Is Good Urban Form Slowing Us Down?

There has been a lot of chatter recently on the issue of fast vs slow transit.  This week is the perfect time for this discussion as two major United States transit projects of differing stripes opened up; the Metro Silver Line in Washington DC and the Tucson Streetcar.

Last week, Yonah Freemark wrote a post discussing the benefits of fast transit specifically calling out the Green Line in Minneapolis for running 11 miles in about an hour.  Now, this line has parts of what people are always asking streetcars to have; dedicated lanes. "They get stuck!"  Yet this line, as well as the T-Third in San Francisco and others mentioned in the post are still "too slow".  Yonah goes on to discuss metro expansion in Paris leaving a discussion of politics and costs of rapid transit to the very end.

To me this points to the first place where urbanism and fast transit disagree with each other, block sizes and stop spacing.  By trying to maximize connections to the community, the transit line has to stop more often, slowing speeds.  And if built into a legacy urban fabric, this also includes negotiation with tons of cross streets where designers don't give priority to the transit line.  This happens in Cleveland on the Health Line BRT as well as the Orange Line in Los Angeles, even though it has its own very separated right of way.  The Gold Line Light Rail in LA and the Orange Line originally had the same distance, yet one was 15 minutes faster end to end. A lot of this had to do with less priority on cross streets given to the Orange Line, not because it was a bus or rail line.

We continue to talk as if dedicated lanes are magic, but its a suite of tools that helps speed transit along inside of our wonderful urban fabrics.  Transit is directly affected by urbanism, if we let it be.

But then there is the other side of this discussion.  Transit's effect on urbanism.  Some New Urbanists believe that slow transit is necessary for building better urbanism.  Rob Steuteville of New Urban News calls this "Place Mobility".  The theory goes like this:

When a streetcar -- or other catalyst -- creates a compact, dynamic place, other kinds of mobility become possible. The densest concentrations of bike-share and car-share stations in Portland are located in the area served by the streetcar. That's no coincidence. You can literally get anywhere without a car.

In Portland parlance, this is the "Trip Not Taken".  When you build up the urban fabric of a city, many usually induced trips disappear.  That car trip to the grocery store becomes a walk and that streetcar trip to Powell's Books might be a bike trip now.  Or in the world of the web, that trip might change hands, from you to the delivery truck.  In Portland at the time they calculated a 31 million mile reduction in VMT from the housing units built along the streetcar route.

To increase the viability of streetcars in a world dominated by a "cost effectiveness" measure dependent on calculations of speed, the "Trip Not Taken" was refreshing.  Many transit lines were being built without regard to neighborhood or were cheap and easy.  But they were fast!  You can see how the "cost effectiveness" measure intervened with elevated rail through Tyson's Corner (yes I'm still annoyed) or the numerous commuter rail lines on freight rights of way in smaller regions that probably should never have been built.  But they were fast!

Yes the streetcar helps with creating place in the minds of developers and urban enthusiasts, but no it doesn't do the whole job.  The Pearl District and Seattle's South Lake Union were perfect storms of huge singular property ownership, massive investments in additional infrastructure, proximity to a major employment center, lack of NIMBYs, and a strong real estate market.  But look at the results.  It's hard to argue that the streetcar didn't help develop this massively successful district in one of planning's favorite cities.  But it's also hard to give it all the credit.

The crux of the argument is that place making should be the ultimate goal and slowing things down makes things better.  And many cities see the streetcar as some sort of fertilizer that makes it grow and a reason to change zoning code. Because of very stringent local land use opposition (read NIMBY), this makes a lot of sense.  If a streetcar can lead to the restructuring of land use or the fulcrum of a district revitalization, I see that as a benefit. But again, don't give it too much credit.   

From a safety standpoint this slowing down idea makes sense.  The Portland Streetcar has been in collisions, but no one has died or been seriously hurt, unlike a number of high profile collisions in places like Houston, where drivers can't seem to follow the rules. Our society also puts up with over 30,000 deaths a year to get places faster on interstate highways as well.

But...

Ultimately the base success of a transit line isn't in the amount of development it has spurred or the zoning it has changed.  It's the ability to get a lot of people where they want to go, in a timely fashion.  A commenter on Jarret Walker's Human Transit Blog says it best.

But the romantic impulse towards slow transit wears away quickly if you have no choice but to rely on it all the time! I don't have a car, so I rely on buses that travel excruciatingly slowly, wasting much of my time.

As someone who has gotten rid of my car and considers myself a walking, bike riding, transit loving (and sometimes zipcaring) urbanist, I find it very annoying that it takes an hour to go three miles here in San Francisco on the bus.  And if I need to get downtown, I take the Subway which is a half mile away versus the streetcar which is half a block away because time does actually matter.  We see this decision play out every day when people choose to drive cars over using transit.

But if we are going to spend so much money, we might as well figure out a way to transport the most people possible. Sometimes that might be streetcars.  Other times it's not.

But back to urbanism and transit.

