Some of this is from $4 gas I'm sure, but the growth in ridership shows the pull that the light rail line has. Here's my favorite photo from the trip last week. Thursday around mid-day.No.24 Nations Ford, which connects to the Arrowood and Woodlawn road stations: 16,111 then, 23,794 last month.
No. 42 Carowinds, from the South Point Business Park near Carowinds to the I-485/South Boulevard stop: 412 then, 3,589 last month.
No. 43 Ballantyne, which travels to the Sharon Road West station: 3,710 then, 8,259 last month.
No. 44 Fort Mill, from Wells Fargo in Fort Mill to the Arrowood stop: 1,471 to 3,615.
No. 58 Pineville, which runs from the I-485 station to Carolina Place Mall: 12,294 to 16,318.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Gotta Have More Cowbell...err Charlotte
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Deep Seeded Bias
Jeffrey Tumlin, a transportation planner with Nelson Nygaard, a BART consultant, sees the skewed funding priorities as part of a deep-seated bias against transit in American public policy. "If your road or highway is experiencing bad levels of service, it's assumed that you need to get money to expand capacity," he says. "When you're allocating money for transit, nobody ever asks how crowded buses are."This is a pretty good article from Salon as far as msm goes. Then there is this part, which is the story of most people's life on BART if you're taking the train during peak hours. Sardines.
Four minutes later, another Pittsburgh-Bay Point train arrives and an audible groan goes up in the station: This train is packed too. Inside one car, a poster on the wall applauds riders for taking the train instead of driving: "Thank you for not gridlocking today. Thanks for taking BART." It's not even peak rush hour yet.Second tube anyone?
HT Bus Chick
Friday, October 24, 2008
Euclid Corridor BRT Opens
They basically reconstructed the street and are running the same buses as the Eugene system. It's also another case of a project in the FTA process opening over 10 years after conception. I thought BRT was supposed to be cheaper and quicker to implement? Though if it started today, the project wouldn't even be funded under Ma Peters. It got a Medium Low in Cost-Effectiveness and cost $21 million per mile. I thought the reason for BRT projects was because they are more cost-effective. Basically what this proves is that the FTA doesn't want to spend money on projects that give transit its own ROW. No not painting lanes on the street, but a true separation from other traffic that makes it more effective. Today, its required to get a medium in CE as we've discussed before.
Those projects that do not currently have a rating of "medium" in cost-effectiveness would automatically be precluded from funding recommendation by the FTA, notwithstanding the merits of other criteria applicable to those projects.This is part of the cutdown in projects that has been going on lately. It's recently dropped from 85 projects in the pipe before the 2005 "medium" enforcement to 2007. Not counting small starts, this year only has 31 projects in the New Starts report.
Lest you think that projects are rightly being cut, it should be noted that Denver's Southeast Corridor, Charlotte's South Corridor, the Los Angeles Orange Line, and the Minneapolis Hiawatha Line all had a Medium Low ratings. Those projects have all passed their projections yet would not have been funded under the current process. Anyone else tired of cost-effectiveness being used as a blunt object to bludgeon the alternatives that will truly get people into transit, including rail AND true BRT?
Let's see how this line goes. I still wish it would have been rail and electrified, but it's an improvement in the corridor, one that the FTA would not approve of these days.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
UTA Ridership Up
It is clear that the investment in TRAX and Front Runner is paying off. Despite there being only two TRAX lines it carries 34% of UTA's ENTIRE ridership. Add Front Runners numbers into the equation and it is at 40%. When you consider the bus system covers six counties and a couple of hundred routes, it truly shows how well TRAX and Front Runner is doing.Here's the official map they have recently put up on their website for the expansion:
Trax - 51,849
Front Runner - 8,250
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Seattle Streetcar Ridership Over Mark
2008 ridership on the Seattle Streetcar reached 347,000 riders on October 1, surpassing first-year ridership three months ahead of schedule.H/T Brian at STB
Friday, September 26, 2008
Charlotte Space Race Update
Parker wants to bundle three projects. The first is an 11-mile extension of the Lynx to University City, which is now projected to cost $900 million. The commuter rail line to the Lake Norman area could cost between $250 and $310 million. CATS is also penciling in $50million to improve the existing light rail line. It wants to extend station platforms to handle three-car trains and also wants to buy additional rail cars.It seems like these package deals are starting to catch on as regions are seeking to build more than one line at a time. The FTA is going to get more of these after they made the deal that they did with Salt Lake City paying for 20% of their four lines.
