New Tech & Electrification

If you were a city, would you want to be the first to implement an unproven technology whether it's hydrogen streetcars or super fast charging streetcars? I know that makes it tough for innovation but it seems like a lot of risks and on a political level it means career death if the program crashes. That being said, there are lots of interesting ideas out there that might deserve a look. In addition to the two above, the inductive motor looks interesting as well.

One thing though, I really really don't get the hate of overhead wires. They have been proven since 1888 and create no point source emissions. Get over your personal aesthetic people. If you were so concerned with wires, you should also be concerned with that smog stuff as well. As I've said before, it may look bad to you, but my lungs don't care.

On a similar note, some Railroads are considering electrification as well as allowing corridors to be used for wind power transmission. This idea has been around for a while and I'm glad they are finally catching on.

Drinking from a Firehose

Here's a few tidbits from the last few days. I'm sorry for the outage but I was in Denver for CNU. The next few weeks should be a bit more stable.

Beijing wants to be a transit city...that means not waiting for more than 5 minutes for a bus. That would be awesome.

In peak hours, the minimum departure interval for subway trains will be shortened to 2 minutes; the waiting time at bus stops will be reduced to 3 to 5 minutes; public transport will account for 45 percent of the journeys in downtown areas.

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Forclosure is hitting the Lindbergh MARTA development. The area is seen as a model, but apparently that doesn't help get or keep funding.

“We worked 10 years to get to this point and to make such inroads and transformed the entire neighborhood,” said Harold Dawson Jr., president of the Harold A. Dawson Co., the project’s developer. “And unfortunately these lenders can’t see the forest for the trees.”

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Carrollton looks like the place to be in North Texas when it comes to TOD. The New York Times gave them a nod. Though what is even more interesting is that they are looking at getting Korean investors to build some of it.

Mink hopes to bring Korean developers to prospect for business around the city's three Dallas Area Rapid Transit rail stops. Those transit stations are scheduled to open in December 2010.

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Winston Salem is looking to use energy grants to plan the streetcar. I thought that was rather innovative.

The city hopes to apply for a discretionary grant through the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program from the U.S. Department of Energy as soon as funds are available. Winston-Salem would be in competition with other local governments for the money.

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The Ragin Cajun is stumping for streetcars in New Orleans.
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Salt Lake Mayor Becker hopes the US Conference of Mayors will be able to push harder for more streetcar money.
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Looks like we have another I-10 situation in OK. I don't understand paving over rail ROW. It just doesn't make any sense in these times.
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Why bar the car when you get the milk for... wait that's cow. Well why are people buying cars if they have the zipcar option.

Comment Rejection

At the moment I have comment privileges on posts that are older than 5 days. If the post is older than 5 days the comment gets moderated. I don't think I have rejected a real comment yet, just a lot of spam, which is why I set it up that way. But today because my fingers were dumb I accidentally rejected two comments. Apparently once you reject you can't go back, even if you hit the back button. In any event, I took a screen shot of the two comments and posted below. If you wrote them (Bob + MV), I'm really sorry I deleted them, I didn't mean to. Perhaps you can post them again. This is the only way I could save them...

Of Montréal Electrification

Looks like Montreal could reap the benefits of electrification sooner than others.

Agence Métropolitaine de Transport and Hydro-Québec agreed on May 5 to invite proposals for a study to determine the feasibility of electrifying four of Montréal’s commuter rail routes totalling 250 km.

In Calgary they ride the wind. Here they could ride the wave.

I Wear My Sunglasses At Night

Over at Politics and Place they're talking about the effect of train goggles with an excellent discussion on this issue that I mostly agree with. Yes I have them too. Apparently I'm a Choo Choo Head. I won't go into the dog whistle effect that the term choo choo has for rail transit opposition but it's there and it's strong. But as Paz states:

Munch on this for a second. If all of the sudden every streetcar and commuter train that ever ran was to suddenly reappear, would we still need buses? I would argue "absolutely, yes".

Ditto. As Bruce McF always says, buses and trains should be friends.

Knew It Was Gonna Happen

I've been waiting for that day. The day when the Busway in Miami is handed over to the cars. We knew it was gonna happen...somewhere.

Now they might get their wish if county commissioners and other local elected officials approve a proposed plan to convert the Busway into -- among other alternatives -- a four-lane highway with express toll lanes where private vehicles would share the road with buses. The revenue would then be used to fund the cash-strapped county transit agency.

This is one of the things I fear with BRT boosterism, that eventually the road will revert to cars. To some degree my fears are unfounded, but this should give us caution.

More Rock

There are tons of songs out there that deal with driving, wish there could be more like this...



Be careful though. It's kind of catchy...