In Portland, dedicated lanes on the North/South parts of the line wouldn't make as much difference because it has the same issues we mentioned with the Green Line above and narrow streets.  Streetcars have to deal with urbanism.  I think streetcars are ok as a circulator in downtowns, because these are the trips that help people get around dense places that are proximate.  You can bring your groceries on when its raining and disabled folks can load their wheelchairs with dignity. Tourists like the certainty of the tracks and little kids love the ride.  We see that even on 20 minute headways, 13,000 riders are on the line every day.  It's hard to argue with that, given it's more riders than many first choice bus lines in some major cities without rail. 

However for linear route based transit operations, we need dedicated lanes and signal priority to at least make the expenditure worthwhile and play nice with our urbanism.  Once you get outside of a district, people want to get places.  I like subways and wish we had more, but it seems politics and money seem to get in the way like Yonah mentions above.  Some might even argue that before we even think about building fixed guideway lines, we should focus on our buses.  Perhaps we should have a threshold system ridership before putting in rail, to determine whether all options for increasing ridership have been exhausted.  Houston's new network plan could be a good guide.  And personally, I don't think BRT should be special. It should be the norm. Luckily the new 5339 bus facilities funding guidance could allow for BRT and Rapid Bus funding (they are NOT the same thing). 

But there's a new report out which discusses which factors drive ridership for fixed guideway transit once we decide to go that route.  Employment and residential density around transit lines, the cost of parking downtown, and grade separation were found to be the most effective measures when put together to drive ridership according to a recent TCRP report released earlier this month. Individually employment had an r squared of .2 while the others had negligible impacts.  Only taken together as a whole did these measures drive the most ridership as seen below.

The report goes on to say "The degree of grade separation is likely influential because it serves as a proxy for service variables such as speed, frequency, and reliability that may lead to greater transit ridership."

But determining success is hard.  In fact, its so hard that of the transit projects surveyed, the only thing that transit agencies seemed to agree on (it has dots in every project below) was that the line would be cheap!  We discussed this briefly above. 

"Provide fixed guideway transit in corridors where inexpensive right of way can be easily accessed"

Which is many times why we end up with slow transit.  It's cheap. We're cheap. Streetcar costs are below that of light rail or subways and since its in a mixed traffic right of way, it will be cheaper politically than BRT.  Commuter rail on freight rights of way is the best to them though even though its the worst at creating ridership.  To me it's is even cheaper because it usually ignores the chart above with the focus on employment and residential density.

So all of this is to say that Streetcars are not the worst transit ever and urbanism will affect transit, and transit will affect urbanism.  We just need to decide what the appropriate ways are for intervention such that we maximize people's ability to get to the places they want to go and build great communities.  Let's not swing the pendulum too far to either side, it might tip the balance against us. 

Neglected Cities Push Certain Transit Because Regional Agencies Won't

In the middle of all the wrangling over the Cincinnati streetcar Peter Rogoff, who is the FTA administrator, said something really interesting in his letter to the city and transit agency. The transit agency (SORTA) is the fiduciary agent for the FTA funding pass through to the city and wants to stay on the FTA's good side since they receive other federal funding. The mayor is looking to kill the project for who knows what reasons he set his mind to, but this is really kind of an aside.  Rogoff:

Transit improvements are best deployed when they are governed and controlled 'under one roof.

He goes on to say in his letter, relayed by the Cincinnati Business Courier

While FTA has been successful in supporting transit projects that are not controlled or operated by the region's principal transit agency, we have found that there are a great many economies of scale that better serve the taxpayer when a fully staffed and experienced transit provider is involved from the very beginning

But isn't that part of the problem?  These massive regional transit agencies are typically stacked with suburban board members that don't always have the core cities needs at heart.  They are usually concocting schemes to extract money or service in some form or fashion from the more transit willing neighborhoods in the region in order to have some sort of suburb to city dream bus or commuter rail line that costs a lot, but really doesn't move the needle on changing mobility in a meaningful way.  Either that or they have to have an election that includes heavy transit opposition precincts that sink ballot initiatives that pass in the city proper.

So recently cities have been taking on the mantle of thinking up and building transit that works for them and their goals.  Portland, Cincinnati, Austin, and others have all taken up planning for more urban transit options and with much different goals.  At the start of the Portland Streetcar process, Tri-Met wanted nothing to do with it.  They were a regional agency.  Right or wrong, the city streetcar movement is a function of the neglect that center cities feel when it comes to regional transit priorities.  The core might be the economic engine for the region, but the fiscal extraction continues.

This is also a disappointing admission that transit agencies and their federal funders still don't know their role in city building.   I'm not talking about building a streetcar and waiting for housing development to come, but rather the need to economically serve, connect, and bolster regional employment centers with workers in a more productive way than the single occupancy car. 

Today an NPR story on Austin popped up with TTI's Tim Lomax stating that it wasn't building roads or transit that needed to change, it was people's behavior. 

But Lomax says his computer models show the only real solution is going to involve changes in behavior and lifestyle. "We did some modeling to suggest the kind of magnitude of change," he says. "We used a giant hammer on the travel model. We took away 40 percent of the work trips. We said those are going to happen somehow, but they're not going to happen in a car." To keep traffic flowing in his sophisticated models, Lomax plays God of Austin. "We said, instead of people driving on average 20 to 25 miles to get to work, now they're going to drive five, six or seven miles to get to work," he says. "That says there's going to be a massive shift in jobs and population."

