Today's Heros

That would be the North Carolina House.

In a 77-40 vote Tuesday, the House gave preliminary approval to a local-option sales tax for bus and rail transit service, after turning back a move to let some of the money be spent for roads.

Turning back the tide is hard, but things like this begin to send a message.

One Dozen Per Million

Chris Leinberger has been hoofing it around the country pushing his idea of walkable urbanism and regionally significant walkable urban places*. Just today he got articles in Sacramento and Raleigh NC on his ideas. In Raleigh, they are thinking that if plans are followed through, it will be the end of sprawl. The skeptic in me says highly unlikely.

But i'm intrigued with how he came to the idea that every million people in population needs at least half a dozen regionally significant walkable urban places*

Leinberger said his study of metropolitan Washington, D.C., and Atlanta suggests that a city should have no more than a half-dozen walkable urban places per million people. Some of these will be downtown, some in inner-ring neighborhoods, and some in the suburbs, But what they have in common is their location at rail-transit stops, not on highways.

By his math, Raleigh should attempt to create two or three such places, in addition to downtown, by 2030, when the comprehensive plan anticipates the city will be home to 600,000 people.

These places should be on the rail or a streetcar corridor, which, he said, are permanent and attract investors, developers and upscale buyers. "I have never seen a dollar of real estate investment generated by a bus stop," Leinberger said.

If this is based off of DC, we need to start building a lot more monocentric rapid transit in our regions. This creates the ability to connect places that have different niches for the needs of the population. Not every walkable district is going to have everything you need, so they need to be connected with accessible transit. In Sacramento, there's more than enough room to build these significant places, but they need more transit.

According to Brookings Institution research, there should be eight to 12 regionally significant, walkable urban, transit-oriented places in the region. Today there are only three: downtown, midtown and Old Sacramento. The opportunity for locating and building five to nine additional walkable urban, transit-oriented places and building far more development in the existing three would be worth billions of dollars and would represent a more sustainable way of living.

*I wish he would define this more precisely.

Do We Have to Even Read It?

And so it begins again. They got tossed out of Charlotte and now are hunting transit again. Some of their suggestions, more roads, BRT, and telecommuting. Anyone wonder why I continue to be skeptical of BRT? Especially when folks who hate transit advocate for more of it. Here's my favorite paragraphs:

The regional planning and transit bureaucrats who created the latest Triangle transit plan weren't really trying to fashion transportation policy. They were trying to remake the region's economy and land-use patterns according to "Smart Growth" principles that are, in truth, reactionary. They envision urban employment cores, dense residential neighborhoods and rigid commuting patterns based around a 19th century technology, the train, that bear little relationship to reality.

While some individuals desire such a lifestyle, the vast majority of citizens, 82 percent by one recent estimate, prefer to live the American dream in a single-family home and travel when and where they want using their personal vehicles. Any transportation plan hostile to clear public preferences is doomed to fail, and to cost taxpayers a great deal in the attempt.

Haha didn't anyone tell these guys about Karl Benz in 1885 and his four stroke gas engine. You know, 3 years before Frank Sprague and the electric streetcar. I wonder how many times we have to go over this. But that last paragraph is telling. No citations of real studies or polls (like this one) and all preferences of his own. How come its so expensive to live in Walkable cities? I would venture to guess it is because there is so much demand that prices are being driven up by folks who have money that want this type of lifestyle, making it harder for those who don't to leave the the suburbs. Again, why should we subsidize his suburbia?

Framing Livable Communities: Density Terms

I guess we need to start a new series on Framing Livable Communities. Because of the intense press against density and transit, there are some things that need to be communicated differently. Today's instance is density and the need for the media to describe it as "packing people in". I might feel differently if we were setting up sardine tins like exists on the 30 and 38 buses, but density doesn't always mean Hong Kong just like suburbia doesn't always mean 1 unit per acre.

Not that this article from Raleigh Durham is a particularly bad one, but the headline "Raleigh Plan Picks Areas to Pack Growth" leads people to believe you're trying to force them to do something rather than giving alternatives to the single choice we currently have. We also know that focusing growth should be the true conservative point, due to the fact that actually saves money for cities and the people who live in them. Though it has been said that "density creates democrats". My hope is that when we make investments in our infrastructure including transit, that we make the decisions that save money for everyone and that includes smarter, denser growth. Growth that doesn't "pack us in".

State of NC Stepping Up

Today in the Charlotte Observer there was an article about a $1.6 Billion in State Funds to match local transportation efforts. It also authorizes all of the large regions to pass a sales tax if they so choose similar to the 1/2 cent sales tax that exists in Charlotte. But the best part about this is that it leaves decisions up to the localities.

