Podcast: Discussing San Antonio Transportation

This week on the podcast we're joined by Trish Wallace and Jillian Harris of the San Antonio Transportation Department to talk about the cities current past and current plans for mobility.

Anti-Sprawl Transit Chief?

Former Charlotte transit chief Keith Parker has pushed San Antonio towards Streetcar and BRT faster than anywhere else I've seen in the last few years.  He had just moved in to that position back in 2009.  According to the Express News, he hopes to have lines under construction by January of 2012.

The best part isn't the streetcar push though, it's that they are taking funding to spend on urban projects that would have been spent in unincorporated parts of the county.  

“Removing $55 million from the county,” he [opponent] said, “diminishes our ability to provide infrastructure services in unincorporated areas of the county.”

For those of you not familiar with Texas land use issues, unincorporated areas generally have no zoning restrictions and very little subdivision restrictions.  Regions like Houston have areas outside the city limits that form Municipal Utility Districts (MUDs) to provide water and sewer infrastructure but ultimately they end up sucking a lot of transportation funding away from cities given their peripheral nature. To be fair, I grew up in a place that was once a MUD and then annexed by Houston.  It was well planned for a burb but most of them are not master planned communities that end up with 65,000 people.

In planning school one year we had class t-shirts that said "In the ETJ, no one can hear you scream".  The extra territorial jurisdiction is a part of the county which the city can't zone but can annex, meaning you're going to get the worst sprawl you've ever seen from those parts of the region.  So with this quote I was quite happy to hear that the county wasn't going to get sprawl generating funds and that it quite possibly could be used for a streetcar.

Jim Bowie & Davy Crockett Would Ride

San Antonio leaders are very optimistic in saying they will have streetcars in three years. And that would put Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio ahead of Austin in the Transit Space Race.

Henry Muñoz, VIA Metropolitan Transit’s board chairman, said he expects the agency to break ground in two or three years and will announce in the next month a citizens advisory committee to help guide the creation of a starter streetcar system.

Linkfest: A Matter of Fact

Apparently concrete ties are better than wooden ones.
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CATS Cheif Keith Parker is leaving Charlotte for San Antonio (Why?). I wonder if its because they are going to do some rail building.
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Can high speed rail really be called transit? And if not, is the transbay terminal a multimodal transit hub? Just a thought.
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He not only lied about the bike numbers in his recent Newsweek column, he also doubled the cost in his head of the California HSR line. Apparently facts don't matter to George "Jean Shorts" Will.

Remember the Alamo

In the back of my mind, this seems like a really bad idea. Should I have a reason not to be skeptical?

The shocker last night wasn't so much that a local toll-road official will take over as chairman of VIA Metropolitan Transit.

It had more to do with a revelation that behind-the-scene talks have drifted toward the possibility of merging the toll and bus agencies into a super agency. The Alamo Regional Mobility Authority, which is banking on toll-road plans but can pretty much do any type of transportation project, recently outlined an idea to create an overarching Multi-Modal Transportation Finance System.

With it, VIA and the RMA would combine to maximize financing capacity while allowing each agency to operate independently, says the RMA document, which was prepared for a city-county transportation task force.

This might be the first shot in a long Texas war that would attempt to combine these recently created mobility authorities with local transit agencies. Not something that is unfamiliar so close to the Alamo. My fear is a region wide transportation authority focused on toll roads will give suburban jurisdictions too much clout over all transportation and leave the more urban areas hanging out to dry. Specifically, Austin's outside pols have been trying to take away Capital Metro's sales tax for as long as anyone can remember. We'll have to watch and see what happens, but color me skeptical.

Doesn't Seem Like a Problem to Me

From the San Antonio Express News Transport Blog:

President-elect Barack Obama's call for sweeping infrastructure investments to put 2.5 million people to work has experts debating just what and how much government should do.

One problem, for some, is that toll roads and privatization could get left behind.

Oh noes! We wouldn't want that. I mean the whole idea of toll roads and privatization is getting money from the government right?

San Antonio Revs Up Rail Again

After the fall of the 2000 San Antonio light rail vote, I didn't think that I would ever see this again. Unlike Austin which was close, the San Antonio vote was kind of a blowout for the opposition. But with gas prices up, advocates are seeing a chance to build transit networks again. However, this seems to be a play out of the Austin playbook. Commuter rail first.

There's a bit of a problem though, If Austin's commuter line skirts downtown and comes in on the edge, this line doesn't even come into San Antonio's downtown. If this is what is envisioned, it would be a horrible idea. I've said this before and I'll say it again, just because there are tracks, doesn't mean passenger rail should be on them. I wish we would stop being cheap about infrastructure. Go where the people want to go. Below the newspaper cutout, is a map of the rail line and the main part of the Riverwalk downtown. You can see how far and how many obstacles separate the line from the people.

Rail From the Dead

It's been a long time since the year 2000, but we're starting to see some deja vu and some longer range thinking. Here comes the rail plan revival train.

1. San Antonio. The Express News has an editorial discussing bringing light rail back to the polls.

A proposal, no matter how thoroughly defeated at the polls, is likely to resurface when the timing is right. Is the timing right for light rail in Bexar County? County Judge Nelson Wolff thinks it is.Announcing his goal to promote light rail during a recent event marking the start of ozone season, Wolff said the system would help the area meet tougher environmental standards imposed by the federal government, the Express-News reported. The new standards mean the region, which barely avoided costly sanctions for ground-level ozone pollution last year, may not be so lucky in 2010, when regulators compile their new list of "bad air" cities.In politics, there is no such thing as a dead issue.

2. Norman Oklahoma. They are trying to steal the Supersonics. Not Cool. That might give them an opportunity to build a rail line. Cool. Every story has two sides, this one just might end up in alternative transportation. Though the article says light rail, its highly doubtful thats what they mean when they say they will look at using existing tracks.

Collins, speaking to a Norman Chamber of Commerce legislative breakfast Friday, said he was able to raise the issue of light rail with the owners of the Seattle SuperSonics. He said they seemed interested in promoting rail using existing lines and stations.