Thinking Big: The Next Bay Area Project

I know that BART to San Jose is in the pipeline and as usual it wasn't planned to serve people but to be cost effective. This means that it goes where no one is along available ROW and skips major employment centers except Downtown San Jose. You would have thought that we might have learned something from the planning of BART in Oakland and Berkeley but apparently not.

But that isn't what i really wanted to talk about. I have a new idea for the Bay Area's newest New Start/Transit Project. I'd like to call it the Subway to the Sea 2, Urban Core Capacity Enhancement. The title is a nod to the Subway to the Sea bubbling up in LA and the New Jersey Access to the Core tunnel under the Hudson. If we're going to densify the bay area further, we need more of a metro system along major corridors. We need to be cost effective, so we should start with a corridor that would generate a lot of new ridership. So how about we build a line between the beach and downtown on Geary, build the new trans-bay tube that's been planned, and build up Broadway in Oakland to Rockridge and Berkeley under the 51 line.

Current ridership in this corridor is 56,000 for Geary and 18,600 boardings on the 51. This means that if everyone changed modes (which we know there still has to be a surface bus line for shorter trips) there could be about 80,000 riders. Given the speed of the new line and convenience it could increase ridership to way over 100,000 a day just on the line. This is a third of BART's ridership. Now the line is 19 miles from Berkeley to the Sea along the route I mentioned.

Now the line wouldn't just generate a lot of ridership, but it would generate a lot of new TOD, Office and Residential. In Oakland on Broadway, there would be a surge in new development along the corridor between College Avenue and Downtown. It's possible to capture a lot of the office and residential markets and take some pressure off of the outer sprawling suburbs. It will also take pressure off of the almost at capacity Transbay Tube.

Another feature of this would be the tunnel under the bay. it should be designed to be dual mode so that Caltrain/HSR could go to Oakland, Emeryville, and/or Jack London Square. That way Caltrain could extend into downtown and across the bay to Emeryville and possibly beyond making a connection between the jobs there and Silicon Valley (Yellow). It's possible to electrify the line all the way up to Martinez making commutes from around the horn easier with new stations in North Richmond and Hercules. It might also provide a way to keep trains away from Jack London which has had some issues with accidents. It would be a big project and more than likely cost a lot of money, but it will also be a huge ridership generator. Not only will you get over 100,000 from the subway alone, there will be the tens of thousands that want to get across the bay with a one seat ride to Emeryville and Jack London Square.

Idea: LACMTA Turnstiles = Electricity

If the MTA is going to install turnstiles to take tickets for the Red Line, they might as well make them able to generate electricity. Each time someone turns them, they should be able to trap that energy perhaps to operate the stations if nothing else. Not sure if that is feasible but they need to figure out a way for them to pay for themselves.

Another idea that came up this week sent to me by a colleague and friend was the ability to use excess body heat from subway stations to heat buildings. Sounds kind of gross to me, but if it works...

APTA Technical Document on Streetcars

The Circulator Trackway Report was created to bring back some of the technical design skills we lost with the disappearance of street railways. An example of the kind of information you can find in the document ...

Problems typically found on track of questionable design and/or construction are:

• Improper gauging of track and guard rails.
• Use of apparently railroad-based designs not suitable for Light Rail Circulator System rolling stock with street
• railway wheels and/or the curvature employed on the system. (See Figure 3.)
• Failure to understand the criticality of certain crucial track dimensions and tolerances under small radius circumstances.
• Employment of design details that increase the cost and complexity but have no payback in terms of performance or utility

Thinking Big in Raleigh-Durham

After a failed attempt at a regional rail system connecting Raleigh and Durham, the Triangle region has gone back to the drawing board and come up with 16 corridors that need transit. The local paper backs the idea because of success in Charlotte with their transit expansion which includes not only light rail, but express buses and increased local service. Recommendations will be coming soon on technology so we'll see what happens, but it sounds ambitious. According to the News and Observer.

The Triangle can afford to expand bus service and build new rail projects if local leaders make a "Charlotte level of effort," the head of a regional transit agency said Friday.

A new half-cent local sales tax could augment local and state transit funds to pay for 150 new buses in the next few years and launch more than $1 billion worth of capital projects by 2020, said David King, general manager of the Triangle Transit Authority.

Seattle Streetcar Network

Diamajin at the Seattle Transit Blog has a post with a lot of comments (Please read them too) on an idea for a Seattle Streetcar Network. Check it out.

China: 270 KM of Subway Under Construction Simultaneously

This just makes me feel ridiculous. We're fighting over 10 or 11 miles at a time of surface rail and they are building 270 km (167 miles) of subway!

The First Carbon Credits for Rail

The Dehli Metro has received the first carbon credits for a rail system in the world. They didn't however do it in a way that people would expect, by taking people out of cars (which they are trying to do), but rather registering the energy saved through regenerative braking of the system. I find that the most fascinating thing about it. Recently there has been news about Sacramento retrofitting their cars to put power back into the grid through regenerative braking but I haven't heard much about other systems doing it. Anyone heard anything about other systems?

I do know that folks in Portland and New York city are looking for ways to capture carbon credits. This might be a better way to start than going after the amount of tailpipe emissions saved by people moving from cars to transit which is often hard to figure out, but should be done eventually. I wonder how hard it would be to retrofit the New York City Subway Cars with this technology?

Density is Relative

Check out this post by the Austin Contrarian which shows densities in different cities around the world. I was interested to see where some African cities lie in the density comparison. Also, Budapest was high on the list and you can see why in the photo below.

Giving Employees a Bonus by Charging for Parking

On the other side of the coin from the suburban subsidization is the money that can be saved by transit, whether its rail or an express bus. Richard Layman has a post over on his blog about when companies decide to charge for parking and give an allowance for transit. The original article was in the New York Times.

Subsidizing Suburban Metro Riders

Check out this graph by Robert Goodspeed. He looks at how much more subsidy suburban riders get going into DC than urban riders. Once again the suburbs not paying their weight for services.