AC on Density #2

I mentioned AC's post on Density earlier. In his most recent post, he calculates the weighted densities for 34 regions. I'm wondering how San Jose had such a high density. Perhaps for the same reason that Los Angeles' density is relatively high, due to natural boundaries hemming in exurban growth. Atlanta on the other hand is flat as a pancake and is the worst sprawl offender.

Want to Chat With Fellow Transit Nerds?

I like discussions on transit. It's fun to sit around and shoot the breeze about whatever is going on. Here in San Francisco there used to be forums over at the SF Cityscape where the folks would gather to talk about transit, but its migrated over to Ess Eff. Cityscape still has some awesome resources including a huge blogroll.

As forums go though, I don't think there has ever been one about the transit oriented lifestyle but over at the Metro Rider LA Fred Camino and the gang have done just that. So if you want to go talk transit, check it out. And if anyone wants visit Frank up in Seattle and jump start a conversation there, he's got one too, although the comments section to his blog and over at STB are pretty lively. And down in my hometown of Houston Christof and the gang have the CTC forums.

Are there any other transit forums out there? I know there are a number of yahoo groups with epic battles taking place daily between the transit folks and anti-planners/libertarians but I hadn't seen any in other places.

Greening Car Myth + Capacity Issues

In Forbes, Michael Repogle writes an article on the problems with auto travel increases even in the face of new technologies.

A key arena for innovation will be finding ways to grow the world's communities and economies while at the same time reducing how much driving the population is doing. The forecast growth in motor vehicle traffic--60% over the next two decades in the U.S. and many times that in China and India--threatens to overwhelm gains won through increasing vehicle fuel efficiency.

Which is the main rub, that VMT will increase so much that it will overwhelm any solutions we come up with such as everyone having a Prius type gas sipper. The only way to solve this issue is with more compact development and better transit.

The key to success is to keep car traffic from growing to unsustainable levels to begin with. A 2007 Urban Land Institute study found that shifting two-thirds of new U.S. growth to compact neighborhoods where cars are not the only transportation option would save 85 million tons of CO2 annually by 2030. That figure is more than the combined annual emissions of over 16 million regular passenger cars.

While Michael claims the transit solution is BRT, I think he's been drinking too much of the Bill Vincent cool-aid. In keeping with most BRT peddlers out there, he spreads the rumor in a major print medium that BRT is cheaper than LRT. With most new BRT lines in the United States built as hybrid buses instead of trolleybuses, and just operating as express buses they are not helping the problem either. In suburban areas and less congested routes BRT will be a major part of the solution, but in urban areas, it is a necessity that we build rail lines that can have multiple car consists and have major capacity. The Orange Line in Los Angeles which is already at capacity and takes 15 minutes longer to finish the same distance as the Gold Line LRT, even with its speed limits. The LACMTA is looking to expand it but there is hardly room for more people.

The thing that bothers me most is what if a lot of people need to use transit in cities? On some lines, particularly in San Francisco, there is a capacity problem. A recent study to open up Muni for free rides showed how overwhelmed the system would be if a substantial number of new people hopped on due to free rides. This scares me a bit. New York City has been handling massive increases quite well but even they need to expand and are in the process of building new subway tunnels. If we ever have a big shock and a ton of people hop on transit, there are going to be problems. And not having the capacity of a subway system spine here, it will show the limits of buses as the only solution as peddled by many rubber tire advocates. Buses will always be the bones of a transit system, but our spine should have capacity to move more people than a 60 foot bus.

Acela Gains Travel Share on Airlines

Showing what is possible for the future of many corridors across the country, the Acela (Kinda High Speed Rail) has been gaining share on the airlines in the same corridor. It kind of strikes me as silly that anyone would want to go through crazy security lines and airport traffic when you can just hop on the train in the city.

Wired has a few reasons why the train is gaining.

Obama on Transit

In today's Charlotte Observer, staff asked Barack Obama how he felt about federal support for mass transit:

His response:

I'm a strong supporter, as part of our broader energy strategy. You know, if we are designing cities, and urban communities and suburban communities around two-hour commutes, then we are destined to continue down the course of climate change. And mass transit not only is far more environmentally sound, but with oil prices sky high, and not likely to go down significantly, because of increased demand by China and India, it gives individuals much more of an incentive to look at trains and mass transit as an alternative.

Eh. I want to hear a more substantive discussion, but anything beats McCain, who has said he wants to kill Amtrak through privatization. I imagine Mary Peters will get to stick around too, and we already know her record.

