Streetcar Post

There's an interesting post at Steve Munro's site on some things that have happened in Toronto over the years. Also, Mayor Becker in Salt Lake City talks about getting funding for the Sugar House Streetcar and a downtown network on a local NPR station.

Creative People Walking to Bowl

When do trends or catch phrases end? Does a good background idea like the Creative Class ever just go bad? What does this mean for Walkable Urbanism or Bowling Alone? Folks like Richard Florida, Chris Leinberger and Robert Putnam build up names for themselves around a central theme. The theme must be a good idea at some point, and why if it was so catching before, does something fade or not fade?

I think you have to look at the underlying facts and basic premises of it all. At the most basic level, every city has a creative class, but at what point does being a really lame city hurt you and the generation of big ideas? To me all of these folks have something in common in that they are trying to figure out why there are some places that people like to live more than others. But the boiled down answers aren't so simple as they make them out to be. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

Connection Links

The most interesting finds of the day:

Train station revival in Redlands. Wonder if ESRI has anything to do with this...
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Peter Calthorpe is working in Toronto along the Subway extensions
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Streetcar expansion in the Big Easy?
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After the rocky start of the Music City Star Commuter Rail line, I'm really really surprised at this possible commuter rail expansion. It's in the long range plan but I thought long range meant 50 years.
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I love love love when I can go on a trip and not set foot inside a taxi. Fortunately a lot more cities are connecting their airports to downtown with transit. I do wish more places would think harder about the long term implications of not having a station in the terminal such as in Dallas or Phoenix. Yeah it meant some tunneling but it makes things so much easier! I know there are a lot of people that hate the BART to the airport connection, but I love it and use it all the time. If you need to charge me more, go for it. USA Today runs the story on rail from airports.

Streetcars in New York? Ask JSK

A visit to exchange ideas could possibly spark the New York Streetcar renaissance. Janette Sadik-Kahn will visit the city to talk about bikes and the big changes in New York but might come away excited about streetcars, something Toronto never left behind.

Janette Sadik-Khan, Commissioner of Transportation of the City of New York, is in Toronto tomorrow to celebrate Earth Day and to see a Toronto icon that she wants to bring back to the Big Apple: the streetcar. “I’m very jazzed about my visit,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said today from her New York office. “The streetcar program is something that I’m looking at here. We threw away our streetcars, and you kept them. I think it’s a great economic development tool.”

I don't think that New York should adopt the streetcar model of Toronto exactly. For one thing the single cars are more like buses instead of the sleeker more comfortable european trams that can be of greater size due to modular designs. You would lose out on some of the benefits of greater capacity and energy usage. Toronto is currently looking to replace the existing vehicles so we'll probably see them make the switch soon as well. Also it's likely that a dedicated lane for streetcars will be necessary to make the lines even more efficient, something Toronto is starting to do.

Perhaps we'll see some sort of study soon. And perhaps New York can look to some of Scott Bernstein's ideas on using funding from electric companies to bring them to scale. Not everywhere, but on a few key routes that could use the capacity.

Transit Not Roads

Lots of editorials coming out discussing the issue of roads and transit in the stimulus package. Take a look at a few on each side. It doesn't surprise me Atlanta is so far behind, and falling faster. They have editorial page people like this guy. But there are folks that get it. Such as local writers from PIRG and at the *Toronto Star* (updated: err Globe and Mail).

New Poll: Worst Rail Project in Planning

Thanks for all the input. It seems like we have a few projects that are pretty bad. Again I'm not going to let you choose more than one. You have to choose what you think is the worst. So here are the contestants based on feedback. I added in two specifically nefarious BRT projects as well.

BART to San Jose
NJ Access to the Regions Core
LIRR East Side Access Project
San Francisco Central Subway
Montreal Train de l'est
LA Gold Line to Montclair
Toronto Spadina Extension
NY Subway 7 Line Extension
Metro to Dulles (Silver Line)
MBTA BRT Silver Line Phase 3
US 36 Denver BRT
Miami Metrorail North
Anacostia Streetcar

So those are the list. Usual week for voting applies. Vote for Other if there is a project not listed.

Rising Property Value Time Frame

Hamilton, just outside of Toronto, is expecting increases in property value from light rail that would be in the new Toronto long range plan.

It will rise again soon, suggested a real estate report yesterday. Older properties near King, Main and James streets will gain the most in value if Hamilton gets light rapid transit, as city staff hope. So says the Vancouver-based Real Estate Investment Network, which looked at the housing value added by big transportation projects in Hamilton and Kitchener.

Study co-author Don Campbell says the value of homes within 800 metres of new rapid transit or GO stations will rise 15 to 20 per cent more than homes in non-transit areas. He's excited by the prospect.

Somewhere in the article they discuss that it will take a year, but I'm not sure if that is believable. I often wonder with studies like this what the real time frame is. Such a quick time frame doesn't seem reasonable while a long time frame seems so far off it might just seem like regular increase. They also say that there is a price premium on living near highways.

But he said property near the Red Hill Valley Parkway will see real estate increases in the years ahead. Being one to three kilometres from easy highway access can give you a 10 to 12 per cent premium on your home's value, he said. Transportation-related premiums -- which insulate homeowners from market downturns -- appear a year after a project is done, he added.

Though I wonder how much that will change with gas prices. In a PBS special that is going to air soon, they interview a family who are spending over $1,000 a month on gas because they live so far away. Those housing prices have to reflect that truth. As my colleague Scott Bernstein says, we need to build cities that isolate citizens from these peaks and valleys of cost. I believe the biggest way to do that is to invest in sustainable transportation.

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?