Emphasis mine.  Those other 40% of work trips that would be needed to keep traffic flowing green (which would never happen - induced demand, duh) would come from walking, biking, and transit because the employment cores were adequately served with good transit. 

What we continue to see today is an overly regional approach to transit development based on a suburban fantasy of living where you want and commuting into work downtown.  Most people don't work downtown.  But intensification of core neighborhoods strengthens the tax base.  So what you get is like what is happening in Minneapolis.  The transit agency is trying to fund commuter service that they call light rail while the city thinks of streetcars because they don't have the funding power to do more.  But there is no talk of dedicated lane surface light rail or subways that only go to the edge of the streetcar suburbs because that doesn't fit each side's worldview. 

The FTA seems to be on the suburban side of the issue, allowing, even wanting, these commuter systems that end up being really expensive to operate (See Northstar in the Twin Cities) with somewhat limited value at this point in their transit network development.  If the FTA can't figure out the suburban leaning of transit agencies or the need to feed employment centers better, we're going to keep traveling down the same choked road, and it won't be pretty. 

Jobs North of the University of Texas on Two Corridors

Here are the job totals north of the University of Texas along the two corridors.  Guess which corridor the local establishment chose.  Not the one with the most jobs, or low income jobs.  What drives transit ridership?  Employment.

On Charlotte's Fight with North Carolina, Itself

A fight is breaking out between former Charlotte Mayor/current NC Governor Pat McCrory and current Mayor Anthony Foxx over funding related to the local Streetcar and LRT projects.  Charlotte, unlike many other states gives state level full funding grant agreements for capital transit projects. In 1998 Charlotte passed a half cent sales tax for transit expansion in the region with McCrory leading the charge.  In 2007 the pro transit folks fought off another ballot measure to take away the half cent and won by 70% of the vote.  This fight was partly started because of cost overruns that bothered libertarians, also chafing at the thought of having rail in the region.  Apparently the most despised mode of all. 

At this juncture, the city is looking to fund the streetcar project with local property taxes because there is no funding available from the half cent, which is tied up in the Northeast Corridor and operations of the expanded bus system.  The bus system funding has worked so well, that its seen over a 100% ridership increase.  Because of the lack of transit funding, the regional plan as seen below, is taking much longer than initially planned.

This seems to be the rub.  McCrory believes that only the half cent set aside for transit should be used for expansion, and that funding from the state ($299m) is dependent on local funding being so constrained, that the city has to go through the state.  Apparently trying to speed up the process of building out the network by locally funding is not allowed.  One line at a time, and no streetcars. And forget that the roads don't pay for themselves. What this tells us is that decision makers in the state think that if Charlotte has its half cent of play money, the big boys can use the funding for the other interests.

But what else is going on in the region that would equate to other interests?  How about the $3B in road projects that are happening in Charlotte currently.  And they want to start a state fight over a few hundred million?  What a disgraceful flareup.  The State doesn't want to give money because they think Charlotte has enough, and Charlotte with the help of NCDOT wants to waste billions on sprawl highways. Building sprawl highways that have no use until the land around them is developed into oblivion.  Charlotte pretends that it doesn't want to turn into over sprawling and traffic choked Atlanta, but it looks like being Georgia is the goal, and the state led by Pat McCrory, is more than happy to help them get there.

Grating on a Curve

I was in Houston for a work meeting last spring and went on a tour with our good friend Christof Spieler who has taken a hiatus from blogging at CTC Houston while he is an active member of the board for Houston Metro.  He was kind enough to take me around to a lot of the new construction going on to complete Houston's three newest light rail lines.  I must say I was blown away at the progress and opportunities that the system holds.

Houston's Light Rail Plans via Christof Spieler

I know there is a lot of consternation in Houston from certain congressional parties that if they had it their way would never have let the city build its first line.  But I'm sure glad they did because it's allowed them so much political support to push forward with the system they are installing now.  While even that had its fits and starts as well as issues with general managers and vehicle orders, I firmly believe that this will be the most European system in the United States when completed.

North Corridor Construction



Unlike any other LRT system in the United States, they eschewed existing freight rights of way and made the conscious decision to run in the major corridors with dedicated guideways.  This is going to bring unprecedented mobility to the newly served areas as well as perhaps a few issues as well.

While many say that Houston has no zoning, what it really means is that Houston has no use restrictions.  Unless your neighborhood has existing deed restrictions, anything is fair game as long as it pencils in your pro-forma.  Making that pro-forma more difficult is all of the setback and parking regulations that are required from the city.  It costs a lot of money and changes development dynamics but the lack of use restrictions allow development such as the housing below.  Townhouses on small lots that would never have been allowed in any other single family neighborhood. 


Southwest Corridor in East Downtown (EDO)



This also raises the issue of affordable housing.  While the lack of building restrictions keeps prices fairly low, extremely low in fact when compared to SF or NYC, it doesn't mean that neighborhoods won't see some drastic changes coming to their neighborhoods.




