Midweek Notes

Arlington is the largest city in the United States without transit, but will run trains through the city for the Superbowl coming in 2011.
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Vancouver does Granny Flats in high rises.
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Seattle Mayoral candidate McGinn is floating ideas for another light rail election in two years. But by light rail does he mean rapid streetcar or light metro?
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A dustup over trolley buses in Seattle. I'd be interested to see if the bean counters actually did a lifecycle analysis considering how long electric trolleybuses actually last. Anyone who takes away existing hydro powered transit and replaces it with diesel needs a head check. It's unfortunate that it is even being discussed at all.
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The economy isn't being so kind to mixed use projects in Atlanta.

Tuesday Night Notes

Tram trains in are starting in England. It would be interesting to see if cities in the United States start looking at tram trains as a model.
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Kemper Freeman really doesn't get the gold mine he could be standing on.
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Apparently the Lehman collapse has slowed Caltrain's electrification. From house testimony:

Losses in our county alone, for example, include: $25 million in San Mateo County Transit Authority funds that will stall planned electrification of the Caltrain Peninsula Commuter Rail Service

Running Scared

The green movement is gaining influence and looking for 10% of the revenue for carbon credits. But this is scary to the highway movement as their influence and scare tactics wear thin.

According to Greg Cohen, president of the American Highway Users Alliance, the changing partisan guard in Washington has made highway groups wary of the focus on transit funds. “People are much more nervous about being on the chopping block,” he said. “It seems like the anti-highway crowd has much more influence than they had in the past.”

Anti highway? How about pro livable communities.

Depending on Obama's FTA

A lot of people are depending on Obama's FTA to change the rules to let them build streetcars and other projects. I'm hoping that he doesn't let them down by continuing to delay the transportation bill. In Charlotte, the city council overrode a veto by Mayor McCrory to spend money on a streetcar study hoping that the FTA would change cost effectiveness rules aimed at speed instead of placemaking and short extended walking connections.

But the council's Democratic majority said it was important to get the project started. They hope the federal government will change its rules to pay for streetcar construction, and they argued by spending the money now the city would be first in line.

Get Off My Grass Track

John McCain hates transit. We would be living in an extended Bush nightmare if he were President today. It shows because it seems as if he knows absolutely nothing about how the Federal Transit Administration does competitive grants. I would somewhat understand the pork argument if he was targeting projects randomly inserted such as a bridge to nowhere, but many of the target projects actually have full funding grant agreements with the FTA after going through the highly competitive New Starts program. Much of this money seems to be for the annual allotment the FTA pays out for projects that sign their FFGA.

I would also say that many highway projects that are being built today wouldn't make it through this process so to call them pork shows the lack of understanding. The Mayor of Stamford who has a BRT project in final design even goes as far as to say McCain doesn't get it.

The SUT project will also be a model of livability and sustainability, optimizing the use of the SITC and its 225 commuter trains and hundred of buses a day, supporting the development of LEED-certified and green buildings for 12,000 new residents and highly-paid workers, and reducing vehicle miles traveled by 18,900,000 per year.

True colors coming through every day. 18 million VMT is a lot less foreign oil.

Freeway Swing

Ryan dug up a paper by Baum Snow that was reblogged by Matt Y. While the numbers are interesting in themselves, the swing was most dramatic to me. It wasn't just 18 percent drop with the introduction of freeways into the urban fabric but if we are to believe that city population would have increased by 8 percent that is a 26% swing in population for cities.

This is no small chunk of life and as we have seen, it was devestating to the economic vitality that cities would have maintained. As Scott Bernstein always says, urban places are the way we can build wealth. Unfortunately a whole lot of wealth was transferred and reallocated. It might be interesting to see what that 26% swing meant over time for the economics of the United States considering how much of the population lives in metro areas. We might be having different discussions today about sustainability.

Blogging Sustainability

You all might have noticed a reduction in posts over the weekend and sometimes during the week. Alas the go go go of the blog and work together started to get to me and so I decided that Friday and Saturday were best left away from trying to post and try to regain something of a life. I envy people like Andrew Sullivan who have decided to take a complete month off of blogging and detach from the digital world. Ultimately my life as I lived it the last few years was/is unsustainable. Lack of sleep makes you mess up posts and probably also makes you susceptible to being sick more often.

With that being said, this isn't a GBCW post. Rather, it's just an announcement as to why things might seem a bit slower or less frequent. I'm still excited about this stuff. It still boils my blood. But trying to collect articles for work and blog my thoughts is wearing me out. So if you want to follow whats going on every day, check out the articles I send out at work every day. I try to pull together things that are interesting to TOD and transit from the approximately 400 news articles and blog posts I read daily. Some of these things you get on the Overhead Wire, some of these things you get on the CTOD blog.

