Roads & Bridges

Everyone remembers the constant repeating of Roads and Bridges during the campaign and during the process for the stimulus package. I'm pretty sure when he was discussing this he meant existing roads and bridges instead of new ones. Well this wasn't so clear to the road warriors:

"The President's strong support for roads and bridges serves him well. Despite the controversy over the Economic Recovery package, 94% of Americans supported the President's call to increase infrastructure investments. Roads and bridges rank #2 in importance among infrastructure priorities for the American people. And while Congress only provided 3.6% of the Economic Recovery funds for roads and bridges, the President's consistent promotion of highway infrastructure made his views crystal clear.

I think its funny that when roads and bridges are discussed, people on the road side automatically think highways. It's like a dog whistle but in this case it might not mean what they think it does, which to us should be heartening. There are also plenty of complaints about tolling and the feeling that there won't be enough money to build the highway system all over again.

1. The proposal implies that the 87-year old budgetary mechanism known as "contract authority" be deleted from the budget. Without contract authority, multi-year highway projects cannot be fully-funded.
2. There is no mention of President Obama's support for roads and bridges anywhere in DOT's budget framework.
3. "Road pricing" is discussed as an option in the budget framework, despite Secretary LaHood's opposition to tolling existing roads.
4. There is no room in the budget for any substantial increase in highway funding, despite the President's recent call for investment levels that would rival the funding for construction of the Interstate Highway System.

Perhaps Mr. Obama tricked us during the election with the whole roads and bridges comment on repeat. I for one would welcome the trick if it meant we are changing the way we're funding new capacity and alternative transportation modes. We will see.

People Love the Trains

The new Siemens SD70s in Portland are popular. And they haven't carried a revenue passenger yet.

Does This Look Familiar?

I believe it looks like the creation of sprawl. If you wanted this to happen, why are you in the city at all? Why not just move to the exurbs. It already exists like that there. It's another example of the car companies and traffic engineers fantasy that everyone wants a car and everyone can have a car if we just pave the city with lanes to accommodate it. It's just cleverly repackaged as a promo for GPS navigation. Fortunately, we're beginning to think differently about the roll they play.

Preserving Affordable Housing Near Transit

In a recent report, my day job with the National Housing Trust looked at the number of expiring section 8 and 202 units near fixed guideway transit stations in 8 cities. In these cities, 63% (65,000) of the units that are located within a half mile of the station will have their section 8 and section 202 housing contracts expire in 2012.

This is only eight cities with rail transit but when you think about the mobility that transit allows for people who already have a hard time, it's an even bigger deal when it disappears. A recent Center for Housing Policy report found that low and moderate income families spend as much or more on transportation than they spend on housing. So you can see why it would be important to preserve housing such as this near transit stations in order to give folks more opportunities than they would have if they lived on the periphery. There should be a concerted effort to preserve these affordable units near transit.

So imagine my hope rising when the MacAurthur Foundation along with Enterprise Community Partners pledged $3.5 million dollars to fund new and preserve affordable housing units in the Denver region near transit corridors.

ULC — a nonprofit group affiliated with the Denver Foundation that buys, preserves and develops urban real estate — is expected to be the sole borrower of the fund, and will be responsible for buying property for the TOD housing and partnering with local companies for site redevelopment.

For the TOD housing project, the ULC will target three types of properties — existing, federally assisted rental housing; unsubsidized rental properties; and properties that currently are vacant or used for commercial purposes that have desirable locations for new affordable housing.

This is a way to get out in front of the market. If used intelligently, much of the money could be used for landbanking along future transit corridors then provided to affordable housing developers who could never get in on the market later on. I hope this is replicated in other cities soon.

File Under, Are You Serious???!!

I just couldn't help myself. I had to share these two insane articles with you all. I keep telling myself I'm not going to post this drivel, but these are pure comedy.

Randall O'Toole - Save Washington Metro by Privatizing It
Reason Online - Rant against the Cinci streetcar, comparing it to a monorail

A good measure of our success over the next 4 years will be how crazy we can make these guys. Looks like we're off to a good start.

Related Comedy: Parking

From Seinfeld:

George: Look, I have my system. First I look for the dream spot right in front of the door, then I slowly expand out in concentric circles.

Elaine: Oh come on, George, please put it in a garage. I don't want to spend an hour looking for a space.

George: I can't park in a garage.

Elaine: Why?

George: I don't know, I just can't. Nobody in my family can pay for parking, it's a sickness. My father never paid for parking; my mother, my brother, nobody. We can't do it.