In August 2007, FTA and UTA executed a Memorandum of Understanding to set forth their mutual expectations for Federal financial participation in two of five projects that comprise UTA’s “Transit 2015 Program.” UTA was seeking a combined $570 million in Section 5309 New Starts funding for the Mid-Jordan and Draper LRT extensions. In return, UTA made a commitment to build, by 2015, the West Valley City and Airport LRT extensions, as well as the South Front Runner (commuter rail) extension without Federal financial assistance. The current total capital cost estimate for the five projects in the Transit 2015 Program is $2.85 billion.Now CATS will try a similar deal getting more out of the process. What this tells me is that the process that exists now doesn't really work for regions. They are looking to fill in the gaps that were missing in the last 60 years and there is just not enough money from any source to do it.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Charlotte Ridership
However, average weekday ridership on CATS’ light-rail system fell 3.2 percent last month to 16,357 from 16,895 in July.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Documents You Shouldn't Use Against Transit
An August 2007 study by the Federal Transit Administration entitled “Contractor Performance Assessment Report” compared average weekday boardings for completed projects with the predictions made during the EIR process. Of 19 New Starts projects (mostly light rail), 16 had boardings below the forecasts, with some as low as 20-30 percent of forecast figures.First off, the busways in this study were either in freeway right of ways like Houston or built on an existing freight right of way as a new road like in Pittsburgh. These bear no resemblance at all to the arterial running Oakland BRT plan and should not be compared to them as much as I think these first generation busway projects show that buses are no replacement for rail.
Ridership forecasts for busways performed even more poorly, according to the report, where “none of the available busway forecasts proved to be accurate. It appears from the limited sample that forecasts of ridership on busway projects . . . will not exceed 41 percent of the forecasts.”
This is a document that was done a number of years ago but recently cleaned up and released by the Bush administration folks under Ma Peters. It was a follow up to the famous Pickrell Report which was used by wingers and libertarians alike to say that transit was worthless. But as Todd Litman notes, you can't take the start number and compare it to the end when you have design changes in the middle of the plan among other things.
Studies by Pickrell (1992) and Flyvbjerg (2005) suggested that many earlier rail transit projects exceeded projected costs and failed to achieve first-year ridership predictions. But much of what Pickrell classified as cost overruns where actually adjustments due to design changes...The FEIS numbers are also from the late 80's early 90's when ridership models for transit were still being honed due to the fact that we had just started building transit projects again after a long time off with a few metro subway lines in between. I'm not going to say things were perfect and there were some mistakes made, but I feel like now the FTA is starting to overcompensate for that. Recently ridership has been going over estimates like Charlotte, Denver, Minneapolis etc etc. In this report, the ridership estimates are extrapolated which make it look a bit worse if you look at the numbers without looking at the year they were forcast for. I'll also note that building automated guideways was a bad idea back then. 6% of ridership is really bad.
Ridership forecasts are developed to reflect trips in a particular year. For eleven of the twentyone projects included in this study, the ridership forecast year remains in the future (as of this writing).
The Capital Costs aren't anything different from what you would find with major freeway projects. Some over and some under the final estimate. But my main problem is using this report against transit at all, especially since the processes are completely different now. I know this report will get used again against transit at some point in the future, but I really wish it wouldn't, because without context, its worthless.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Ridership Away!
Find your light rail city here.
Find your heavy rail city here.
Find your commuter rail city here.
