be that lunch crowd I saw when I was there.

Triple Standards for Transit

One wonders why people must always be forced to vote for light rail but not roads. But yet the Columbian is editorializing just that and being very blatant about it:

Whatever the answer, a more general light-rail question should be presented to Vancouver voters, to cover all bases. There is no need for a vote on the new bridge itself (transportation infrastructure routinely is decided by transportation officials) or tolls (voters generally don't vote on user fees), but the light rail question is different. As we editorialized on Feb. 24, "Light-rail critics have complained loudly — and correctly — that people should be allowed to vote on the matter."

Really? Why is light rail different? Why shouldn't transportation officials be allowed to decide about this transportation infrastructure? And why are critics the only reason to vote? I'm sure there are plenty of critics of the CRC. Why not let them vote as well if you really believe in such deep democracy. The answer is that the Columbian doesn't believe in anything except for the George Will doctrine. If its not a car, its not transportation.

Rumor Mill

Fred Hanson to Adelaide? Are they going for a huge light rail expansion? What's up with transit agency heads leaving lately? Simonetta from Phoenix, Marsalla from Denver, Hanson from Portland...

Update: Just an advisory role. But now there's also word that Keith Parker of Charlotte might head to San Antonio. Magical jumping CEOs. Nat Ford, you next?

Portland Unveils First American Made Modern Streetcar

Portland Transport has the skinny with photos and a video. With the recent passage of the Eastside Extension, it looks as if there will be a lot more of these coming. I've also heard rumors that Tuscon could order from OIW as well.

As a side note but not entirely unrelated, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on how places like Portland and Austin are hitting a mid-life crisis. They are getting such a huge influx of past college folks that there just aren't enough jobs for them. But why are people moving there? What makes these places cool?

Mayor Adams Will Ditch Car

Following Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, Sam Adams has said that he will ditch the car for a month and go on bike and transit.

We mentioned to Adams that the 71-year-old Bates was going even further: The Berkley mayor has traded in his 2001 Volvo for a transit pass and walking shoes. "Seriously?" Adams said. "He's really doing that? No driving at all?" None.

Adams paused, obviously feeling out-maneuvered in the race to become America's greenest mayor. "How big is Berkeley?" he asked. "Because Portland is 143 square miles?"With a chuckle, he relented. "OK," he said, "I'll take his challenge for one month."

Wha?! Who in their right mind would take that challenge? Oh perhaps someone who is not a member of the Emerald Aristocracy. Many people here in San Francisco talk a green game, but can they back it up? Plug in hybrids aren't going to cut it in this race. You gotta do more.

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?

Train Operators Have Mental Boundaries Too

The people commit suicide via train are selfish and a**holes. They do it to Caltrain operators here in the bay area all the time. If you feel your life is so awful that you want to end it, do it on your own and don't get anyone else's mind involved. Really it should never be that bad but that is another topic of discussion. I really feel for the drivers that can do nothing but watch. It's sickening and there should be a campaign against it so that people who do contemplate it might think about the people they are hurting while trying to end thier own pain.

Milwaukie Max Gets into PE

I hope that means that the New Starts Report lists are coming out soon. Can't wait for that data mine. Makes me wonder what other lines made it into Preliminary Engineering. Here's an interesting look though into what happens when transit agencies submit to the FTA.

In applying for preliminary engineering, TriMet sent the transit administration a six-foot stack of documents on the project.

What a waste of paper. I'm sure everyone has a copy.

Houston's Rail Cars Overworked

This was the same story I heard with the first Portland Streetcars. They were overworked but luckily the Skoda models were hardy and didn't break down much. But deferred maintenance to keep people from overcrowding the trains will strain the vehicles eventually. Though the Siemens cars will have to continue to work hard until the new CAF cars get there.

People Love the Trains

The new Siemens SD70s in Portland are popular. And they haven't carried a revenue passenger yet.

Rainy Saturday Links

Looks like planning for the streetcar and future fixed guideway transit is in the works for Portland. You can find more info here at Metro's site.
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More proof that the Republicans are morons and have devolved to a party that just tries to win the news cycle. The cries that Harry Reid wants HSR to Vegas to get all the money is just ridiculous and is unfounded. Give me a break guys. Grasping at straws. And the fact that the media is reporting this dreck is disgusting. Yonah has more info, and it shows what kind of junk we'll have to fight back against. Good thing we've had some good training against the likes of O'Toole, Cox and the lot. Quote of the day from the LA Times...

(Dem Rep. David) Obey also took issue with Republicans' efforts to portray the rail funding as an earmark. "The worst thing that people can do in this town is to believe their own baloney," he said. Noting that funding decisions will be made by the Department of Transportation, he added, "The last time I looked, the new Cabinet secretary was a Republican."

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Bills are expected to go through the Texas legislature soon that would allow Dallas - Ft. Worth to have a vote to build a regional rail network.
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Salt Lake City is looking to use redevelopment districts to help pay for the streetcar. I think consultants and locals are not thinking outside the box on funding. This seems to be the first answer they come up with, as we saw in Charlotte recently. Consultants, stop being so boring!!!
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An interesting story about streetcars that once ran in Jamaica.