Ben Wear Can't Have It Both Ways

Ben Wear has no right to complain about gas prices when he continually harps on Capital Metro and promotes bigger toll roads. Given the state of the world, gas prices are only going to get higher. Something needs to be done about transportation and urban form in Austin if folks there are really going to address this issue. However constant Nimbyism by groups like ANC and rampant misinformation about the benefits of transit from road warriors like Wear's friend Jim Skaggs keep Austin in transportation limbo.

Its hard for me to take his 'poor me' shtick seriously when he rails against alternatives to his plight. In fact, it makes me wonder if he actually knows what the heck he is talking about. If not rail or transit, then how is he going to reduce the cost of transportation. Is it more wars? It certainly isn't with toll roads or hybrid technology. A recent publication by the Brookings Institute and the Center for Transit Oriented Development states that families who live in transit rich neighborhoods pay less than 10% of their incomes on transportation. This doesn't mean they stop driving, it just means they are less dependent on the car for every life movement. In sprawling areas, this cost escalates to 25%. For a family making $35,000 that is over $5000 back in their pockets each year. That's a real tax break for working families that could be created by investments in transportation alternatives. His Prius solution is only a savings of $1560, but that could be negated if toll roads continue to proliferate. Also not included is the cost of auto ownership in general.

So if Austin is going to have an honest discussion about issues facing the region including affordability, then there needs to be more information and action on alternatives to the automobile. Complaining about gas prices just doesn't tear at my heartstrings anymore, because Mr. Wear like many others, have dug their own hole.

IPod as the Great Transit Equalizer

It’s funny but I think the advertisements for Apple’s IPod are fairly accurate. Especially in San Francisco you see silhouettes of people and these white lines hanging from their ears all over the place, whether its on the sidewalk, bus or train. But it strikes me that the IPod should also be known as the great transit equalizer. When it came to riding in your car you had a cd or tape case where you could choose from all the music you had, or at least what you had in your case. In order to do that on transit one would have to lug around their collection with them.

Now with the IPod, we can have thousands of songs in a device that is the same size of our wallet, allowing us to listen to whatever we want to, whenever we want to. But while the IPod can be hooked up to the car, it seems to be more useful from a transportation standpoint to walkable transit oriented neighborhoods. When you get out of a car the radio turns off or there is a tape transition, but when you leave a train or bus, the music continues on kind of like a soundtrack to your life.

In my opinion, it’s this soundtrack quality that can give transit a bonus versus the car. There are many songs that if I play them in my car they bring back memories. Specific places on a road from Austin to Houston when I would drive home for Christmas or Thanksgiving are imagined in my head when I listen to the particular song I like to play on that stretch of road. Since I had a CD changer in my trunk and not the front deck I would even pull the car over to switch CDs if the one I wanted for that certain section of road was not available in the changer.

Now I’m finding that I’m having similar experiences with transit and my Ipod. However instead of just in the car, I have it for walking around the city, places along bus routes and inside of department stores. It even allows me to drown out the awful music at say the Gap or other places where they try to match the brand with music types. Well what if I want to shop in the Gap or Target listening to some metal or opera? They wouldn’t play those over the speakers but with the great equalizer we can.

There might be some drawbacks including awareness of your surroundings that might lead to some unfortunate altercations with automobiles or with the less desirable and under discussed elements of city life. There is always an issue of being social as well; shutting people out by just having headphones on is easy. But if anything, the great equalizer is incredibly more social than say an automobile. People in their own pods of space cut off from having to deal with social situations has led to rises in the instances of road rage however I’ve never heard of anything called Pod Rage. It might exist but from what I’ve seen, people are generally passive when bumped into with their IPod versus people bumped into who don’t have one on.

There is a serious issue that should be discussed as well with regards to hearing though. I know I’m guilty of listening to my IPod much louder than I should if I’m in a subway to drown out the external noise. However this could lead to long term hearing damage and such is said your eardrums are like lobsters, once their cooked there is no going back. I’m thinking about whether I should get noise canceling headphones or just read with earplugs which might be a soundtrack setback.

But with all that being said, I see the Ipod and MP3 players in general as a great transportation equalizer. You can create a soundtrack of songs you like but now it won’t apply to just your car but rather memories and experiences of life in general.

Junk in the East Bay

A bad idea. Why? Because if they wanted to make bus service better they should have just done it. There was an article in the Berkeley Daily Planet discussing why it's a bad idea. I've condensed the points below:

1. The EIR even says there will be a low change from automobile drivers to transit riders
2. It provides no energy consumption reduction
3. Will poach riders from BART
4. It keeps advertising BRT as "rail like" even though its not.
5. The EIR doesn't address the impact of 51 buses vs light rail on greenhouse gases

I don't agree with him that parking is such a big deal. It's not free folks. I also think that taking a lane for transit is good. Finally cars will play second best to transit.