If you would like to see a few more of the images from the trip, check out my Flickr page

Silicon Valley's Transit AND Land Use Problems

There's been a lot of bashing of Silicon Valley lately.  It's the butt of transit jokes because of its light rail line which is one of the least traveled LRT lines in the United States for its distance and service.  At the time it was built, it was one of the first new non legacy lines in the country.  Now that shouldn't be an excuse but we certainly know that in order to be successful you have to connect people with the places they want to go in a timely fashion.  The 1st street line connects a lot of places, but it does it rather slowly.

So we would hope they learned from that mistake when they were planning BART and actually decide to connect places, but give people a faster option, but they decided to double down with aweful all in the same of saving money.  Sure they are saving money using existing ROW for BART, but they are also skipping destinations they need to connect to make it successful. 

Light Rail is Dark Purple, Caltrain is Red, Plannded BART is Steel Blue, Green are areas of high employment density. 

You can see that the planned BART line skips all of the North Valley tech employment and instead makes people depend on a slow light rail system to connect. Even when BART is complete to Berryesa, it won't be as effective as it would have been going under or through this employment cluster into downtown.  Yes it would have cost more but the investment would have been there for hundreds of years. 

Additionally, as I've mentioned in previous posts (1, 2), when silicon valley does get dense, it's in horrible suburban layouts.  You can see below along the San Jose LRT line how buildings suck ridership right out of the system with parking and bad design.

  

The last image above below shows how many buildings you could fit in this space if they had better non auto oriented design.  And I guarantee this would drive ridership along the line. 

Now there have also been discussions of how Silicon Valley needs to become Manhattan in order to keep talent that wants to live in urban places instead of valley sprawl.  An article in the Awl made this claim but in reality, Silicon Valley doesn't need a hefty core of ultra tall buildings, it just needs to use the space it has better and become the DC or Paris of the Western United States.  There's so much opportunity, yet it is completely wasted. 

So in my eyes the transit is part of the problem for not making the connections that increase property values to do this type of infill, but its also the fault of developers who don't understand that a classic way of building for pedestrians is needed to attract pedestrians and quality of life that people are moving to San Francisco to attain. Sure some people don't want that, but we have more than enough supply of single family homes if there's more of a choice.

 

Austin Route Choice Part 3: The Guadalupe/Lamar Alignment

In the previous two posts we discussed the history of Austin's quest for rail transit and the possible political reasons behind the current urban rail alignment.  Finally we're getting to what I feel is the most important part of this series which is making the case for the first urban rail alignment that Austin should undertake.

The reason why I believe that the Guadalupe/Lamar alignment should be the first one is for political and practical reasons.  Many pro-rail folks have written about this issue in the past 8 years so this ultimately is my way of putting more data behind those pushes. Let's go over why-

Political Future

Since 1995 Austin has had a hard time pushing forward with rail because of the politics.  Most of the time the state or rail opponents were trying to take money from Capital Metro and put it into roads.  Currently the city hasn't been able to drum up enough support to decide how to fund expansion or to have another election since the 2004 win.  Given it took 6 years to build the Red Line through fits and starts as well as technical issues, it seems like it will continue to be a hard road until a blockbuster line is constructed.

We saw this in other cities as well.  In places like Houston, the opponents such as Rep Culbertson and others have hammered away at the agency, trying to stop rail expansion at all corners.  However, because the initial line was so successful (40K Riders a day) even the ouster of a General Manager and a house cleaning at Houston Metro has not delayed expansion and three extensions are currently under construction.  In the Twin Cities, Charlotte, and Phoenix, initial lines were successful as well and extensions are pushing forward even through tough political climates.  This is the reason why a first line with killer ridership is important.  If you can silence the critics with a quality product, neighborhoods will be asking for extensions instead of opposing them.

Mining Existing Success 

According to Metro's 2010 Service Plan 2020 report, the three highest ridership bus lines in the city are the #1 (14,912), the Forty Acres UT Campus Route (8,027), and #7 (7,725).  The #1 and #7 are north-south routes that run from dense North Austin neighborhoods through UT, the State, and Downtown Austin.  The #1 specifically and its express bus compatriot the #101 garner over 17,000 riders a day.  That is a respectable number on most major corridors in medium size cities around the United States but at over double any other corridor in the city, it should stand to reason that a dedicated right of way rail line would be a great success.  The map below shows line ridership from this report.  It also shows the living density of downtown workers.  The red lines are the 1,7, and Forty Acres Loop.  Employment data was obtained from LEHD's On the Map program which uses 2010 data.

Where the People Are

Another thing the map above shows is where people who work downtown, at the University, and at the Capital Complex live in greater densities.  The dark purple areas are those which house higher concentrations of Austin's core employees.  Many of the people who are working in the densest employment center in the region are coming from North of the employment cluster, not east where the Urban Rail Line would run.  Additionally, if we're looking for additional ridership, the gross intensity of residents plus workers is highest along the Guadalupe/Lamar corridor as seen in Orange below.  Census tracts in dark green have more than 20 people per acre. This is ridership gold.