Via BART's Blog

Silo X: Single Project vs. Complete System

There's been a lot of talk over this study today. It comes at a perfect time for journalists to skim the abstract and form their own conclusions before actually digging in to the details. What the study does though is look into the life cycle costs of different transportation modes. As Jebediah states in his post:

What’s totally missing in their “complete” estimates for these various transportation modes are the virtuous effects of rail: creating denser communities where people tend to walk more, own fewer cars, live in smaller abodes, and spend less time stuck in traffic jams.

Where could we get such a look into that community? Why Portland of course where they began preliminary calculations of these things in a basic way for transportation and building emissions.

This can and has been replicated (pdf pg 53) in other places such as Over the Rhine in Cincinnati. Hopefully other places will look holistically at the benefits of the whole package instead of just these news hopping studies that continue silo thinking. It is certainly good to look over the life of projects, but as mentioned, it's only the life cycle of that individual transportation project and nothing else related.

Oh Noes! Streetcars Go Slower!

The Salt Lake Tribune apparently doesn't get the point of Streetcars AT ALL.

According to the UTA's own study, capital investment for expanded bus service on 2100 South would cost only $10 million. The streetcar would cost $37 million. Buses are more expensive to operate, but you could run expanded bus service for 26 years on the difference in capital cost between buses and the streetcar.

Great, run buses on a private ROW that has a ton of development potential. No comments on the difference in development that will result or the benefits of electric transit. Also, they apparently also haven't even taken a look at Portland, Tacoma, or Seattle to see if people actually ride.

TRAX has shown that Utahns will ride trains when they won't ride buses. That might be another point in the streetcar's favor, except that Utah doesn't have experience with a slow-moving streetcar system.

Oh noes! Not a slower moving streetcar! It operates nothing like Trax in downtown Salt Lake!!!

Links & CNU Coming

The Reconnecting America site will have updates from the CNU this week on its twitter aggregator for the CNU17 hashtag. If you use twitter, I'll be tweeting from @reconnecting.
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Jarrett at Human Transit asks if Sim City rotted our brains. I've been playing since the early 90s and I'm pretty sure that if I didn't go to planning school I would have no idea that zones didn't need to be separated.
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Poor drivers, they just get no respect. No one loves them anymore. The Heritage Foundation is trying so hard its sad to see them twist the statistics without giving a full picture.
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A group files a civil rights suit on the Central Corridor. How much should be spent on gentrification mitigation on rail lines? Is there a limit?

Running: Determined to Be a Better Man

Sometimes I'll post something on running which many of you know happened to be a big part of my life before transit. Today I'd like to point folks to a post in Jogger's World about a friend of mine named Darren Brown. It's a good story about how DB dealt with his father's (who was a famous and decorated runner) suicide and came into running on his own. Recently DB broke 4 minutes in the mile and with his deceased father became the first father-son duo to break 4 in the United States. My tie to Darren is that I failed to get him to come to Texas when I recruited him out of high school. He eventually came to school at UT but we were glad he came late instead of not coming at all.

"You see, I want to become a better runner than my father," Darren Brown says, "but I'm determined to become a better man."

In Houston...

I'm in Houston visiting the fam and some friends. I've decided to take a little digital holiday. You might still get a tweet or two but I'm going to stay away (or try to at least) from the Reader and Blog till Sunday.

Always Someone Cooler Than You

Supervisor Chiu and others have called for a second Freeway revolt. This time its a bit more passive, but its good to have people start speaking out in favor of even more spending on transit. What is also shows is how clueless MTC is when it comes to the United States as a whole.

In response, Randy Rentschler, a spokesperson for the MTC, called the RTP "the most transit-friendly plan of any metro area in the entire country."

I'm sure it's not as friendly as New York City. As Ben Folds says, always someone cooler than you.



But the bigger point that even if you were the most transit friendly plan in the United States, that isn't really saying much, considering how regions in the United States treat transit.

Oh the Memories...

Anyone remember these comments in February?

Hartgen said he thinks ridership will drop further because uptown layoffs are only starting, and that the drop in ridership should spur CATS to consider halting its ambitious plans to build more rapid transit. “We should be saving for our operating budget,” Hartgen said.

Ridership seems to be doing ok to me.

The Lynx Blue Line averaged 15,121 weekday trips in April – surprisingly high ridership given the severe recession. Charlotte's light-rail line had been averaging roughly 14,000 trips for much of the year, and the Charlotte Area Transit System expected it to decline because fewer people are working. But the Lynx carried 380,186 passengers for April, up more than 10 percent over the same time a year ago.

That's good, because expansion is going on as planned, they'll just have to find more funding.