Nothing of big interest. The next quarter is going to be where the sparks fly. But Portland and San Diego are at 113,000. Not bad for 3 line systems. Imagine 6 lines and a streetcar network. Then we're getting somewhere closer.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Opposition Pundits on Parade
Ron Utt, of the conservative Heritage Foundation, said transit is "inconsequential in terms of reducing congestion or greenhouse gases" and that people who want to use transit should simply pay more. Citing the example of a Washington-area commuter rail, Utt said: "If more people want to use that and more people have to stand, I don't know why that should place a financial burden on people in Iowa."Sure Ron, that's why almost a million people per day take Metro in DC. I have a really great idea, how about people pay the true cost of gasoline or roads or airlines. Let's also make people pay directly for air traffic controllers and the highway patrol. And why should I pay for a rural road in Iowa? All transportation is subsidized, let's stop the favoritism towards one mode and pretending that cars pay for themselves.
Typewriter Typewriter Typewriter!
Then there is our favorite cipher, Randal O'Toole. His most recent call is to cancel the Denver Fastracks program claiming it's bad for the environment and social engineering. You know, the usual junk.
Environmentally, light rail is a disaster for the region. For every passenger mile carried, light rail consumes four times as much land as Denver-area freeways. It also uses more energy and emits more greenhouse gases, per passenger mile, than the average SUV.I don't know where he gets this one. But as Mr. Setty at PublicTransit.us reminds us, transit actually reduces passenger miles overall. Randal's twisted logic lumps in the construction of the line when he never talks about the construction losses of highways and the vehicles that drive on them. What about the construction of all those parking garages?
O'Toole, many academics and other anti-transit activists understandably do not wish to discuss the wider, systematic impacts of transit on transportation patterns and land use. One key study estimates that for every passenger mile on transit, slightly more than two urban vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is suppressed or foregone. This study documents the connection between transit and lower vehicle usage that has also been documented in dozens of other studies. This effect is particularly significant when less than 40% of U.S. residents have easy access to transit at the present time.But what annoys me the most is that stupid no one rides transit argument. Well no one has the option to take it! New York City has transit, people take it. Washington DC has a rather good subway system, people take it. But when the green argument for him fails, he can always fall back on social engineering. You know, the kind that took place from 1950 to the present when cities built roads only and subsidies were funneled to development related to roads.
The other support for FasTracks comes from those who want to socially engineer Colorado lifestyles. They use light rail as an excuse to build tax-subsidized high-density housing projects on properties taken from their owners by eminent domain near planned rail stations. Yet few Americans aspire to live in such dense housing, and such compact development makes little sense in a state that is 97 percent rural open space.Hmm. No one in Colorado wants open space, just build on it. I'm sure John Denver wouldn't mind. And no one wants to live in high-density housing projects, that's why TOD commands such a low price premium with buyers. No one ever wanted to live in LoDo right? What about all those road, pipe subsidies.
Cars Cars Cars. Sprawl Sprawl Sprawl. Sounds like Drill Drill Drill.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
DART Ridership Up Up Up
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Rail Ridership in LA Up Again
But another interesting development is the recent skyrocket in rail ridership and slightly lower bus ridership increases in Los Angeles. The Gold Line in particular is moving up, taking a 39% increase over the same time last year, with all rail up 20%. But the Orange Line and the LA Bus system were up 8% and 6% respectively. Not that 75,000 new riders is anything to to sneeze at on the bus tip, but with only 4 lines, rail ridership increased 53,236 total riders. That is a lot of capacity on four corridors that just got soaked up. Imagine if there were more rail corridors and more possible network connections.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Historical Seattle Transit Data
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Ridership Posting, Charlotte Almost at 2025 Number
So this continues the trend in which the FTA has massively underestimated ridership recently on new lines. Cases in point.
Minneapolis - 24,000 Projected 2020 26,000 Q108
Houston - 39,000 Projected 2020 40,000 Q108
Denver - 38,100 Projected 2020 36,000 10.07
In other ridership news, Gold Line ridership in LA is up 31.8%. From bottleneck blog:
Seems to me that it's easier to ride and more convenient than other busways that only increased by 4% in a corridor that has greater population. Also, we got a comment from a reliable anti-rail buddy Tom Rubin in the last Orange Line post. He's most recently been trying to work in Milwaukee for the Reason Foundation but was shutdown by Len Brandrup of Kenosha Transit. I thought his joke at the end of his comment on the last Orange Line post was quite funny. What do you all think?
