Subway to the Sea Badge

In an earlier post I discussed blog support badges and listed some I'd like to see. I created one for the Subway to the Sea for kicks. Feel free to use it.

Level the Urban Playing Field

A blog I really like to check out is the Bellows. Today Ryan discusses a response to an article about equity in cities vs. suburbs by economist Ed Glaeser. I agree with what he and Ed are saying about cities having to pay for some of suburbanites negative externalities which to him include the urban poor and the car based lifestyle. (Side note: A related recent article that people should read is about the movement of McMansions to McSlums by Chris Leinberger in a recent issue of the Atlantic.)

Back to Ed though; Back during the industrial revolution who could blame people for wanting to get away from the black soot and overcrowding that made up cities. It's different now though and there are lots of rules that keep cities from being the slums they were before. But today, cities pay (or as some say export tax base) to the suburbs in the form of road subsidies versus before when streetcars and streetcar suburbs were funded by the people in those suburbs. This to me is the biggest force today that promotes and spreads real sprawl. There have been policies after WWII that accelerated it including the Federal Highway System and suburban lending practices but those now are more of the beginning of the inertia rather than what is happening now. Now pro-suburban policies include job subsidies and the expansion of roads instead of maintenance. Now let's level the playing field.

No region should receive special favors from the federal government; no city should get special treatment from Beacon Hill. But our cities deserve a level playing field. A level playing field requires that urbanites should not bear an undue burden of caring for the poor and that suburbanites should pay for the environmental costs of energy-intensive lifestyles.

Back to the Bellows, some don't think that we should level the playing field to cities but Ryan gives this response:

His follow-up point that we shouldn’t do things to benefit cities because those things will unfairly benefit the rich is dreadfully off the mark. Glaeser is saying that society as a whole would be more urban if we got rid of some of the distortions preventing such a change (by charging, say, for pollution and congestion externalities). His broader point is that this will make society as a whole better off. And yes, policies to make life better in cities will have the effect of making life better for people in cities, and possibly harder for those in suburbs. So what? If the world needs to reduce carbon emissions, then it’s going to be the case that people who have to cut back most on their emissions get hurt the most. The alternative is to continue to allow those folks to not have to pay for the damage they inflict on the rest of us.

We Want the Line Away from Dense Places

Even though the extension of the Gold Line from Pasadena to the east has not even begun construction, there is already talk of expansion to Ontario Airport. There is hope that this would take expansion pressure off of the region's main airport LAX. As of now the extension to Ontario has three alternative routes and local NIMBY's are already starting to show their colors including elected officials.

"The Gold Line will be another transportation mode available to residents, and it could help revitalize the downtown area, so it's a good thing for Upland, in a general sense," said Anthony La, the city's public works director.

"Upland's preferred alignment is the one with the least impacts to Upland," he said. "We want to know the interests of the community are protected."

Unfortunately for any city, the route with the least impacts is also usually the route that goes where no one wants to go or come from. Usually we would like these rail lines to go through the denser areas to help people get from here to there. But some believe otherwise:

Mahdi Aluzri, deputy city manager of Rancho Cucamonga, said his residents will not be fond of that option as it puts the line in the San Bernardino Associated Governments-owned right of way currently occupied by the city's newly completed popular bike path.

"It passes through a bunch of densely populated residential areas," Aluzri said of the route. "It would have a negative impact, and I expect that to come up in the community meeting."

Perhaps someone local can shed a little more light on this but it's getting more and more apparent that the biggest obstacle to building good transit is people not wanting the line to go where the people are located. In this instance it might not be a concern in that these last sections are just route options with perhaps one station, but if that station is located away from people then it doesn't really help ridership or development opportunities.

WMATA and Joint Development

The Washington Post has an article on the restructuring of the Joint Development (Read TOD) program at WMATA. This is good news in that they will look at better development around the stations rather than just building anything to get money. This should pay off long term.

Too often in the past, board members said yesterday, land around stations was sold mainly to raise cash. The new rules focus on increasing transit-oriented residential and commercial development to encourage Metro ridership and reduce automobile traffic. The Ballston corridor in Arlington and Columbia Heights and Gallery Place-Chinatown in the District are considered examples of successful transit-oriented development.

The Glorious Transit Web

It's the web 2.0 and if you have a cause for transit, create a badge so it gets more recognition. Below are a few badges I've seen and causes I'm down with, others I'd like to see a badge for in no particular order:

Sound Transit 2.1
Austin Guadalupe Light Rail
California HSR
Geary Subway
Subway to the Sea



I've also been thinking about the need for a national transit campaign infrastructure. Everyone is really good at keeping up with the local causes but does there need to be some central place for organizing or getting the word out? I'm interested in the model that is used by Daily Kos or MyDD where they have a blog but also have user diaries. Instead of diaries however, because everyone has their own blog, perhaps it would be campaigns. This central blog would have contributors from each metro area discussing what is happening on the battlefield and where things are headed. Many of the blogs do that but this could be a central place to see what is going on nationally kind of like what the City Transit aggregator is trying to do. Perhaps it's a glorified version of the City Transit Aggregator.

Another important thing about this national info hub would be the ability to raise money around campaigns like Act Blue does for Democrats and Slatecard does for Republicans. Basically there are a whole lot of people out there who are interested in national transit policy and could use this as a way to get involved locally where alot of the big decisions are being made and help influence policy at the national level that helps cities get the funding they need for local projects. What do folks think? Is it something that should be fleshed out? Would people be interested in this kind of thing?

