High Speed Rail for the Masses

Yesterday was such an HSR frenzy that I thought it should be documented:

First, David Lazarus questions whether transit will work in the United States. He talked to some "experts":

He said investments in transit projects need to be accompanied by policies designed to make driving costlier and thus make public transportation more attractive. These policies include significantly higher charges for parking virtually wherever you go and the increased use of toll roads.

I don't like this frame. You mean we need to charge what they really cost. It's not like we would inflate the cost just for the heck of it to some arbitrary number. I guess we could, but really if people just realized how much that garage spot cost or how much the roads really cost things would be much different. Lazarus concludes:

I hate to be cynical, but I simply can't imagine political leaders at the local, state or federal level telling voters that they support a big increase in gas taxes, sky-high parking fees and high-density neighborhoods.

There's a lack of supply of those types of neighborhoods. I really wish people would realize this. It's not that some people don't want to live in these types of environments. It's that for the most part it's illegal. That we need to change.

But a question I had coming out of it is whether HSR can really be called "transit". We don't call air travel transit do we? It seems to me like a kind of grey area. How do you define what transit is and what it isn't. Lazarus was also on NPR's Marketplace.
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The head of Ryanair is obviously going to jump up and down and hold his breath if the UK government states that all short haul flights should be by train. Obviously not all trips can be by train but England really shouldn't be hop skipping inside the country when there is a faster alternative.
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Rob talks Intercity buses. They are cheap and becoming more plentiful. I don't see them being an alternative to rail as some believe. Rob also talks Bent Flyvbjerg. Many people use his work to say we shouldn't do megaprojects. Rob must be back to posting more. Free time?
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That China place is rocking along with their HSR lines. Many places that were super far apart have halfed their travel time between the two. In such a large country, HSR will bring them closer.
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Glaeser. I've heard he's a good economist. How come everything I read from him that's politically tinged is awful. Ryan explains.

The First Electric Railway?

While Richmond VA is still the first electric transit system proved in 1888 by Frank J Sprague, apparently Montgomery Alabama was the city with the distinction of the first electric streetcar line in 1886. Or was it? The often unsung electrician was Charles Van Depoele and he opened 11 electric railway lines before Sprague opened his network in Richmond. The first being a demonstration line in Chicago in 1883. However these systems were prone to breakdowns and were often in need of fixing.

Another electrician, Leo Daft, had built electric lines on Pico in LA and in New Jersey, only to have issues with trollers coming off the wires and reliability. It wasn't until Frank J Sprague that systems were finally reliable enough and the invention of the spring loaded trolley pole (with the help of Van Depoele's first troller idea) kept the wire and trolley in constant contact. However Mr. Sprague recognized himself that the first regularly operating trolley line was Mr. Daft's in Hamden Line in Baltimore, constructed in 1885.

Mr. Sprague himself opened a line in St. Joseph Missouri in 1887 but proved himself when he electrified and ran 40 cars in Richmond VA in 1888. He also proved to investors that the vehicles would still work when they were backed up end to end, all pulling electricity from the same wire. He shouldn't get all the credit since there were many that came before him, but he's often credited with being the father of electric transit.

So which was the first? Are we going by reliability? By first operating date? By demonstration? I would say they all win since they all contributed to the cause. It's just unfortunate that they haven't gotten the recognition they deserve for their contributions.

H/T Streetsblog Cap Hill & Urban Mass Transit

Jim Bowie & Davy Crockett Would Ride

San Antonio leaders are very optimistic in saying they will have streetcars in three years. And that would put Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio ahead of Austin in the Transit Space Race.

Henry Muñoz, VIA Metropolitan Transit’s board chairman, said he expects the agency to break ground in two or three years and will announce in the next month a citizens advisory committee to help guide the creation of a starter streetcar system.

DOC Streetcar

Dallas and Oak Cliff have decided to get together on plans for a streetcar. Previously, Oak Cliff and Fort Worth were going to go in together to seek TIGER stimulus funding for new streetcar projects. However Dallas has plans for a streetcar as well, so bringing the ideas together is smart, considering it will lower the overall costs of a system that would likely run just blocks away from the other if allowed to plan separately.

