Inflation Hits Everyone

They are going to point to the trains as being over budget,
but they will ask why there is a "gap" in road funding or fudge it.
Inflation hits everything and everyone the same
but some like to pick their least favorite modes to blame.

Large Misallocation of Resources

There is a new report out from an independent auditor that asserts Minnesota has been spending too much on expansion of roads and not enough on maintenance and repair. This report should be done all over the country because this is what it tells us: we've been wasting resources and subsidizing sprawl with bigger and bigger roads when we should be attending to the core capacity of our transportation systems. I'm not sure people will be able to stomach this for much longer. Soon there will be toll roads everywhere and people will be asking why we didn't build more alternatives....

...Frank might have an answer.

Very Cool Subway Commercial

Check out MetroRider LA for the coolest transit commercial ever. I remember I heard somewhere that the auto industry spends more on ads in this country than we do on transit operations. Go figure.

Dulles Rail Gets a Slight Boost from House Republicans

While Mary Peters and Company are looking to stymie transit development around the United States, several lawmakers are having none of it in the DC area. Is this a start towards looking into the cost effectiveness measure as a false measure of the benefits of transit projects? Hopefully. While they don't discuss that issue specifically, the Washington Post has more on the push the project is getting from a couple of house bigwigs:

Two Republican leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives have asked the Transportation Department to move forward with the "critically important" but struggling plan to extend Metrorail to Dulles International Airport.

Minority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.) and Deputy Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) sent Transportation Secretary Mary Peters a letter this week, saying: "It is vitally important that this project move forward. Open dialogue between Virginia and the Department of Transportation will make certain that lawmakers are best able to alleviate the burden of increasing traffic congestion and transportation demands across the entire national capital region."

Send Steve at Urban StL Some Love

Steve Patterson who blogs over at the popular Urban St. Louis suffered a stroke in early February. Steve and I presented on blogging and transit last year in Miami at the Rail~Volution conference. He's recovering well but it wouldn't hurt to send him some love. If you haven't checked out his blog before. You can do so here. Get better soon Steve!

Increasing Job Densities an Appropriate TOD Strategy

It might seem like a duh moment, but Prof. Gary Barnes paper discusses in a paper he wrote for the Journal of Public Transportation that it's not just residential density that determines transit usage, but rather where people are going.

Using regression analysis, he showed that in Minneapolis, aside from developing residential densities, transit share can be increased by building up commercial centers. In the regression, he showed that for every 1000 people per square mile that the residential density grew, the increase in transit's share to downtown increased 2.4% versus .6% increase when people went to suburban jobs. The same thing happened for increases in low income users. For every 1% increase in low income population per square mile, increases were noted. The chart that shows the results is below.



He also relates the concentration of regional jobs in major centers directly to how much transit people take. An example from the article is below.


There are a few caveats including the need for quality transit and parking regulations in these centers that encourage transit ridership. But just having a center of commerce isn't good enough. Places that have a lot of jobs like Pleasanton need to be better organized and less suburban office park.

Recently however, many people have been focused really heavily on residential densities, which are important, but I haven't seen many programs that create a regional job placement and growth strategy. This could be part of the key for increasing transit's use for work trips.

I have a feeling as well that pushing for dense commercial centers with mixes of retail and office then connecting them with high capacity transit will go a long way towards increasing transit's ability to cut congestion in the peak hours. It might also be a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, creating a cycle of more transit and more office development in the cores of a region.

I know that this is kind of a 'duh' post. But having numbers to quantify the effects of connecting residential areas to large employment centers is really important in moving forward with policies that promote transit ridership. Thanks Prof Barnes for this paper and for your conclusion:

Planners and policymakers hoping to manage urban traffic congestion through increased transit use are limited in the short term by the strong influence that existing land use exerts on mode choice. While this point has been widely acknowledged, most research and policy discussion on this topic has focused on increasing residential densities. However, the conclusion of this article is that the development and expansion of very large, high-density job centers is the best tool available for most cities to achieve substantial increases in transit use.

While there are many ways to improve transit use, achieving the substantial increases necessary to impact congestion levels will probably ultimately require greatly improved service frequency or higher costs of driving, such as parking charges. Higher parking charges will be politically infeasible in the absence of adequate transit service as an alternative; however, improved transit service is hard to justify in the absence of a sufficiently large market.

