The Reason Why the Car Rules....

is that the federal government apparently thinks autos should be put ahead of everything else. Portland Transport brings us up to speed on the request by the Federal Highway Administration that Metro, Portland's regional government, put cars at the top of its RTP. This is ridiculousness. The reason why cars are at the top of the food chain is because they have been forced there over many many years. Jonathan puts it best...

When is the U.S. going to take a serious look at how misguided our blind allegiance to the automobile has been for the last hundred years? We don’t need to be anti-car, but we do need to be much more car-conscious. You’d think with our current issues of obesity, global warming, wars over oil, skyrocketing highway costs, etc… that the feds might just be a bit more open to new ideas.

Cristof Destroys Culbertson

Over at Intermodality, Cristof clears up some muck about that knuckledragger Culbertson and proves that yes, Light Rail can run on Richmond. I wonder what would happen if we had to vote for freeways.

Rails to Trails

I love rails to trails. It's a great idea and opens up good space for running. However there is one caveat. If you ever want to have a transit line back in the corridor where there will be a rails with trails project, don't ever build a rail trail without the transit. It is politically impossible to get the rail back in once people have gotten rid of it. This idea was in a Seattle paper this morning. If you want the rails with the trails, gotta put them in.

Capital Funding Sources #3

Because transit investments have positive relationships on property values, lately developers are getting in on the act. But basically people are getting rich off of a public investment. While there is nothing wrong with it (unless you're Speaker Dennis Hastert and you do it illegally) shouldn't the public get something more out of its investment?

Well they can if they figure out a way to take some of the increased value from the landowners that got lucky enough to have a public investment near their property. I'm not talking about TIF, but rather some sort of a transfer tax. The idea is that as soon as a city knows that they are going to make a value changing investment, they should create a selling district like a TIF. They take an inventory of the district around each rail station and its land value as well as sample areas in the region that aren't around rail stations. If a property is sold between announcement of the rail station placement and the opening of the line (perhaps another time after opening) then the sales price is measured against the control group for the region and the increase over the regional average is taxed at a certain amount at sales time. This extra capital could be used on future capital improvement projects or an affordable housing fund for the station area. Just another idea...

Culbertson Not the Coldest Beer in the Fridge

So here is another idiotic writeup by Mini Tom Delay. Rep. John Culbertson asks Metro to put the rail down Westpark which in his opinion is a good idea. What he doesn't know however is that the FTA would never fund that route. The ridership is too low to get a favorable rating in the New Starts program yet he pushes it anyways. Any guess as to why? Well he thinks that he needs to hold metro accountable but really it's because he hates transit. Can't we get rid of this guy like we got rid of Tom Delay?

Tram Blogging

How About some Tram Blogging? This yellow Siemens Combino Supra is from Budapest. It's reportedly one of the longest trams in the world with 6 modules and 54 meters long(177 Feet). That's almost 3 articulated buses. Very Cool. This picture was taken by Marcus Tschaut.

The Next Modern Streetcar

The next modern streetcar to open will be the South Lake Union Line in Seattle. Currently under construction, it was the brainchild of land owners in the South Lake Union neighborhood that would allow them to connect up an underutilized industrial properties that could be redeveloped with downtown. The downtown end consists of connections to the new regional light rail, monorail and buses.

Most of it is going to be paid for by the landowners taxing themselves. Paul Allen, former Microsoft exec, and the other owners plan to change the neighborhood with high rise apartments and biomedical research facilities. It will be an impressive transformation and they are relying on the streetcar pretty heavily. The idea was conceived based on the success of Portland, so hopefully they will match the experience there.

Houston Representatives (D) Want LRT

Well now that big bad Tom Delay is gone looks like Houston residents might get what they actually voted for. Being from Houston I've been watching this with interest. Tom Delay and his little buddy Rep Culbertson were so anti-transit yet so powerful they were able to get Metro to change its technology from LRT to BRT. This made all the voters mad because they felt like they'd been tricked. This also put Metro in a bad political situation weakening their ability to have a little more leeway. While we don't know if they can actually get it changed, we do know that Culbertson is a jackass and will build 10 lane freeways all day knocking down houses, but when it comes to light rail, if its built next to a house he's gonna stop it or put in a bus.

Planning Hard or Hardly Planning?

This post had a bit of thinking about how smart it is to be forward thinking in your transportation planning. Well today in the Salt Lake City Tribune it seems like in a plan for a new 8 lane freeway they didn't look at whether it would be prudent to reserve space for transit. They only looked at as the articles states...

But Wasatch Front Regional Council staffers, who are updating the agency's long-range transportation plan, only evaluated which mode of transportation - vehicle or transit - would get people to their destinations the quickest, said council executive director Chuck Chappell. That means streetcars or BRT wouldn't be cost-effective, he said.

Wouldn't be cost effective? What does the cost effectiveness of a reservation for future transit and smart transportation planning have to do with planning for a freeway? Well it does have to do with cars and auto-centricity that seems to be prolific around the country. At least the press is smart enough to pick up on the highway good ole boy network that still persists at regional and state DOTs. Perhaps because of the heads up it will change during the meetings and final planning.

APTA Calls Bush on His Auto-Centricity

Bill Millar, President of the American Public Transportation Association called out President Bush for not mentioning transit as a way to reduce oil consumption. The following is an excerpt but the full text can be found here...

The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) is disappointed that, in his State of the Union address, President Bush did not recognize public transportation usage as one of the ways Americans can reduce their dependence on foreign oil. We urge Congress and the Administration to increase investment to make public transit services available to more Americans and to include incentives that will encourage greater transit use in the energy legislation that will be developed. The millions of Americans who use public transportation each day know it saves gasoline. APTA commissioned a study entitled "Public Transportation and Petroleum Savings in the U.S.: Reducing Dependence on Oil" so that the President, Congress and our citizens can have the right facts before them to make informed decisions about how to solve our country's energy issues.