I'm going to take a wild guess and venture to say that they won't get funding for the project. Given the whole country is foaming at the mouth for only $1.5 billion dollars in funds, it would be hard to expect projects like these to get funding over those more established. The low funding with so much interest makes that extra $2 billion from cash for clunkers look silly as well, considering there are transit projects that could help guide new growth that reduces VMT versus paying for people's new cars so they can drive more.

Governor Good Hair

Does this mean that we can give Governor Perry a hard time for all his contacts within the toll road community? I'm not sure he really wants to start this fight.

Grape Flavors

Governor O'Malley will choose LRT for both the Red and Purple lines tomorrow which has been an awaited decision for a long time. I hope that the Red line will not be another stand alone line like the green line and the existing LRT line. Not being able to share equipment and operating a single line with shops etc for each line in the system seems wasteful to me. Honestly both of these lines should be Metro subway lines, unfortunately these days all we do is look at the cost first and long term benefits and value last. Such is life I guess.

One More Clunker

Perhaps the streetcars of San Francisco were getting a bit upset with the lack of funding coming their way and the silly cash for clunkers program, so they decided to tag team an SUV. In all seriousness, I hope everyone is ok.

Track Trauma

I've discussed the operator side of suicides on the track before. The Mercury News goes into greater detail with Caltrain engineers.

Alternate Universe

An article on NBC 11 ponders what would have happened if the Bay Area never would have constructed BART. It's an interesting thought, especially considering the alternative they paint in the article.

We'd certainly have an electrified Caltrain running to downtown San Francisco at a faster speed than the current Baby Bullets -- and perhaps running on the Bay Bridge or in a new tunnel under San Francisco Bay to Oakland and beyond. We'd also have real commuter rail from the East Bay to Silicon Valley, the region's most vital employment center -- not the paltry ACE and Capitol Corridor services people have to make do with.

We'd have light rail, a modern version of the Key System, crisscrossing the East Bay. And we'd certainly have faster service in San Francisco, the city most dependent on public transit.

While its a pretty picture do we really think that alternatives to BART would have gotten traction without the existence of BART or a core program? In San Francisco, the construction of BART was also the time that the Muni Metro Market street tunnel was constructed. I often wish that we had built a center cities metro and connected the edges with commuter rail to places like Walnut Creek and Pleasanton. It perhaps could have lowered the cost and increased productivity of the system. But as usual hindsight is 20/20. We won't really know either way.

One thing the article points out that really hits me and should hit everyone in San Francisco.

Isn't it ridiculous that transit commuters take less time to go from Walnut Creek to downtown San Francisco than it does to cross the city?

Yes, yes it is.

Sunday Night Notes

Karlsruhe, notorious for their introduction of tram trains, is looking at nickel cadmium batteries for short segments of the line where there is a switch from Mainline to Tram operations.
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Fort Collins had a street railway until 1951, some of the tracks were dug up under the pavement recently.
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All about priorities:

Luoni said the key is spending priorities, not lack of funds. The money the federal government spent in one year on the Iraq war could have funded 200 light rail transit systems.

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We might be seeing solar ferry service in Hong Kong. At some point the bay area was supposed to have a more robust ferry system, but I haven't heard or seen anything about it lately.
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Gavin seems to not really care. Please go away soon.
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The New York Times editorial on HSR is pretty good. We need a transportation bill, not a stall. And they don't call it the highway bill!

Despite his support of the idea of high-speed rail, President Obama has put off dealing with the national transportation bill for another 18 months. That is a delayed opportunity to move forward on an important new national transportation plan to expand public transit in much the way the Federal-Aid Highway Act did for roads more than 50 years ago.

Until Mr. Obama and members of Congress can enact a comprehensive new transit agenda, both have an obligation to make a down payment on high-speed-rail corridors across the nation.

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Tough times for TOD and Mixed Use projects in Atlanta