If you want to get these in your mail daily, send me an email. It's free so totally worth it! Sorry for the crossover plugs because as I said, I like to keep my opinion on TOW and work separate as much as possible, but trying to keep up everything is tiresome. So anyway, thanks for continuing to read and I'll be keeping it up!

When Road Engineers Do LRT

I mentioned in a previous post that I don't believe freeways are places for stations. I stand by that remark and worry that here in the United States, we're worried so much about the lowest cost we don't really care about the outcome on ridership, as long as it hits a target for cost effectiveness (the FTA kind) that makes us marginally happy.

Unfortunately using this cost index we're not maximizing our opportunities when we decided that the freeway is the place to be all the time outside of the CBD. I don't disagree with folks like Jarrett when they say that rapid transit has its best opportunities to run fast in the freeway. But at the same time, there are similar opportunities to leave the freeway ROW when it comes time to have a station and connect the places that people ultimately want to go, and the parcels that should be redeveloped into walkable districts.

I believe a perfect example of this is the Denver Tech Center. When they designed the T Rex project, why didn't they go forward with the option that would have allowed direct access to the center of the employment district? I imagine it was perceived cost compared to running time. It didn't matter that its where people wanted to go, when the train was moving it was running fast, so stopping on the other side of the freeway was a better option for the ridership modelers and the engineers designing the road.

It doesn't look like anyone was thinking of people when they designed the interchange. I'm sure they are happy with the way the light rail and freeway interchanges look and operate, but unfortunately the engineers did nothing for people riding the train to work in the second largest employment center in the Denver region. Now the line is on the other side of the freeway, away from the largest market forces in the area and not available to change the parking lots over because of the continued utility of the car. In the cold of winter people get to walk over an overpass above a bunch of cars driving at 65 miles per hour.

The map below shows a routing that would have been very easy to build in my mind and not cost much more money. You could have surface stops and a few cut and cover tunnels would be needed but nothing huge. It likely would have brought over time a jump in tens of thousands of riders over the long term. Simple ideas like this is why I don't like the idea of freeway running. It gives designers a free out when it comes to designing for people instead of cars. The map below also shows where the videos below that I took came from.


View Denver Tech Center in a larger map

Video 1



Video 2




I also still believe that its possible to have fairly rapid transit on arterial streets, we just need to do it right. Sometimes such as in Charlotte you get lucky with a freight ROW that runs parallel to a major arterial and a major freeway. In this instance, you have the best opportunities. But for the most part, major highways don't lend themselves to going places where people want to go on foot. While it might seem like a nice compromise, I think that we're selling ourselves short if we continue to build stops in the center of the freeway.

And ultimately in the United States where we don't seem to know how to design rapid transit, its perhaps best to keep it away from the freeway all together, especially if this mistake will continue to be made where it seems cost is more important ultimately than connecting major employment districts directly.

Is This Backwards?

If you wanted to see the tram, wouldn't you go try and ride it, instead of watching it from your car?

So many people turned out in their cars to watch the dazzling blue and silver trams, traffic jams lasted well past midnight in downtown Dubai, notorious for congestion, in the 40-degree heat.

Stop Spacing and Arterials

Rob has a good evaluation post up about the slow going Health Line BRT in Cleveland. Ultimately the planners weren't thinking of Rapid Transit and probably had too many people to please when they decided to have so many stops on the dedicated ROW. But this isn't just an issue that keeps BRT below 10 miles per hour, the T Third line in San Francisco has a similar issue. It has its own ROW down the center of Third Street, yet it has so many stops and crossings that the schedule maxes out at 12 miles per hour. Compare this to Rob's example of the Red line in Cleveland that goes 25 mph.

But its a balancing act of serving the most people possible and making the line go fast. For example the FTA sometimes goes to far and the running joke is that the cost effectiveness rating would be a great measure if you didn't have to have stations on the line. But something we might think about when planning these lines is that perhaps we don't need stops so close, and also that signal priority for buses and trains is imporant in making these generally longer haul services competitive with auto trips.

Network Expansion

New Orleans is looking to build three new lines while Portland has approved a reference plan for a streetcar network. The catch, New Orleans is looking for TIGER money, which is about as scarce as, well, Tigers in the United States. All of these proposals hinge on money. What's new?

Consequential Strangers

You know the type. The check out lady that knows your name or the bartender that knows your favorite beer. They are what make urban places great, and what make cities more social.

New Metros Abound

Looks like we have new Metro segments in Dubai and Sofia. Trinidad could put theirs on hold. But funny regions are building Metro lines and in Sofia, they are cheap!

Construction of a further extension from Mladost 1 to the International Exhibition Center on Tsarigradsko Shose began on July 2 for completion in 2012. The €94m project includes 2·5 km of tunnel, one station and a car park.

