Where Are the Whiners on This One?

Man that Houston can sure build roads! Good thing they're starting to get a little balance. An email on the LightRail_Now yahoo group came in with an article about the Hampton Roads cost increase for a specific piece of the route. Now they have contingency money set aside so its not busting the budget but the ridiculousness of transit opponents comes out when overruns occur. It's a "boondoggle"! they say.

Well what about boondoggles like this: the Katy Freeway in Houston. Charles Kuffner covered this back in February but the email reminded me about this fantastic project that's $1.7 Billion over the original $1 Billion or $1.2 Billion estimate. How many more billions in GHG cleanup will this one cost?

As for Hampton Roads and other FTA projects, what do you expect when you start a project and over10 years it gets changed a little and built. This type of time overrun has got to stop. We can't wait that long anymore. Don't get me wrong, we need to build it right...but ten years?! Give me a break.

Space Race Update: UTA Vehicle Purchase

UTA, the transit agency on Utah's front range which includes Salt Lake City has started up the PR campaign and purchases for its Front Lines 2015 program. The plan is to build 70 miles in 7 years. So to keep on track with that, they are buying up 77 Siemens SD70 Avantos for $277 million or $3.6 M per vehicle. The same type used in Charlotte and Houston.

To make the order cheaper, buy in bulk. And that bulk includes an option for 120 more. My best guess is that either Houston or San Diego is going to be exercising those options with San Diego's cars reaching the end of their 25 year life and Houston embarking on the metro solutions plan. It might also be split up into smaller orders if cities that are running low based on this most recent ridership surge.

Siemens' news release about the contract lists an option for 180 more rail cars, though UTA General Manager John Inglish said the agency most likely won't use that many. It's common practice to secure more than needed at a good bulk price, he said, then offer the excess to another transit system that needs the cars.

Looks like the Siemens plant in Sacramento is going to be working overtime. Glad that these vehicles are all being built here. Imagine the economic impact if every city was building new LRVs and transit networks. Jobs Jobs Jobs.

Update: a Railway Gazette Article states that the Siemens vehicles will be a bit shorter than the Charlotte and San Diego Cars in order to accommodate 4 car trains.

Anyone Need Some Modern Trams? Never Been Used!

Prague apparently bought four streetcars but never used them. They didn't work. Now they are building Skoda models built at home in the Czech Republic and selling off the surplus four Tatras. Anyone think they can be fixed up and used in the US? I dunno, but it might be worth looking into.

Update: On second thought, probably not a good idea. Translation here.

Dragging Them Kicking and Screaming

A few items of good news out tonight:

Rep. John Mica is from Florida and the ranking Republican on the house transportation and infrastructure committee. He has been fighting for local commuter rail recently but took a time out to gave a speech at the Dow Jones Infrastructure Conference. He discussed Semi HSR on the Northeast Corridor and improvements to Amtrak. When asked about the airline lobby, he had this to say:

"We'll drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century."

There was also news from the Ranking Democrat from the same committee, James Oberstar. He stated in a discussion with Minnesota Public Radio that new starts rules would be changing. This would perhaps allow a tunnel under the university and cut down the importance of our favorite cost effectiveness measure.

Oberstar, who chairs the influential House Transportation Committee, supports the Central Corridor project linking St. Paul and Minneapolis. The DFLer said a recently passed bill changes how the Federal Transit Administration evaluates transportation projects that are seeking federal money.

Under the old system, Oberstar said the FTA focused on what's known as the cost-effectiveness index. The CEI is a complicated formula that looks at travel times, ridership and construction costs.

But Oberstar said the index means the agency essentially ignores other factors, such as environmental benefits and the potential for economic development. He pushed for the recent changes, which will require the FTA to also give comparable weight to five other criteria.

Hopefully this means that cities start planning lines based on ridership, rather than saying, what can we build for this small amount of money.

Debunking O'Toole #3,520

Mr. Setty at PublicTransit.us is debunking Randal's latest try to put down light rail yet again. This time the claim is that a Prius is more energy efficient:

With most renewable sources such as wind, solar and hydroelectric, "gross energy" is essentially meaningless in this "Prius vs. Electric Transit" argument, except that efficient extraction of available energy keeps the price of the power obtained down. Taking O'Toole's reasoning to its logical extreme, if wind and solar only captures 10% of the available energy, or a hydroelectric project only captures 25% of the energy available, he'd still report absurdly high BTU's expended. Never mind that in these cases, nature still radiates this energy into Earth's environment--whether humans choose to tap into it or not.