Putting It Into American Terms

So Bush's budget wants to shift money from the transit account into the highway account. PIRG is getting really aggressive on this now and made this statement at the end of a recent press release:

“Bush’s proposal is like taking your star quarterback out of the game because the defense is giving up too many points”

Right on.

Rail to Oakland, The Other Oakland

That PIRG report has made its rounds and now a group in Pittsburgh wants to use the evidence from it to kick off a campaign to take rail from Pittsburgh to Oakland, the neighborhood. It is the third largest downtown center in Pennsylvania and has many Universities and a top notch medical center. It's also where Mr. Rogers began discussing his neighborhood at WQED.

It's also not connected by any of the rail lines or busways that Pittsburgh has built over the years. Given the previous cost estimate of $750 million dollars 15 years ago, I'm imagining this 2-3 mile expansion will be a subway. The layout for those not familiar is below. The orange is the existing light rail which includes a downtown subway and tunnels in the hills. The red is the east busway, the first 6.8 mile section was completed in 1983 at a cost of $115 million ($244 2007 or $36M per mile) and the yellow is the currently under construction North Shore Connector which will open up the north side for rail expansion. It's a rather hilly landscape and like San Francisco, one of the reasons the light rail lines were saved is because of their tunnels.

If You See Someone, Say Something

Ben has an post up about subway love in NYC. I've often wondered what, if any, etiquette there was to talking to girls (or guys) that caught your eye on transit. Some of my friends have said that it creeps them out while others are indifferent. One of my friends said that she gave a specifically creepy guy an evil look until he moved seats.

Apparently its not unusual to find creepy people on the subway, but its not unusual to see cute girls either...although most seem to have wedding rings. I certainly don't want to get the evil eye and I usually try to follow the golden rule, do unto others... And since I really don't like being bothered, I find it really hard to bother other people. So I end up listening to NPR or watching Diggnation and every once in a while catching a glimpse of a cute girl walking on or off the Muni or BART.

"He Had No Transportation Experience"

Anyone know an arabian horse judge for the DOT job? Today in the Washington Post there was an expose on Tyler Duval, a Bush appointee because of connections ("It was a friend of a friend thing") and DJ Gribbin who was a family friend of Dick Cheney. Their goal is to reduce the roll of government in transportation expenditures and instead privatize everything. But transit means nothing to them because as it stands, it can't be sold off to the highest bidder. So as we've been saying, they have been trying to kill transit as evidenced by their recent try to get toll roads into the new starts program.

Even if the next president reverses its policies, the Bush administration will leave a legacy of new toll roads across the country, a growing number of public roads leased to private companies, and dozens of stalled commuter rail, streetcar and subway projects -- including the $5 billion extension of Metro to Dulles International Airport.

As mentioned in a post by Steve Davis at Smart Growth America, one of the targets Duval and Gribbin hope to get rid of with congestion pricing is earmarks. But as he also mentions, earmarks are a small part of the total expenditures with most of the money going to state DOTs who spend it without goals or measures of success on freeways. But many of the earmarks are projects that have merit, but can't wrestle funding away from We've seen this in the last week where there has been a fight over an earmark for the Central Corridor, a very worthy project.

But here's a catch with the congestion money giveaways. The funding for those pilot congestion pricing projects came from funds that usually go to replacing buses in cities and the small starts program. Congestion pricing has nothing to do with funding for buses in rural areas or in cities that need to replace older buses but have seen their funding continue to sucked up by gasoline prices.

"I couldn't believe they could get away with this, to just take that money away," said Mark Munson, director of the Regional Transit Authority in Dubuque, which has been frequently forced to deny trips to the elderly and disabled because there are not enough buses and volunteers can't fill all the gaps.

Duvall is unapologetic, saying the traditional pork-barrel process of divvying up transportation dollars is bad policy. The proof, he said, is the fact that increased government spending on transportation has not slowed congestion.

If pricing is implemented, there should be a real plan to give people an alternative of real rapid transit. The New York plan is great because they have plenty of alternatives to get places in the pricing zone. Ryan discusses the need to do both as well. And Frank at Orphan Road warns us to be wary of going too far.

This is the reason why it really matters who becomes President next. Political appointments really have a huge push on policy and if we keep the same trajectory, we'll be stuck with these two guys for 4 more years.

And if you think there were a lot of innocent contractors on the death star, Ryan has some conspiracy theories for you as well. I'm not sure if they are that far from the truth given what has happened since Bush took office.

Real Density Comparisons

AC calculates real density by weighted averages of census tracks. Check it out.