Congestion Issues on Guadalupe/Lamar

The corridor I believe should have a dedicated right of way also has a congestion issue. Given the limited number of direct north-south arterials that go through the center city, this is a significant problem. A TTI presentation on congestion made at the February 2012 (Item 3 19:45 into the presentation) transit working group meetings intimated that Guadalupe/Lamar from 6th street to 45th street is the most congested arterial in the city.  In that same meeting, Dave Dobbs mentioned the fact that NEPA documents stated that the Guadalupe/Lamar corridor was at capacity for the last two decades. The same can not be said for the east corridor leading towards the Mueller redevelopment.

But why plan a non-dedicated right of way Rapid Bus for a corridor that has extreme congestion, especially at rush hour when people are leaving work and campus? Anyone who lives in Austin can tell you that Guadalupe from MLK to Dean Keaton is a nightmare at rush hour, moving at a snail's pace.  Data from the Service Plan 2020 report suggests that the #1 bus already suffers from some of this congestion itself.  In fact it is only on time 49.4% of the time.  49.4% That ranks the line 51st out of all the bus lines in Austin in on-time performance.  Most of the time the line is too early.  But if you look at the data, the bus is late almost 20% of the time.  This is certain to affect a Rapid Bus, even with signal pre-emption and fancy stops.

And there's this problem, as much as road warriors would like to, you can't expand the road.  None of the North South arterials are going to magically expand.  With mixed use VMU coming down the pipeline bringing much needed densification, the need to move more people efficiently on the Guadalupe/Lamar corridor is going to be necessary, and welcome.  Putting more buses on the corridor isn't going to help anything other than create bunching.   Giving people an alternative that takes about the same amount of time every day is an important way to raise transit ridership as well as urban densities that create livable communities. The City of Austin seems to understand what Urban Rail would do for a corridor as shown below, however they seem to be ignoring the best corridor for this type of intervention.Why isn't Guadalupe/Lamar the target for this type of intervention?

City of Austin via Downtown Austin Alliance

This is why a dedicated right of way light rail line with significantly greater capacity is necessary on this corridor.  It would be nice to have out to Mueller but outside of the density bonus, why do it?  There's no congestion there.  There's not as much demand for service there.  And you're not going to get a ridership bang there that will give the region the political capital to build extensions fast.  My guess also is that more people have ridden the #1 bus for its utility in Austin than have ridden the #20.

The map below looks at the areas where downtown workers live and boardings.  Again using LEHD On the Map data and shapefiles from Capital Metro showing 2012 weekday boardings (Thanks JMVC and Capital Metro).  You can see that the Guadlupe/Lamar corridor has heavy boardings all the way up as do other parallel corridors moving north.  This is where the demand is coming from for trips. Riverside looks pretty good as well. 

Another thing you can spot from this is that where the dark purple is located, the boardings are heavier.  This is because the density of people that work at UT, Downtown, or the Capital is higher in those places.  Since downtown is constrained, more people are going to opt for the bus.  The same can't be said for other areas that are easily accessed. 

Goals for the System

A memo outlining goals and evaluation criteria for selecting the first segment of the Urban Rail system sent to the City Manager discusses the goals that the line should accomplish.  Mueller certainly is pointed out as the goal corridor but let's go over some of the points here and reference back with what we discussed in this and earlier posts. 

Evaluation Criteria

Provide Greater Mobility Options
1.1 Serve Existing Ridership - I hope we made the case with the maps and analysis of Capital Metro's ridership data that existing ridership is on the Guadalupe/Lamar corridor.  The number 20 Manor bus gets 1/3rd of the ridership that the #1 corridor does.  Additionally, the segment extensions from the edges of UT are approximately the same length from Cresview to 27th as the Mueller alignment (4 miles)  The current ridership on those segments is ~3,300 on the Lamar Guadalupe Corridor to Crestview and only ~600 between San Jacinto and Mueller. 

1.2 Serve New Ridership - New Ridership at Mueller is likely since the project hasn't been built out completely.  However ridership on the #1 will go up because a rail line is a much more attractive option now for downtown commuters, especially in a dedicated right of way.  UT students are already on the hook, but those who would use the line to go to the State or downtown would increase.

1.3 Support Other Modes -  Nothing will support walking and biking more than building greater densities on the Lamar/Guadalupe corridor.  The problem with the Mueller Corridor is the freeway barrier that exists. Once passing under the great wall of former East Avenue, any connections via bike or walking to the major destinations on the West side are lost to novice cyclists and walkers.

1.4 Provide Park and Ride Opportunities - If you take the Lamar/Guadalupe line north to the North Lamar Transit Center, you already have an existing park n ride.  No need to buy new property and it could serve as a place for the maintenance bay as there is industrial land approximate.

Provide Access and Linkages Between Major Activity Hubs

2.1 - There are more activity hubs on the Guadalupe/Lamar corridor north of the core than east of it.  This is proven by the existing ridership.  People have places to go.  Mueller is a wonderful place I'm sure but unlikely a major destination for students or Austin residents who don't live in the neighborhood.  However on Guadalupe there is Amy's Ice Cream, HEB's Central Market, and Changos.  Not to mention all those Hospitals, State Offices, and the Triangle.  Those seem less important than good food to me. ;)

You can see how this works from this route rendering from aerial photos from Austin's skyscraper page. 