Creating a large market appears to reduce to two options: the well-known solution of increasing residential density and the less-considered option of focusing on the work end of the trip. While both of these tactics appear to be effective in principle as well as practice, it is, for a variety of reasons discussed in this article, very difficult to have impacts on residential density that are large enough to have regional significance.

The constraints that limit the use of residential density increases as a tool are not in force to nearly the same extent for commercial development. A gradual transition of a relatively small amount of office space from isolated or low-density settings into a few large dense centers could lead to sizable increases in regional transit use in a relatively short time.

The Twin Cities area illustrates the possibilities of this approach. There are two downtowns, but Minneapolis is much larger and is geographically in the center of the developed area. Downtown St. Paul is relatively small and close to the edge by comparison, yet still attracts a substantial transit share. This hints at the possibility that even suburban locations, if they are developed to a sufficient size and density, can become major transit attractors.

Increased densities at the work end of the trip, by making improved transit service frequency more viable, could also help to increase nonauto access to retail and other nonwork opportunities. While higher density residential development can also have an impact, the effect is much larger when the increased density occurs in or around high-density commercial areas, both because more trips will be made to these high-transit attractors and because these areas support relatively good transit service going out as well as coming in. Increased commercial densities, especially in the suburbs, may be the only tool available for inducing significant transit use from the vast suburban areas of most cities that are already developed at low densities, and which will probably stay that way forever.

Texas DMR Sets World Record

Holy cow! My guys, 3 of whom I used to help coach at Texas, set a World and American record in the Distance Medley Relay tonight in Fayetteville Arkansas. Man I'm proud of these guys. Way to go Kyle, Leo, and Jacob. You all are my heroes.

Stealing from the Transit Fund Again

I hope this doesn't keep happening every year. Apparently last years $1.3 B in transit money shifted to the general budget wasn't enough.

Transbay Blog | Rescue Muni

If you live here in California, call your rep and let them know this won't fly again.

Why Buy the Cow When You Get the Milk for Free

Dallas business leaders seem to love rail, but they don't want to pay for it. This is about investing in the future, so it annoys me when people complain about high taxes when it would directly benefit them to pool resources. People are complaining about their mobility and traffic, but if they aren't willing to pay for a change, where is it going to come from? All of this emphasis on tolls and private company operation is just a way to shift taxes to make a small group of people money, not about solving problems or serving the taxpayers.

But many of those ideas are already being explored by the transit systems, and won't produce the nearly $200 million a year it would cost to operate the expanded rail network, proponents said Thursday. "This is not a plan to build out the rail system by 2025," said DART board member Mark Enoch, referring to the position paper distributed by Mr. Ritter. "It's a plan for how to avoid raising the sales tax rate." Voters want rail more than they want lower costs for businesses, and that is a fight they may have to take to the Legislature again, Mr. Enoch said.

Lance Armstrong to Open Commuter Bike Shop in Austin

News from my third home of Austin. What a great push for commuting by bike. If only other transit modes had such a well known and authoritative ally. From the Austin American Statesman:

It's not about the bike sales. That from Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong, who plans in May to open a bike shop, commuting center, training facility and cafe in a 1950s-era building at the northwest corner of Fourth and Nueces streets.

"This city is exploding downtown. Are all these people in high rises going to drive everywhere? We have to promote (bike) commuting," Armstrong said Wednesday, gazing up at the towering 360 condos rising next to the site of his new shop. "This can be a hub for that." Mellow Johnny's, named for the nickname Armstrong earned while wearing the Tour de France leader's "maillot jaune," or yellow jersey, will be housed in a yellow- and red-brick building next to the music venue La Zona Rosa. It is a block north of the Lance Armstrong Bikeway, a path that will cut east-west through downtown Austin.

...

Armstrong predicted that Mellow Johnny's will be "the coolest bike shop in the world," but said he's not trying to put any other Austin bike shop out of business. "It's not us versus them," he said. "We're all about the cycling culture."

I'm glad that they believe in the bike community of Austin as well and acknowledge there are other bike shops in Austin that are awesome. Here's a plug for my boys Jack & Adam and their shop, a part of that community.