An Investment

Annually the New Starts program funds about $1.7 billion in ongoing projects around the country. Chump change. Check out Public Transit in Ottawa. They are discussing a $4 billion dollar investment in the city. $425 billion is the adjusted cost of the federal highway system. Certainly would be higher today because land costs much more. However look at the investment in Toronto, Canada.

Toronto is planning a $55 billion dollar transit investment. Our cities are hardly discussing a few billion per region in transit over the next 20 years, yet Toronto is planning a steady $2.2 billion a year for 25 years. Some of it is quite controversial such as an east west subway line, but its interesting that they are talking about a multi-year investment for a single city that is larger than the federal share of funds for all cities in the United States.

NYT Streetcar Article Makes Impression

After articles in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today about streetcars didn't generate a lot of buzz, the NY Times article rocketed up to the 3rd most emailed article on NYTimes.com at one point yesterday. This was brought to my attention by Frank over at Orphan Road.

But in the last few days, that one article set off a flurry of streetcar articles around the country.

Los Angeles - Downtown business organization sets up Streetcar Non Profit.

Over its first eighteen months, LA Streetcar, Inc., would look to raise just under $400,000. The money would be used to advocate and coordinate the streetcar effort.

Pasadena - An editorial in the town paper on beginning to consider streetcars

And the thing about such momentum is that streetcar building is so much simpler than other kinds of transit, with tracks that don't require deep digging, that city blocks are just closed down to auto traffic for a few weeks. And Seattle's line was up and running in December of last year just four years from the time it was conceived. That's unheard of in the transit world.

Minneapolis - The city has a streetcar network plan, they look towards Seattle and Portland for ideas. Also check out this "new to me" blog Twin Cities Streets for People.

An investment blog, Common Census, has an interest in the investment opportunities around streetcars. This is the first time I've seen this outside of the transit blogosphere.

As major cities look to build new streetcar systems and extend additional lines, investors should be aware of the potential opportunities these new public transportation lines could bring.

Treehugger makes the point about dedicated right of ways and calls Randall O'Toole full of %$!*

I would politely suggest that Mr. O'Toole is full of crap- I live in a streetcar city and the lines do not all go downtown, they do connect with the subway which does, but are used to go in all directions by all kinds of people. Drivers hate them (they are hard to pass and definitely slow down automobile traffic) but riders love them. When dedicated rights-of-way go in, they become fast, dependable and have huge capacity.

The Chronicle of Higher Education makes the case that streetcars and transit in general are good for student populations and school coffers.

And while streetcars can save hundreds of dollars a year in commuting costs for students and others, the lines save millions for universities that would otherwise have far more serious parking problems — and many more costly garages and space-hogging lots.

Bombardier's Toronto Streetcar Bid Implodes

Because of technical specifications where the vehicles wouldn't be able to take some of the tight turns on the Toronto system, the bids have all been thrown out and will be put out again.

Bombardier, the presumed front-runner to supply new low-floor streetcars for Toronto, has failed to prove its vehicles can handle some of the tight turns on the city’s narrow tracks, the Toronto Transit Commission announced late yesterday.

As a result, the Montreal-based company’s proposal for the $1.25-billion project has been rejected and the bid process to find a company to build an accessible fleet of new streetcars has collapsed.

Part of the problem is Toronto uses a wider gauge. One of the rumors is that using standard gauge would have allowed locomotives into the city center but they would not have been able to negotiate the curves that caused the failure of Bombardier to comply with the technical standards.

Steve Munroe will have more.

People Are Using the T Word!

Paul Krugman of the New York Times is blogging transit. Did he use the T word? Really? In the first post he discusses three different cities.

Atlanta is the poster child for sprawl, and as a result it has hardly any alternatives to cars: 89 percent of workers drive; less than 4 percent take public transit.

Boston is an older city, with an extensive transit system from the days when most people didn’t have cars. Even so, 79 percent of the labor force drives to work, but 11 percent do take public transit.

And then there’s Toronto. It’s still more auto-centered than not — but 22 percent of workers take public transit.

The thing about Toronto, they never got rid of their streetcars. I wonder how much that has to do with their ability to keep transit numbers up. Now they are off on a light rail expansion to fill in some gaps.

You can read some more thoughts on Krugman's posts here(Bellows), here(Yglesias), here(City Comforts), and (BT). Are things starting to change in the US? Are people actually starting to discuss land use and transportation? Frank at Orphan Road covers this as well:

I've been ranting for a while now about the connection between land use patterns and energy consumption, but for a whle it seemed like shouting into the wind, especially as national politicians talked about how some magic pill like ethanol was going to solve all our problems. Lately, though, it seems like the connection between land use, public transit, energy consumption and national security is finally starting to gel in people's minds.

I hope you're right.

Increasing Value

In Toronto a study recently completed posits that with the completion of the Spadina Line expansion, land costs will have risen 20%. I hope they are doing something to capture some of that increased value. The Star reports.

"In the future, these areas will outperform the rest of the region. If the market goes up everywhere, these areas will increase by 10 to 20 per cent or more. If values in the GTA drop, these will drop by 10to 20 per cent less," forecasts Campbell.

Campbell said he doesn't own property in the area, but will be looking this week for multi-residential units as an investment.

Access to transportation is just one of many real estate criteria used to determine value, but it is becoming increasingly important as highways grow more congested and gas prices increase.

The Big Announcement

And it's out. Toronto is "doing the deal" as my college track coach Bubba would say. This is a major step forward and announces that they aren't going to sit on their laurels. $6 billion and 120 km (75 miles) of rail. Should Toronto be a part of the Space Race?

Toronto Expansion Soon

I know its not in the US but Toronto has a rather large streetcar network and soon they are going to be announcing something big. A few billion dollars for a real light rail system. Stay Tuned.

Update: Looks like a $6 Billion Dollar Plan for Reserved Guideway Rail Transit. More details to come...