But we're not even mentioning the core route, which on the first posts maps show all the parking garages and stadiums the line will pass.  Not the actual buildings people work in or attend classes. I'm not really opposed to either of the alignments downtown, though west is likely faster through the core, but north and east of UT is what we're concerned about the most.  Again I have no quibble with the Riverside segment as it works pretty well.  There probably isn't a need to go to the airport but whatever helps people coming in for SXSW, ACL, or Texas Relays helps.

Improves Linkages Between High Capacity Modes


3.1 Connect to Red Line - Do it further north so there is no backtracking and people can get to more destinations.  A commuter line that only runs every 30 minutes can't possibly be termed high capacity.  It does have a high capacity vehicle.  But if it doesn't go very frequently, then it isn't carrying a high capacity on that corridor.  But you could connect with the rail line further north at say Crestview station. Then people won't have to backtrack and will have a two seat ride (while not ideal, it is better) to anywhere on the great Lamar/Guadalupe corridor.

There is a proposal to connect to the Red Line at Hancock Center.  This would probably be better than the MLK or downtown alternatives, but Red River is a fairly narrow street which makes it difficult.  Ultimately students would love to use the line to go to Freebirds and HEB but outside of commute times its not much of a destination corridor.

3.2 Connect to Lone Star Rail -  Is that going to get done in anyone's lifetime?

3.3 Connect to Metro Rapid. - You'd be replacing most of Metro Rapid because there is a better mode for the corridor, urban rail.  Metro Rapid was just a trick to get the FTA to pay for colored buses and new stops with fixed guideway funding.  This type of purchase is happening around the country and is really starting to bother me as I believe this funding in the New Starts funding pot shouldn't be for Rapid Bus, it should be for actual fixed guideway projects like BRT, Streetcars, and Light Rail.  Agencies should be building Rapid Bus lines, but there are funds for that as well.

3.4 Connect to ABIA - Again, no problems with the riverside segment

Improve Person Moving Capacity

4.1  Break Through Ring of Constraint Intersections - Mueller is better than the most congested arterial in the region as a destination for creating new corridor capacity?  A Guadalupe/Lamar alignment would do this better than any other corridor.  And if downtown streets have been at capacity since 1992 as this Statesman Article suggests, then why are planners shying away from the corridor that the most downtown workers are coming from as shown in the maps?

Additionally, looking at a Downtown Austin Alliance presentation from City of Austin Transportation officials, it's clear that the ring of constraint intersections broken through by the Guadalupe/Lamar corridor are more than the Mueller Alignment.  There is proximity to three of the gateway intersections as seen below (38th and Guadalupe, 38th and Lamar, 24th and Guadalupe) while the Mueller alignment has one. And given the congestion on the corridor and existing ridership, it doesn't make sense to leave it out.  Again, the Rapid Bus plan adds more seating capacity, but that doesn't mean travel time savings if the road is congested, the buses can't go anywhere.

 Support City's Planning Goals

Check

Encourage Investment and Economic Development

6.1 Maximize Return on Investment and Development Opportunities. - Outside of Mueller I'm not sure where this applies more than on the North Lamar/Guadalupe corridor.  There are so many opportunities to the north to change land uses and fix existing development patterns to support rail.  Just north of the Triangle is a perfect example. That area could become a huge example of neighborhood redevelopment. 

6.2 Maximize Economic Activity - No better place to raise sales tax receipts than to give people access to Amy's, Central Market, Chango's, Toy Joy, Mangia, Trudy's etc etc. Again, this is a destination corridor, unlike Mueller which has some opportunities, but not enough to be a first blockbuster investment.

6.3 Maximize Partnership Opportunities - Another metric for a small segment of right of way that will be used in Mueller.  There's also a greater chance of joint development opportunities in the Guadalupe/Lamar corridor because there are more development opportunities period and likely a greater market for redevelopment.  We are already seeing dense development taking place up through 32nd street.  The expansion of the line will extend the mixed use possibilities.

6.4 Access to Jobs -  There is no way that the Mueller corridor has more jobs than the North Lamar/Guadalupe Corridor.  Additionally, we showed above in the maps that the corridor that will serve the most downtown workers is to the north, not to the east.  For refreshment:
 

6.5 Potential for Job Creation - This goes back to the politics post.  If they want to redevelop the parking lots, and get a UT Medical school, then the east alignment is what will help them do it.  However if this is going to be a criteria, they should ding it for not connecting existing jobs and classrooms along the norther corridor.