People Are Using the T Word!

Paul Krugman of the New York Times is blogging transit. Did he use the T word? Really? In the first post he discusses three different cities.

Atlanta is the poster child for sprawl, and as a result it has hardly any alternatives to cars: 89 percent of workers drive; less than 4 percent take public transit.

Boston is an older city, with an extensive transit system from the days when most people didn’t have cars. Even so, 79 percent of the labor force drives to work, but 11 percent do take public transit.

And then there’s Toronto. It’s still more auto-centered than not — but 22 percent of workers take public transit.

The thing about Toronto, they never got rid of their streetcars. I wonder how much that has to do with their ability to keep transit numbers up. Now they are off on a light rail expansion to fill in some gaps.

You can read some more thoughts on Krugman's posts here(Bellows), here(Yglesias), here(City Comforts), and (BT). Are things starting to change in the US? Are people actually starting to discuss land use and transportation? Frank at Orphan Road covers this as well:

I've been ranting for a while now about the connection between land use patterns and energy consumption, but for a whle it seemed like shouting into the wind, especially as national politicians talked about how some magic pill like ethanol was going to solve all our problems. Lately, though, it seems like the connection between land use, public transit, energy consumption and national security is finally starting to gel in people's minds.

I hope you're right.

Dumb Idea

Governor of Arizona Janet Napolitano decided not to tax sprawl homebuilders and instead asked them to help raise the sales tax for transportation. First off, homebuilders are the ones that gain the most from new transit and transportation infrastructure, they should pay for it. Second, why are they still building in that desert???

Arnold on HSR

From the Financial Times quoting Governor Schwarzenegger on a trip with French President Sarkozy:

"I could not believe we were going at 350km an hour"

Believe it Governor, and make it happen here.

Obama at Hayward Field

ph.obama_00724_5-9-08.jpg
Originally uploaded by oregonianphoto

Man this is pretty cool for a track fan. Barack Obama at the Mecca of Track and Field in the United States. Hayward Field. Flotrack will have a video tomorrow I'll post up if I can get the code.

History Lesson: Demise of Twin Cities Rapid Transit

Twin Cities Rapid Transit was one of the best streetcar companies in the country before its demise. It's secondly most famous for the streetcar burning photos that many cite when discussing conspiracy theories.


Well part of the story I had never heard before was told on one of my listserves by transit expert and former Deputy Secretary of Transportation for Pennsylvania Ed Tennyson. He states that at one point TCRT had saved up $10 million dollars to buy new streetcars and repair the tracks but got destroyed by Wall Street speculators. Well, I'll let his words tell the story. I'll add links for emphasis:

The Twin City street car to bus conversion was ironically caused by a pro-street car management, a man named Strouse, I think he was. During gasoline rationing he saved up ten million dollars ($ 160 million at today's prices) to buy more PCC cars, re-lay more track, moderninze the rail system.

A shrewd vulture on Wall Street named Green saw all that money in the bank and solicited the stockholder votes to throw out the sfreet car management so Green could disburse all that money to stockholders including himself. His first attempt failed as the stockholder had pride in the company but inflation hit them (and everyone else) so Green prevailed on his second take over attempt. Strouse was fired and the money was paid out to stockholders leaving nothing for renewals.

Wall Street neophytes saw those big dividends and sent the stock price soaring. Green soid his. Buy low and sell high. Local politicians took Green's place, one named Fred Osanna(In the picture above), a political lawyer. He got a promise from General Motors to loan him all the money he needed to rid the city of street cars and they had National City Lines send him their Barney Larrick to manage the job.

Since there would be no more profits, Osanna and Larrick sold all of the copper wires, car baen property and salvage from scrapping cars to their wives or other relatives at a rock bottom price. Their relatives waited a few weeks then sold all the junk on the market for far more than they paid Twin City Rapid Transit for it. Roy Chalk did the same thing in Washington but was careful not to go to jail. Osanna and Larrick both went to jail, for defrauding the other stockholders.