Gaming the System for Roads

EPA is basically worthless in light of this:

City transportation planners changed data that essentially took one in three cars off the road, enabling them to show less pollution. They also have made overly optimistic forecasts about how often people would use mass transit.

And despite evidence that building more highways causes people to drive farther, the city has told the EPA the opposite: Building billions of dollars of new highways will cause Charlotteans to drive less, and create less smog, than if they weren't built.

Not that it doesn't tell us something we already knew. Non attainment is a joke and all regions are going to continue to build more roads and game the system with the main goal of "reducing congestion" so they can say that they reduced pollution. But what they are really doing is increasing growth on the periphery which increases VMT at a higher rate than technology can reduce the emissions. It's not rocket science to know that building roads leads more people to drive.

But in Charlotte, some of the improvements from cleaner vehicles have been offset by the region's population growth and an increase in how many miles the average Charlottean drives. Vehicles account for up to 70 percent of Mecklenburg's ozone-causing pollutants, according to a county estimate.

70%! They also got a pass because the figured they would have three rapid transit lines by now instead of one. So it's kind of funny that the environmental process for transit makes building the lines slower when roads can run free until they hit non-attainment, even though those transit lines would let them go further faster.

LRT Hiring

Jobs coming for the Siemens LRT plant in Sacramento. Does anyone know if it was decided whether Breda was going to open a plant in LA? They have one in Pittsburg CA, would the LA opening mean the Pittsburg closing? So many questions!

Two Types of Approval

There's a dustup in Seattle over a voter approved streetcar on First Hill. Candidate Mallahan thinks it's not so smart and would oppose it on the grounds of its expense. Of course he's showing his true colors faster than anyone expected but his even bigger mistake in my eyes is stating that the tunnel deal between the city, state, and county is more of a done deal because of the years it has taken to come to agreement. As if voter approval was just something for the plebes. While its nice that they came to agreement, it's not what voters even wanted and shows a disconnect between what voter approved means and what politician approved means.

"Secondly, when voters vote for something and fund it, as they have with the First Hill Street Car, we should build it. And Mr. Mallahan doesn't seemto think that's the case. But he also seems to think we should build a tunnel that 70 percent of Seattle voters oppose."
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Mallahan's campaign shrugged off the attack and accused McGinn of inconsistency and hypocrisy because he wants to thwart the $4.3 billion Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel project that took years for the state, City and King County to agree on.

I don't quite understand the inconstancy, but this is coming from someone who believes unfunded backroom highway deals are more important than voter approved funded transit deals.

Monday Night Notes

I'm wondering if Austin ever did a real alternatives analysis for the center city line. I imagine its a no, and if so, they would do well to see where the highest ridership is. I'm guessing Guadalupe.
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Lots of people are taking light rail in Phoenix. However its not the usual work trip.

Metro found that only 27 percent of the patrons ride the light rail to and from work. In many large cities, commuters make up the dominant share of riders. The survey found that sports fans, shoppers and people going to and from the airport or cultural events form the largest group.

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Folks in Dallas are worried that the light rail line will make Richardson grow so fast that traffic will be horrendous.

Lots of development is going forward in Richardson, with much of it related to DART's rail service. But there's a downside to this good fortune: increased pressure on roadways. North Central Expressway is getting the big pounding.

I'm sure its all the transits fault.
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So Much for Faster

One of the claims of BRT is that its faster to implement. As we know from work here in the Bay Area and other parts of California is that with all the environmental regs that sometimes isn't true at all. Poor cars, they just have too many buses in their way. It's too bad really since places like San Francisco and LA should have had bus lanes a long time ago. There's more than enough ridership on the lines to justify the dedicated lanes.

Late Night Notes

Gonna be a busy weekend. Check out some of the things that are going on:

Looks like the Capital Planning Commission still hates getting rid of particulates. Did anyone else see this report on how they affect the lungs of children from an earlier post?
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The Green Line in Dallas is opening soon. The Green Line in Portland is opening soon. And the Northstar line is coming as well. What's on tap after that?
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Honolulu is banning BO on buses.
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Helsinki is finally ordering trams replacing the old ones from the 1970's. Man those things last a long time.

Jersey Barrier No More

The transit hub tax credit is pulling in folks that didn't think it was a possible option before.

Because of amendments to the Urban Transit Hub Tax Credit program, including lower thresholds for companies to participate and allowing the transfer of credits, Woodmont is considering potential office projects in all of the program’s nine qualifying urban municipalities — Camden, East Orange, Elizabeth, Hoboken, Jersey City, Newark, New Brunswick, Paterson and Trenton.

“We’re looking to see if there are possibilities to relocate companies into these urban centers where they may not have been otherwise considering that location,” said Santola, whose firm is looking at two or three concrete deals under the tax credit program.