Practical Considerations

7.1 Cost Effectiveness - The alignment through Mueller is approximately 4 miles.  The Guadalupe/Lamar alignment to Cresview station is approximately 4 miles straight.  Less curves less cost.  Also, because more people will ride the corridor to the north, the cost effectiveness is going to be much higher on that 4 miles than it will be sending it to Mueller.  We know this because of existing ridership on the corridor.  Boardings between the University at San Jacinto through Mueller currently stand at ~600 as mentioned above.  Boardings between the University at 27th and Crestview currently stand at ~3,300 .  The North Corridor has over THREE TIMES the amount of boardings already.  This means more riders and greater line productivity for the cost.  Again the ridership map:

7.2 Maximize Competitiveness for FTA and Other Funding - The north corridor already got a high rating the last time it was sent to the FTA (albeit it went to Howard Lane), why is the city afraid of submitting it again?  This is what I don't get. Why is everyone in Austin so afraid of the Guadalupe/Lamar corridor for light rail.  It WON in 2000 inside the city of Austin.  Not only did it win voters, in won the FTA.  What makes the city think an inferior corridor will do better?  And why isn't the city following Houston's lead and running the line right through the center of its major employment districts???

Here's Houston's alignment that has garnered so many riders:

And here are the alignment choices from Austin, again from skyscraper page

So after all of this what are the key points that should be made in regards to a Guadalupe/Lamar vs Mueller alignment?

1. Higher ridership and more useful lines have a greater ability to build political will for extensions.
2. The Guadalupe/Lamar Corridor has the highest ridership in the city of any bus by 2x.  The boardings on the upper segment is much higher than the current Mueller segment.
3. Greater densities of UT, Downtown, and State workers live along the north corridor than live out the Mueller alignment.  Greater densities overall follow the Guadalupe/Lamar alignments.
4. The North Guadalupe/Lamar Corridor is the most congested arterial in the region and needs more people moving capacity.
5. The North Guadalupe/Lamar Corridor addresses a greater number of constrained intersections.
6. The North Guadalupe/Lamar Corridor connects more destinations.

We know from the politics that there are reasons for pushing certain alignments.  But the raw data should prevail over politics when discussing the first Urban Rail corridor.

Ultimately the reason I wrote these posts is because I've seen a lot of cities go down the wrong path to start these multi-year transportation projects.  I've done this post on Austin specifically because it is a place that I love even though I've moved to San Francisco, sold my car, and already have my light rail half a block away from my house.  Ultimately I didn't need to spend a week breaking all this down, but people have been pushing this corridor for decades and I felt like there needed to be more facts and realistic numbers tied to the process.

I'm not sure why Austin elected officials are so scared of the corridor.  It did pass a vote in 2000 within the city of Austin and if it weren't for a certain GWB on the ballot the 1,800 or so votes might have gone the other way.  But as my college track coach Bubba used to say, "You gotta dance with who brung ya" and now after pushing on these lines for so many years, its time to make the right decisions based not on feelings, but on cold, hard evidence.

Austin's Rail History & Route Choice Problem Part 2: Politics

Now that we're through the history in the last post and know the ropes.  Let's chat about the current politics that are pushing the corridor in the direction it is headed instead of where we think the logical choice of corridor is located, down Guadalupe and Lamar streets.

Politics - Politics always plays a part of planning for a major infrastructure investment and this decision is no different.  There are several groups that have a specific interest in the routing of the transit line, and while not nefarious in their push to get the line through their land (it's an honest belief that it will help these parts of the city) , it seems to continue to push the project in the direction it is going.

And while its fair that each of these political pushes has merit enough for future extensions, it doesn't mean that these alignments should be the first ones in the ground. Consider the map of the current Urban Rail plan below in Orange.

Map Courtesy of the Austin Chronicle

The main line goes from the Mueller redevelopment project through the University of Texas on San Jacinto Street right next to Memorial Stadium and down south to Riverside where the line would run out to the Airport.  For some reason airports are always wanted for rail extensions even though they aren't major trip generators in the region compared with other areas.  Again, while my preferred corridor is Guadalupe/Lamar, we'll go through that issue later. 

University of Texas' Stake

The University of Texas has a strong presence in the Austin area.  Of course one of the largest institutions of higher education in the country would, but UT is specifically strong.  And it sees itself sometimes as its own little island.  Below is a map of the university campus.  Most students take classes in the sections labeled 1,2,4,5 in the top left quadrant of the campus area.

The yellow line above represents the Guadalupe/Lamar corridor which now is traversed by the #1 Route bus.  The orange line is the Urban Rail plan as it currently stands.

However the University sees itself as the whole campus, and their center is along San Jacinto street, which is the road that splits sections 5 and 6.  Since planning for rail began, the campus master planners at the University have always wanted rail on this street, even though it would be a round about route for students coming from the North or South trying to get to classes to sections 1 and 2.  Also the Forty Acres bus loop that takes students between housing on the west side of Campus (some of the densest neighborhoods in the city) is the second highest patronized bus line in the city after the #1 bus meaning that on any given day, about 8,000 students hop a bus to loop around campus because its convenient, and they don't want to walk up the huge hill from the stadium to Gregory Gym.  But the goal of the University of the line down San Jacinto was to be able to expand East as property allowed denser development for students and space on the west side disappeared.  This is in my mind why they continue to push for a San Jacinto alignment, it's the center of their future master plans.