On a seven-to-four party-line vote City Council Wednesday kept the eight million dollars set aside in the budget for engineering work on the streetcar, which Councilman Andy Dulin wanted to strip from the project. Dulin wanted to use the money on road resurfacing. Others who voted for Dulin's proposal did so because they said there's no concrete plan to fund construction.

We've got to think long term and invest in the future. I'm glad to see Charlotte continues to look ahead, even amidst tough economic times.

Light Rail Kills Babies

This is a pretty old story from 2006, but I'm glad we're past this type of rhetoric.

Americans have not always embraced public transport. “We had people carrying signs saying ‘Light Rail Kills Babies’,” recalls John Inglish, head of the Utah Transit Authority, which has 19 miles of track around Salt Lake City. Proponents were likened to communists, he says.

Well, we're not called baby killers, but we still get called communists.

The Battle for Charlotte 07

Locals might remember these commercials. I was at the transit initiatives conference this weekend and folks played these spots that were made for the Charlotte repeal effort back in November of 2007 when opponents tried to take away a half cent sales tax. It got destroyed at the ballot box 70% against repeal. I asked if we could post them up to share with folks and Brian Rasmussen at R&R Partners was nice enough to send them along. Check them out. My favorite is the mayors. What do you all think?

This one was set in a bar. Apparently these two folks had a lot in common:



This one was two former Charlotte Mayors who apparently never agree on anything. They agreed on this:



Finally, they got recently retired and fan favorite Mike Minter to do a spot on saving the transit tax:

Transportation Bills & Gas Taxes

Looks like the T4 folks have been making some serious headway. They've got the highway lobby all riled up which is a good thing.

“If the bill starts looking more negative on highways, then users that have been supportive of fuel tax increases would turn their back on it,” said Greg Cohen, chief executive of the American Highway Users Alliance. “There is potential that the whole bill could be slowed down here.”

The major sticking point is funding. If more trust fund money is directed to transit projects, then trucking and highway groups will complain about the fairness of using their fees to pay for rail projects. They especially reject a unified transportation trust fund that would pay for all surface transportation out of the same pot of money.

Fairness? You want to talk about fairness? How fair is it to have your mode of transportation subsidized to an uneven degree over the last 60 years. I think Ryan nails it in his Streetsblog post.

In the first place, gas tax revenue comes nowhere near paying for roads. Federal gasoline tax revenues cover barely half of the annual budget of the Federal Highway Administration. Add in diesel tax revenues and you’re still short. And that’s just the federal budget picture.

I think this is an important point. All modes are subsidized, but to the extent that we can put transit on a more even footing we must. The trucking industry has gotten off too easily since the interstate highway system was completed. It was a major reason why rail shipping was killed to almost dead, since the railroads had to pay taxes on their ROW and trucks did not.

But I'm glad Secretary LaHood gets it. As least in words. And the fact that he has a somewhat more receptive president means that this is a totally different ball game. Though in some ways it's similar to that of the Bush and Clinton years that Norm Minetta was in town for:

We returned to the Oval Office, went through the presentation, and afterward President Bush said, "Norm, that's a tax increase. Get that out." So I then took all the unobligated surplus, left $1 billion in the highway trust fund, and used the balance to build a $267 billion surface transportation program that Congress finally passed in 2005. Not long after, the administration asked for an $8 billion infusion of general funds into the highway trust fund so it wouldn't be running a deficit by 2007.

Another Reason California is Messed Up

When someone litigates a transit vote that won by 62%. That is insane. A clear majority, 69%, in both counties voted for the SMART train. When the minority rules like it does here, things are really broken.

Former Novato councilman Dennis Fishwick - acting on his own behalf without an attorney - filed the lawsuit in Marin Superior Court against the district and SMART board, saying they stripped the right of Marin voters to reject the quarter-cent sales tax with a less than two-thirds approval. State law requires a tax increase to receive two-thirds approval from voters.

Measure Q received 73.5 percent approval in Sonoma County, but only 62.8 percent in Marin. That caused confusion among some Marin voters, who thought the measure had been defeated.

Hey all. I'm at the cfte transit initiatives conference and tweeting live. Check my twitter feed on the right column of the blog

McGovern Calls for Transit Spending

Former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern is asking President Obama to think about halving the military budget and spending more of it on things like railways. Things are getting interesting out there.

Finally, I would like to see America build the fastest, safest and cleanest-powered railway system in the world. This nationwide system of passenger and freight rail service should be integrated with equally superior public transit facilities in our cities.

Very few Americans are in the market for a tank or aircraft carrier. There are many eager consumers for the world's best, fastest and safest rail and transit systems.

A recent study showed that public transit spending was much higher in returns on jobs than defense spending and other national priorities. I don't understand why we don't jump on this faster.