"OK, now I'll say something nice about BRT in this alignment -- it wasn't nearly as dumb as LRT would have been."
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Spinning Mary Peters
Recent news that a Baltimore Red Line with all the proverbial bells and whistles may not be eligible for federal funding should come as no surprise. The Federal Transit Administration funding formula is notoriously stingy, and an east-west light rail line with much tunneling would be pricey.This is understandable, we want to be smart with our money, but they go on to make more good points...
Every new transit line must demonstrate cost-effectiveness. That's just common sense. But the Bush administration tends to view such proposals far too conservatively while appropriating too little for transit.This is proven true by Transportation Secretary Mary "Bikes Aren't Transportation" Peters commentary which ignores what has been going on around the country and how the FTA has been manipulating ridership estimates in many communities including Portland and Norfolk by ripping planned development out of the models that estimate ridership. They just don't seem to understand the benefits of transit investment and that shows through with their rating system which offsets future planning with existing density. If you have one or the other, you end up at medium and get no boost at all. Here's her spin from her blog.
The part that frustrated me the most, however, is that the Post is calling for massive increases in federal transit investments (on top of existing massive increases to federal transit spending) while calling for an end to performance standards designed to ensure that money is invested wisely. That the Post’s writers consider it bad policy to set performance standards, demand greater accountability and require honest ridership estimates before investing billions of the taxpayer’s dollars is nothing short of shocking.Honest ridership estimates huh? How about those estimates in Charlotte and Minneapolis? They weren't allowed a modal constant and look what happens, over estimates! The fact of the matter is that using today's cost effectiveness measures, both of those projects would not have been funded! Today the CE measure must be a medium to receive funding. Both of these projects had medium low measures because of their lame ridership estimates pushed by the FTA.
So when she claims that the Post considers it bad to set standards, she's basically saying that it would have been ok to kill successful projects as long as not as much money was spent. What she's actually doing is projecting, Karl Rove style. Here is what the Post actually had to say:
Meanwhile, the administration has slashed spending on new mass transit projects while toughening approval criteria and insisting that states and localities pony up greater shares of such projects, often up to half. That has slowed the development of projects and, by so doing, has driven up costs. And while the administration is right to push congestion pricing, tolling and public-private partnerships as means to generate additional revenue and projects, they are not substitutes for a robust federal role in building the nation's mass transit capacity.The Post has it right. The trend for cities now is to not even apply because the line is so long for funding. There is cutthroat competition for so little money that many don't even want to bother. What kind of system is that? It's sad that the spinning from the Bush administration has bled into the transportation department but what can we expect from folks who don't even understand why its important to build a tunnel or an electric light rail line. They see in one dimension, moving people. Many of us see in multi-dimensions, moving people and building places where people can move themselves with low energy. This however isn't counted in the formulas and that is exactly what the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun are getting at.
The end of her blog post is the most disturbing, considering her punches at "interest groups". Considering she once worked for Parsons Brinkerhoff and the FTA Administrator Jim Simpson started out as a trucker, its no wonder they would try to hit down livability and transit advocates as a special interest, again she's projecting for the road lobby.