Another wrinkle though occurred to me when visiting with Campus Planner John Rishling in 2004. He mentioned that at some point UT would also want to connect to the Pickle Campus as students could be housed there and expansion could take place to create a research village on 425 acres when space got to be a premium on the 40 Acres.  This is in UT's longer term plans and is unlikely to cause them to push for a corridor down Guadalupe anytime soon.  Additionally, unless the current Red Line is retrofitted a two seat ride would be required to get to Pickle, which is currently within walking distance to the Red Line itself, but not a stop.  Any future plans to make Pickle into a campus that needed to be directly connected to the 40 acres would have to consider transportation, but they are not there quite yet.

Images Courtesy of Dhiru Thadani

Map Courtesy of UT

 

Mueller Airport Redevelopment's Stake

Mueller Politics - Mueller is the first new urban neighborhood in the central city for a very long time. The planning for this site took years after the airport left the site for Bergstrom Air Force Base in Southeast Austin in 1999.  The Master Development Agreement was signed in 2004 and development started in 2007.

Throughout that time representatives at Mueller had pushed for rail to run into the development.  The development density was limited by a traffic impact analysis, and in order to increase densities a transit line needed to be constructed through the site to reduce the total trips.  According to the Capital Metro Future Connections Study for the 2006 streetcar alternatives analysis, that meant densities could increase by 12% if that rail line were constructed (PDF PG 15). 

The agreement with the City of Austin sets a traffic impact expectation on the basis of  proposed land use levels and the presence of existing transit services in the Mueller area. The introduction of measures that moderate vehicular travel to and from the site allows the developer to increase development density to the extent that traffic quantities are not increased above the expected level.

The analysis indicates that the Circulator, along with the MLK Rapid Bus, would attract increased transit use to the extent of reducing the RMMA traffic impact by 7,820 vehicle trips. On that basis, there could be additional development to the extent that 7,820 vehicle trips would result. If the development mix of additional development was the same as in the approved plan, the trip reduction would support a 12 percent increase in development without exceeding the vehicular travel target of 73,969 trips (assuming the current mix of land use is uniformly densified).

As the redevelopment project moves towards development, that allowance is cut short not by the trips, but the land available to build more density than originally planned.  So time is of the essence for Mueller but ultimately this type of incentive is backwards.  What they should have programmed is density allowances where increased value or bonus funding was funneled into a funding source that would have built the transit line to the development rather than having to wait for the line to get there before developing.   As it stands now that opportunity is disappearing, and the push for Mueller is a priority for increased value to the city and developers. 

State Politics & Space

Of course if you read the history you would see that there is a lot of animosity towards Capital Metro at the state level.  For a period of time they were trying to take away the quarter cent.  But for those who think the corridor would be a good thing, they want to redevelop the East side of the State Capital since the West is already developed. 

Of course the State provides parking in these garages and has a lot of excess capacity, which means that there is very little incentive to take transit other than existing traffic issues.  According to a 2010 parking study by the Texas Facilities Commission, any employee who works for the state at least four hours a day is eligible for a parking pass.  In 2009, approximately 25% of the spaces were vacant. According to the report...

This parking supply of 9,529 spaces serves approximately 10,101 full time employees (FTEs) in the Capitol Complex during a non-legislative year.

That's not a lot of transit usage but the report recommends that all that free parking is costing the State a LOT in lost revenues. Additionally this suggests that there is a missing demand for transit that could be met by a new line.  However the question will be how much of the population that works at the state is located along the Mueller Corridor as opposed to the Guadalupe/Lamar corridor and points north.

Image Courtesy of Austin American Statesman

With the state also hard up for money (as every other state in the country), the Texas Facilities Commission led by notorious Capital Metro detractor Terry Keel had been working on a public private partnership plan to bring 7 million square feet of space to the Capital.  This would include replacing a number of parking garages with new space which would be bolstered by the Urban Rail proposal. The parking report above also mentions the possible reuse of underutilized resources for redevelopment.

Additional whispers suggest that a UT Medical School campus could also be on the docket in this space, producing a long awaited Medical School that I've always wondered why it didn't exist in Austin.  State Senator Kirk Watson, who was on the Transit Working Group for a time is also pushing for the Medical Campus.   That's a lot of pressure to keep the line on San Jacinto and/or Trinity streets versus the already built out areas around Guadalupe and Lamar. 

The 2000 Burn

Finally there is the political ramifications of getting burned in the 2000 election which saw the voters in the City of Austin approve the Guadalupe/Lamar corridor, but the service area voted against (read the suburbs).  People in Austin continue to be scarred by that election and scared of the state's power to take away funding and make the city dance.  Not only was it the election that brought George W. Bush to the White House, it was also the one that almost wiped out half of Capital Metro's funding, and gave the anti-rail crowd more power in the city to say that the public wasn't interested.  Again, Of course the people of Austin were interested, just not those outside the city limits. Now that this isn't Capital Metro's line, something tells me the voters of the city will still have the City's back for a ridership proven line. 


The Push for Riverside

I really don't take issue with Riverside because its about an equal corridor with South Congress.  It will actually help alleviate concerns from Rob Lippencot (Guero's owner) and Max Nofziger who opposed development of Light Rail in 2000 on South Congress.  Additionally there is space for dedicated lanes in the median as well.  The Airport doesn't need to happen right away but that could be discussed at a future time.

Next Post - The Corridor That Should be the Focus