This is enough to just be ridiculous. I don't know why folks like the Sierra Club or TALC are supporting this. There is no good reason to other than to give up on your environmental principles for transit mode that is hemorrhaging riders in the third world. Are we serious in this country about carbon? Are we serious about global warming? This is a huge waste of money. This is a reason why the East Bay will always be second rate. They will always play second fiddle to San Francisco. The poor shouldn't be relegated to second rate transit.

If they were smart about it they could do a rapid streetcar with passing lanes at stations that allow 1o minute headways. The streetcars would have their own lanes and attract way more riders and developement. The travel times would be better as well attracting even more riders on a smooth ride.

Transit Networks & Highwaymen

It seems these days that the folks from the Road cult are squealing pretty loud. I think they are afraid that they will be swept away by the transit space race. While that more than likely will never happen in my lifetime, one has to wonder what they are so worried about. They have after all most of the money for transportation going to roads. It seems to me like a little kid who just can't share his cookies. It's funny too when they cite choices, you can choose a car, or a car. It's your choice. Right?

Wrong.

The fundamental problem with this is that it's exactly what has caused congestion in the first place, letting everyone believe that they are free to have a piece of road at any time without any congestion. In fact some wish that it was in the constitution. Well where is the logic in that? If we look at nature and floods we see what happens when too much water wants to be all in one place. And so it should come as no surprise if everyone took geology or physical geography some time in high school that this would happen. Yet we keep building one mode of transportation. It's kind of like putting concrete at the bottom of a river to channel it. None of it seeps in to the ground just like cars magically get through traffic. And it seems to me that building all of these transitways for buses just encourages more cars. They might have 2 more people in the but its still a car. It's still VMT and pollution and sprawl.

But if you give people a choice they will take it. But it can't be a half cocked choice. Buses in freeway medians in Houston have shown that they only attract so many riders. I have a theory that it's because they travel in the middle of a freeway. Transit is a pedestrian oriented mode. Freeways are not pedestrian oriented. This is another reason why Houston's 5 transit ways garner about 43,000 riders a day while Portland's Max and Streetcar with 5 lines is over 100,000. Per day. It's why the San Diego Trolley is over 100,000 per day. Network and pedestrian orientation are what drives transit, and more freeways amplifies the inhumanities of single occupancy vehicles. 100,000 people in cars is no small amount of extra concrete for roads and parking spaces.

No one was meant to be that selfish every day of their lives. Yes you can be selfish sometimes. I know I am. I drive to my Gramma's house. She lives in the suburbs where the bus stops running at 3:30pm. It's 3 miles from the BART station and while sometimes I walk, some days i just don't have the extra 2 hours to spare (BART is lame in that they won't let bikes on rush hour trains). But everywhere else I walk or take transit whether it's a bus or a train. Tonight I went to concert by taking the J Church to the 45 Union Bus. Powered by alternative energy from Hydro, $1.50, no parking, no hassle. It's the power of networks and human scale quality transit which it seems some of the highway and HOV people miss.

I saw someone somewhere say that the Blue Line in Chicago which has 12 trains per hour could be replaced with an hov lane and 100 buses per hour and this would be revolutionary. I'm not sure what that person was smoking, but it must be bad stuff.

Design, Shelters, & Riders

A recent competition was raised in San Francisco to design transit shelters. Apparently the idea is something that architects can get into, and by some of the shelters looks, can overdo. But its an interesting exercise in design. My questions would be, can good design keep away the vandals? Will the shelter actually keep the wind out? Will it put maps on many sides so you don't have to ask someone to leave their seat to look at them? Will the advertising be a tasteful size in order to not feel overwhelmed by a product at a bus stop? Those are a few of the questions I would have about these stops. Yes it's nice to worry about aesthetics, but hopefully they are heavy on function.

I would like to make a request to Muni as well. Please put a shelter at my stop on 24th and Church. And a map would be nice. You would think that a handicapped accessible stop on a Muni Metro line would at least have a map and perhaps nextbus. Now that would be great!

Hurricanes, Oil Spikes, and Transit

We might be headed for a major disruption in the coming days. The Oil Drum notes that it's a big deal in that a Hurricane has never entered the gulf. And the BBC notes that it's been about 60 years since this big of a storm event hit the region. From the Oil Drum...

