The Ads Begin

It seems silly that any city should have to vote on passenger rail when they don't have to vote for another city service such as improvements to water and streets. I'm not against voting for sales taxes or bond measures as we do these with city services all the time. What does bother me is having to ask permission for every little detail when the money is already assembled. When you start deferring every little decision to voters, you get California. And look at how well we're doing!

The only other city that has been made to vote on passenger rail even if it didn't include a bond measure or sales tax increase is Austin. Other cities including Denver and Houston decided to build the first line and found that it was a pretty good idea, so voters raised taxes on themselves to expand them. So Issue 9 begins in Cincinnati and here is the first ad in the fight against a ballot measure that would make the public vote on any amendment having to do with passenger rail, including commuter, streetcar, or even high speed rail.

Non Highway Users Anonymous

They can will it to be a user fee all they want, but it isn't. As an example, during my time in Austin I drove quite a bit around town if I wasn't on the #1, 5, 7 buses. But for the most part I wasn't on the highways. A little Mopac here, a little 183 there, but maybe twice a month during school if that. TxDOT and the MPO get back federal flex funds which they can use for lots of things. But it's not usually paying directly for what you're using that gas on most, those local roads.

Now it does come back to transit etc, but you're not paying directly for what you're using. I do pay a user fee now when I go over the bay bridge to my Gramma's house. And for the most part that $4 charge keeps me taking BART, which is faster anyway to downtown Oakland. But these tea party cries of socialism fall on deaf ears when you know these same people LOVE the socialism of roads. They even love the community good of transit. So much so that when it doesn't work, they get angry that government isn't doing a job they didn't fund it enough to do. Oh the irony.

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.