Instead of providing an informed analysis of our substantial transportation record, the Post’s editorial writers offered a simplistic rehash of special interest groups’ talking points. Instead of asking whether transit agencies are using the money they have today either wisely or well, they called for fewer federal investment standards. And instead of offering a relevant contribution to the transportation dialogue, they offered rusty rhetoric and faulty facts.A substantial record that has called bike lanes a waste of money, has tried to build freeway toll lanes with transit capital money and taken bus capital money and given it to a select five cities to push their congestion pricing agenda. Spending money wisely includes figuring out ways to use less oil and allow people to spend less money on transportation. Rail and other new starts projects have proven their worth in this regard, which makes it hard to understand her reasoning that boosting investment and using better measures should be stalled using "cost effectiveness". Like the Post says, pricing has its place, but in her mind, Secretary Peters will always be about making it easier for cars in cities, but without alternatives we'll all choke, coughing up more of our hard earned money to get where we want to go.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Tacoma Streetcar Ridership
The panelists struggled to explain why streetcars attract more riders than buses. Johnsen cited a Tacoma, Wash. bus line that carried 175,000 people a year was replaced by a streetcar, and ridership jumped to 800,000 a year.I had never seen this before, but it makes sense. The Tacoma Streetcar has been rather successful with about 3,000 riders a day. This is in addition to the Portland Streetcar Ridership numbers which were modeled to be 3,500 by the usual modeling for transit. It started off there but by the time the extension was built, it was already at 6,500. Now its at 12,000 a day. And that is with 12 minute headways. I can't imagine what would happen if they halved them.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Assorted Bay Area News
Whoa Muni. Looking at the ridership statistics on light rail from this last quarter, more people are definitely riding the rails. 173,000 a day is pretty good I would say. Although it sounds weirdly high. The Transit Effectiveness Project when taking ridership accounted for 157,424.
Also, if you're interested in the Livermore BART extension, there will be a public meeting Wednesday June 18th in Livermore at 6pm. I'm thinking I might show up, given that I'm on that side of the Bay on Wednesday evenings. Here's a post we wrote a while back on it.
More info:
Robert Livermore Community Center, Larkspur Room
4444 East Ave.
Livermore, CA 94550
The website to view the alignments is at www.barttolivermore.org
Their contact info is:
Phone: (510) 464-6151
E-mail: info@barttolivermore.org
H/T to Joel for the email.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
The Gasoline Conundrum
When does the price of gasoline get so painful that drivers park their cars and look for the nearest bus stop or rail station? Many in North Texas say that time has arrived. And a new study of driver attitudes – plus increasingly crowded buses, trains and station parking lots – suggests they may be right.There is one of these...
High gas prices are pushing more people onto buses and subways, straining transit agencies trying to meet the demand.Like other consumers, the agencies are also paying more for fuel — 44% more this year than last, according to a survey of 96 transit agencies to be released Friday by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA).That double hit means bus and train operators are raising fares, cutting services and delaying improvements. Almost half of bus operators and more than two-thirds of rail operators have increased fares. About a fifth are cutting service.
These aren't choices we should have to make and its unfortunate that our the majority of our transportation system is tied up in oil. It'll be interesting to see how resources shift as prices go up. Will fund transit with higher fares as some have already started to or will it come out of a budget for new roads. The paradigms are shifting, but perhaps not that much.
For the future, when the grid starts to get changed into alternative energy like solar, part of the capital program for smaller cities might include provisions for electrification of heavier ridership bus lines. Now that oil and diesel prices are so high, it's possible to pay off some of the capital cost over time of this incremental improvement. Since this would include some smaller cities, it would be a great opportunity to include more areas into capital funding programs. It certainly would make more lawmakers happy that they are serving their constituents and make available funding from a carbon economy.Monday, March 10, 2008
U.S. Transit Takes 10.3 Billion Trips in 2007
For comparison to the much touted 10 Billion number that we've had the last two years consider this, Budapest (my favorite transit city) residents took over 1.4 Billion trips in 2003 in a region of 2.4 million people. The population of the United States is around 300 Million. While there are obvious differences in urban form and the availability of transit there versus here, its telling of what is possible if we design transport systems correctly and design our neighborhoods accordingly.
For a better western example that wasn't over run by communism until 1989, Vienna (A metro of 2.2 million) takes 700 Million annual trips. The tram network carries 280,000 passengers a day. The U Bahn metro carried 427 million trips in 2005. They began building their metro system in the 60s and finished in 1982. While they had a legacy street railways network, that can be done in time as well.
It's possible for us to catch up, but we gotta start moving a little faster. If each of the top 50 metro regions can get 700 million trips per year, we can increase ridership to 35 Billion trips. Is that possible? I don't know, I'm just tossing out numbers, but it would be amazing and would do a lot for the environment and create jobs.
I also love a good reason to use pictures from my trip last fall. The one below is a tram loop on the Ringstrasse in Vienna.