The Twin Cities Entrance into the Space Race

Welcome Minneapolis-St. Paul to the Space Race. Let's see what they're up to.

LRT

Central Corridor - This line has received lots of press and was just approved by the Met Council.

Southwest Corridor - This is the next light rail line. It will travel to the Southwest through some high employment centers in that part of the region.

Bottineau Boulevard - This line was going to be BRT but might be changed back to LRT.

Robert Street Corridor - South of St. Paul, they're doing the alternatives analysis now.

Commuter Rail

North Star Corridor - This line is under construction.

Red Rock Corridor - This line will go to the Southeast of St. Paul and will be the high speed rail connection to Chicago. If its electrified this would be a great addition.

Rush Line Corridor - This line will go Northeast of St. Paul.

BRT

Cedar Avenue and I-35W


That's a lot of transit. They've also just finished a Minneapolis Streetcar study as well.

Looks Like Houston Is In for 2 More, Space Race Heats UP

2 Lines and an FFGA by the end of the year. Kay Bailey has been good on rail issues. The Houston Chronicle reports:

The Federal Transit Administration is committed to helping the Metropolitan Transit Authority qualify for funding of two light rail lines by the end of the year, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison said Tuesday.

Hutchison's statement came after a closed-door meeting in her Washington office, where FTA Administrator James Simpson and Deputy Administrator Sherry Little talked with Mayor Bill White, Metro President and CEO Frank Wilson, board chairman David Wolff and a bipartisan congressional delegation from the Houston area.

Lot's of Space Race movement lately, might have to upgrade the rankings soon.

Austin Article Update

Are we going to see a plan from Austin soon? The Austin Chronicle has this cool little schematic but it doesn't tell us very much. At the bottom is a dream map I created a while ago. Perhaps this is the first step...I'm not holding my breath.

DFL Veto Override Starts Minnesota on the Space Race

Man these guys made a tough political call. Some Republicans have already paid the price for it, but everyone in Minnesota will be better off because of it. The Democrat-Farmer-Labor party or DFL decided that they needed to pay for infrastructure by raising the gas and car tab taxes. Of course this doesn't mean much for people who drive fuel efficient cars. But here is the Republican complaint...

He said higher gas taxes and registration fees for more expensive and larger vehicles could encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles, "which will save families money."

But Republicans stressed that families who drive long distances in larger vehicles would be hit harder.

As an example, they said a family of four in Bemidji could see its total taxes increase as much as $373 per year, assuming that the family bought a 9-year-old car and a one-year-old SUV and drove more than 35,000 miles a year. The SUV in the example gets 17 miles per gallon, and the car gets 22.

Geez, whine a little more about paying for what you use why don't you. If you drive more, that means you're using the roads more, whats wrong with paying more? It was their choice to live in a place where they had to drive more.

The $6 Billion + dollar bill is also good for transit...

Under another provision, a quarter-cent sales tax increase would occur in the seven-county Twin Cities metro area without a referendum, with all proceeds going to transit projects. The sales tax needs action by the county boards.

The sales tax would raise an estimated $1.1 billion over 10 years. In Hennepin County, the state's most populous, it would generate more than half of that amount, or $606 million. Last year, Hennepin County residents began paying a 0.15 percentage point sales tax, approved without a referendum, to help fund a stadium for the Minnesota Twins.

It would allow 8 planned rail and bus corridors to be built by 2020, entering the Twin Cities officially as a serious contender into the Transit Space Race! Welcome to the club.

Advocates estimated the bill would provide an extra $117 million to $173 million a year for rail and bus service. If federal matching funds could be secured, that would be enough to deliver eight new transitways, for trains or buses, by 2020 -- including the southwest light-rail line eagerly awaited by the western suburbs, the advocates said Wednesday.

Bills, Codes, and Engineering...News Update

The Colorado legislature looks like it will pass an eminent domain bill that will leave the ability to take property for parking lots but will not allow any other development on the land. The Rocky Mountain News has an editorial on the matter.

Dallas is looking to update its zoning code. This would enable more transit oriented development and better street design. In addition, the development at Las Colinas which will have 3 light rail stops on the new Orange Line, is really taking off.

The state of North Carolina is looking to create a fund for transit projects around the state that would provide a quarter of the capital cost for new high capacity projects. Also included are improvement funds for intercity rail and bus improvements.

Michigan Tech is going to open a new rail engineering school. This includes both freight and passenger rail. It's amazing but we've lost a lot of knowledge about how to engineer these systems over the years. Apparently we've also lost welding prowess. In an article in Der Spiegel engineers at Siemens describe their first foray into building light rail vehicles in the United States. They had to fly in 50 engineers from Munich with the skills needed:

Hauck knows what he's talking about. He runs German engineering giant Siemens' streetcar manufacturing plant in Sacramento. But when the German company showed up in the California capital more than two years ago with its plans to build trams there, it found little evidence of craft or even skill. Hauck couldn't find a single welder with the right skills for the job anywhere in the region.

Making meter-long welds across thin sheet metal without the car "bending like a banana," says Hauck, takes talent and sensitivity. More important, it takes good training. To provide that training, Siemens flew 50 welders from its Munich locomotive plant to California, where they spent six months retraining local welders. Now the Sacramento plant is up and running.

Hopefully this is a sign of growth in the industry.