Elaine: I'll pay for it.

George: You don't understand. A garage. I can't even pull in there. It's like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay, when if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free? (he hears a horn honking) What? What do you want? Go around me, I'm looking for spaces.

And people wonder why there is so much traffic!

Vintage Trolley Bus

I love the English Russia blog. You have to see these pictures of old trolley buses still in service that look like they have been to hell and back. I'm glad Muni keeps its trolley buses together better than this.

Extra: If you don't have a ROW, run your tram on the ice.

Midweek High Speed Rail Links

My feed reader is getting bombarded with high speed rail articles. It's crazy how much attention something gets when leadership in this country gets behind it. In addition, things are heating up in California and the nuts on the Peninsula are trying to weasel out. Some of the anon comments on Robert's HSR blog are quite hilarious. I'm paraphrasing but when you say "Rich people live here and will sue so move the alignment to where the poor people are" it's time to rethink your priorities.
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An article in the San Jose Mercury News discusses the possibility of trenching. This is a better option than ending the line at San Jose and running Rapid Rail (which I assume is BART or electrified Caltrain) up the peninsula.
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One of China's High Speed Rail lines is going to start construction soon. Ahead again.

Groundwork started Thursday on a high-speed passenger rail line that will link Shanghai with Hangzhou in east China with trains that can run up to 350 km per hour.

And if only the United States worked like this...

Rail capacity in the Yangtze River Delta region has reached saturation point, said Yu. He said that during peak travel seasons, cargo transport was often suspended to make way for passenger trains.

Firefox warned me about the site so probably not a good idea to click...but if you must.
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It looks like Richard Branson wants to wring more money out of the trip between San Francisco and Los Angeles. He has me sold on Virgin America. Robert says he'd rather an agency cover it so we can pump profits back into expansion.
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Newsflash. People who are bashing high speed rail as a Disneyland Ride are out of touch with America. It would also do them some good to get out of thier congressional district, state, or Washington DC once in a while to that crazy socialist Europe part of the world. I mean, Bulgaria will have HSR soon! BULGARIA!!!

LRT Number Crunching

I got into a debate on Streetsblog about passenger miles and capacity and saw a calculation I had never seen used as a reason that light rail sucked. It's an interesting calculation but it tells me nothing. GaryG states:

You simply multiply vehicle revenue miles by vehicle capacity in passengers to get total revenue capacity in passenger-miles. You then divide actual passenger-miles by revenue capacity passenger-miles to calculate the share of capacity that was actually used to transport passengers in revenue service. The calculation works out to an average occupancy of about 14 passengers per light rail vehicle. Each vehicle has a capacity of 140 passengers or more.

This makes no sense what so ever to me. First off, averaging anything over the whole day seems silly to me. Do we talk about roads being a waste when they don't carry cars at midnight? Another thing is that there's no filter for the peak period which is what of these lines relieve pressure on. The telling thing is that when we looked at the New York Subway, it was only 28 passengers per car. It reminds me of that calculation done a few years ago that all transit systems except for BART are worthless.

Anyways, my argument was that we should look at cost per passenger mile to see the efficiency of each mode. There was a fight about capital costs as there always are from people who think buses can do any job rail does but it led me to the 2007 National Transit Database numbers in easily readable format. Check out some of these numbers:

Cost Per Passenger Mile 2007

Denver
34 cents Light Rail
67 cents Bus

Portland
39 cents Light Rail
93 cents Bus

San Diego
27 cents Light Rail
71 cents Bus

Houston
53 cents Light Rail
55 cents Bus

Minneapolis
42 cents Light Rail
72 cents Bus

San Jose
103 cents Light Rail
155 cents Bus

Buffalo
1.63 cents Light Rail
1.24 cents Bus

Muni
116 cents Light Rail
101 cents Bus

Perhaps light rail in San Francisco is a waste. We should just rip out the tracks, no one likes riding on rails anyways...right? Wouldn't it be nice to toss a three car train on the N or KLM? Perhaps making Muni less like a bus stopping at every stop sign in the Avenues and on Church would help too.

Trains Vs Trucks?

I think this is a perfect example of single mode network thinking. Yes the rail lines don't go to the back of the Best Buy but they shouldn't. The rail lines do certain jobs well and trucks do other jobs well. Why not work together?

In transit, my favorite example is the CityCargo tram. Yes it's a tram that delivers cargo, but it has little electric trucks to deliver directly to the door to merchants in Amsterdam. It only works with both modes.