This is an unprecedented event. NO CYCLONE has ever entered the Gulf of Oman. And there are no custom 'storm surge' models available for that area. This forecast is based on my experience and subjective analysis of the seabed slope and storm surge interaction with the sea floor. Considering the region has never experienced a hurricane, let alone a strong one it is highly unlikely the loading facilities or platforms were constructed to withstand the forces - both wave action and wind force - that they will experience. Significant, damage will occur. How much long term damage, and the volumes associated with it - can not be determined at this time.

So what does this mean for Transit? Another good question is what does this mean for Dubai and the reclaimed urban projects like the palm islands. Given that we don't know what this will do to gas prices, it might be really bad or mild. If its really bad we'll see a spike in gas prices and transit ridership. If its mild there will most likely be a bullet dodged.

The Myth of Houston's No Zoning Part 1

There is a pervasive myth in the world of anti-planning and anti-transit fanatics that should be debunked. Specifically Randall O'Toole believes that Houston is the bastion of the free market. That would be nice and rosy if it were true, but it of course is not.

Parking Requirements

What is a good libertarian argument without a discussion about their preferred mode of transportation. If there was no such thing as zoning in Houston, then there would also not be any requirements on property. But instead we find that a one bedroom apartment has a 1.33 space parking requirement which of course lead to larger parking lots or garages costing developers lots of money. If it were a true free market issue, parking space construction would be left up to the market, yet its not. A report done by the EPA found that parking requirements were a big reason why TOD in Midtown has failed to take off. Another reason seems to stem from the fact that land owners think their land is worth much more than it really is and have been unwilling to part with it feeling like a high rise is their eventual destiny.

The Transit Space Race Explained

A Letter to the Herald in Seattle on the Space Race...

Let us consider the space race instead. Our best and brightest put men in space and on the moon using pencils, paper and slide rules. This was and continues to be a great engineering feat by our aerospace industry. We do not need commercial flights out of our little airport, we need a rail system to our big airport. A statewide rail system, a national system of bullet trains and light rail - let's get the big three automakers, aerospace, everyone involved. And like the trans-continental railroad, in some aspects, our government should pay for it and not expect to make a profit and not give it away to big business.

This may upset the oil magnates and the innovation of hydro-electric power will come off the back burner. Put Americans to work, put veterans to work, put documented immigrants to work. I want to ride the train to work, to play, to school, and to the airport.

National Transit Planning

Seems like Canadian Mayors are taking matters into their own hands. If only Transit Agencies and Mayors in the United States were so proactive, maybe we would have a national plan by now.

The Truth About Roads

While folks like the Reason Foundation will ask for more roads, it seems to me that they are much more expensive than the transit solutions we are proposing and get to a worse end. Well here is the answer straight from the road kings at the Texas DOT...

The decision to build a road is a permanent commitment to the traveling public. Not only will a road be built, but it must also be routinely maintained and reconstructed when necessary, meaning no road is ever truly “paid for.” Until recently, when TxDOT built or expanded a road, no methodology existed to determine the extent to which this work would be paid off through revenues.

The Asset Value Index, was developed to compare the full 40-year life-cycle costs to the revenues attributable to a given road corridor or section. The shorthand version calculates how much gasoline is consumed on a roadway and how much gas tax revenue that generates.

The Asset Value Index is the ratio of the total expected revenues divided by the total expected costs. If the ratio is 0.60, the road will produce revenues to meet 60 percent of its costs; it would be “paid for” only if the ratio were 1.00, when the revenues met 100 percent of costs. Another way of describing this is to do a “tax gap” analysis, which shows how much the state fuel tax would have to be on that given corridor for the ratio for revenues to match costs.

Applying this methodology, revealed that no road pays for itself in gas taxes and fees. For example, in Houston, the 15 miles of SH 99 from I-10 to US 290 will cost $1 billion to build and maintain over its lifetime, while only generating $162 million in gas taxes. That gives a tax gap ratio of .16, which means that the real gas tax rate people would need to pay on this segment of road to completely pay for it would be $2.22 per gallon.

Did you read that like I read that? $2.22 per gallon of subsidization for the road. And this isn't from some liberal think tank or a transit fanatic saying it, it's the organization that builds and collects taxes for them. And this is just the subsidy for the road, not the oil itself! So when simplistic folks from the Reason foundation propose building roads to relieve all congestion, you ask them who is going to be paying for that, or you shut them down with some good research on how much it will really cost versus your transit alternative. It seems to me that even more so now, rail looks even better than ever when it comes to cost effectiveness.

Thanks to Andrew for the link.