The bill doesn't appropriate any money. It simply authorizes urban counties to adopt local taxes for transportation projects and authorizes creation of the Congestion Relief and Intermodal Transportation 21st Century Fund to provide money for an array of transportation uses. How it would be funded would be decided in another legislative session. But the bill offers Wake, Durham and Orange counties in the Triangle and Forsyth and Guilford in the Triad the opportunity to do what Charlotte has done.

"I just think it starts the framework for a comprehensive transportation plan for North Carolinians, giving them options for getting to work, shopping and recreation," said Carney. "It broadens our thinking for the 21st and 22nd century transportation options."

There's one other thing. Because the bill doesn't appropriate money, it leaves decision-making to local voters, Carney said. "This is about the public, not the legislature, deciding what is best.

This means we could see more money in North Carolina for transit options. With the Triangle looking at an intermodal plan, this could push money their way. And with improved federal funding hopefully under a new administration, Charlotte might be able to speed up their expansion given the extra availability of funds. Currently they are trying to move up the streetcar to 2013 from 2018.

CATS officials also have intentions of extending the light rail to University City by 2015 at an estimated cost of $750 million and building commuter rail to the Lake Norman area by 2012 for an estimated $261 million.
...

CATS chief executive Keith Parker said in March that CATS can't do all three projects at once without a new funding source.

Bills, Codes, and Engineering...News Update

The Colorado legislature looks like it will pass an eminent domain bill that will leave the ability to take property for parking lots but will not allow any other development on the land. The Rocky Mountain News has an editorial on the matter.

Dallas is looking to update its zoning code. This would enable more transit oriented development and better street design. In addition, the development at Las Colinas which will have 3 light rail stops on the new Orange Line, is really taking off.

The state of North Carolina is looking to create a fund for transit projects around the state that would provide a quarter of the capital cost for new high capacity projects. Also included are improvement funds for intercity rail and bus improvements.

Michigan Tech is going to open a new rail engineering school. This includes both freight and passenger rail. It's amazing but we've lost a lot of knowledge about how to engineer these systems over the years. Apparently we've also lost welding prowess. In an article in Der Spiegel engineers at Siemens describe their first foray into building light rail vehicles in the United States. They had to fly in 50 engineers from Munich with the skills needed:

Hauck knows what he's talking about. He runs German engineering giant Siemens' streetcar manufacturing plant in Sacramento. But when the German company showed up in the California capital more than two years ago with its plans to build trams there, it found little evidence of craft or even skill. Hauck couldn't find a single welder with the right skills for the job anywhere in the region.

Making meter-long welds across thin sheet metal without the car "bending like a banana," says Hauck, takes talent and sensitivity. More important, it takes good training. To provide that training, Siemens flew 50 welders from its Munich locomotive plant to California, where they spent six months retraining local welders. Now the Sacramento plant is up and running.

Hopefully this is a sign of growth in the industry.

Thinking Big in Raleigh-Durham

After a failed attempt at a regional rail system connecting Raleigh and Durham, the Triangle region has gone back to the drawing board and come up with 16 corridors that need transit. The local paper backs the idea because of success in Charlotte with their transit expansion which includes not only light rail, but express buses and increased local service. Recommendations will be coming soon on technology so we'll see what happens, but it sounds ambitious. According to the News and Observer.

The Triangle can afford to expand bus service and build new rail projects if local leaders make a "Charlotte level of effort," the head of a regional transit agency said Friday.

A new half-cent local sales tax could augment local and state transit funds to pay for 150 new buses in the next few years and launch more than $1 billion worth of capital projects by 2020, said David King, general manager of the Triangle Transit Authority.

News From the Other Side of the State

Probably a bit overshadowed by the transit tax ballot measure in Charlotte these last few days, Raleigh Durham poked its head above water again to discuss a possible new transit plan after the FTA mercilessly cut the initial one using our favorite cost effectiveness measure. The interesting thing about this is that the region is very polycentric and its travel patterns seem a bit abnormal to me for typical hub and spoke transit operations. However there should be a line that connects the two major cities. The article cites a possible commuter rail BRT combination, but we'll be watching for more information as it comes available.

In the Triangle, rising costs and low ridership forecasts forced TTA last year to shelve its quest to build a 28-mile track for trains that would run several times every hour, 18 hours a day, from Durham through Research Triangle Park to Raleigh.

But the advisory group has not ruled out making TTA's tracks the spine of a rail, bus and streetcar network that could stretch across the region and into neighboring counties.