Louisville's Third Rail

Apparently Louisville Kentucky had elevated electric rail service in 1886, remnants of which still remain today.

Exporting Urban Tax Base

Wow. Milwaukee Wisconsin is in an abusive marriage. They are a member of a regional planning agency that has 7 counties, of which three people from each county are representatives. There are no representatives from the city itself which provides 1/3 of the agencies operating budget. This agency, the SEWRPC, is in charge of land use and transportation planning for the counties.

The City of Milwaukee has 100,000 more residents than the combined populations of a majority of SEWRPC counties - Kenosha, Walworth, Washington and Ozaukee - but has zero seats on the commission.

Yet Milwaukee County pays the largest share of SEWRPC's operating budget that is collected from the seven counties' annual property tax levies - more than 33%, or $834,000 of $2,370,000 for 2007, records show.

Funny then how this happens...

Little wonder, then, that a major SEWRPC activity in this decade has been the creation of a $6.5 billion regional transportation plan that does not contain a single penny for any transit upgrade or initiative.

The plan is about to launch, over the City of Milwaukee's formal objection, a $1.9 billion, eight-year project segment including a new fourth I-94 lane from Milwaukee to Illinois. The plan deliberately omits a commuter rail plan that is available for the same corridor.

Even though gasoline has broken the $4-per-gallon barrier and demand for transit is up, neither the state nor SEWRPC will revisit the plan, its assumptions, spending and goals. That's not planning. That's denial.

So this is what happens when you give suburban jurisdictions control of the transportation funding that is regional in nature. No wonder they can't get the KRM line built or a reasonable transit network. They are always getting bad planning advice and have no funding clout.

Belmont Stakes Expects Record Rail Ridership

With gas prices high and thousands of people expected to watch Big Brown try for the triple crown, the Long Island Railroad is expecting record ridership.

With a huge crowd expected at Saturday's Belmont Stakes, the Long Island Rail Road is preparing for record ridership of up to 30,000 people to historic Belmont Park in Elmont and is promising plenty of trains to carry them. "As long as there are people, we're going to keep running trains," LIRR spokesman Joe Calderone said.
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The LIRR only began keeping ridership numbers on Stakes Day in recent years. The largest ridership the railroad has on record to the Belmont Stakes came in 2004, when 25,581 customers went to watch Smarty Jones, who fell short of the Triple Crown when he was upset by Birdstone.

Community Investments

There are a lot of problems with comparing costs across modes. You never know what is going to be included in the estimate and often times critics will take total costs and point out their expense. For example, the City of Houston has to approve Metro to build light rail in their streets. But in addition there need to be other mobility improvements including sidewalks and bike infrastructure.

In this instance it will be provided by the City of Houston, but in the case of Minneapolis and the Central Corridor, the street reconstruction costs are added into the rail line's total costs. The Central Corridor will end up costing $1 B for 11 miles. At first blush you think, wow that's expensive, until you realize that includes reconstructing the whole street and sidewalks.

University Avenue reconstruction, to include the mill and overlay of travel lanes and the reconstruction of 85 percent of the curbs, gutters and sidewalks. Central Corridor planners stated that the City of St. Paul and Ramsey County are considering funding the remaining 15 percent as part of the project.

In terms of pure people carrying capacity though this is important because when compared to highways, it's all throughput, but there aren't any walkers and bikers on a freeway. They also don't need a place to park at their end destination (bikes need space but take up less space for sure). So when we look at costs we should be careful to see all what is involved in the project. There might be more going on than the other side cares to acknowledge.

Lieberman-Warner Bill DOA

Aww shucks, we'll have to wait until the next President is in office to pass a climate change bill. If you couldn't tell, I'm not very upset about it. There needs to be a lot more in there for alternative transportation, especially modes that will reduce VMT like bikes and transit (and walking). It still stuck people in their silos as well not blending the benefits of land use and transportation decisions.

Although it is kind of par for the course that it dies the same day as Oil skyrockets.

Not that Simple

Update: You Can Listen to the Episode of Forum by clicking here.

I worry about analysis like these in the Tyee. While it's nice to think that if we didn't build that heavy rail line we could build x more miles of streetcar lines, it's really not that simple. Mostly because they serve two different purposes. You can't just say we can have 8 miles of streetcar for a mile of heavy rail, because what is happening is your trading short trips at a slower speed for longer trips at a faster speed. It's necessary to have both.

This morning I was listening to forum on KQED and one of the callers said it was absurd that he couldn't get from Sunnyvale to Berkeley in 2 hours. This is due to the lack of express trains between major destinations. In a better transit system, you would have Caltrain bullets stopping only at places like San Jose, Palo Alto, and San Francisco. Then it would go in it's own tube to Oakland and Berkeley. This is an expensive service due to the tube and electrification etc, and would likely generate calls to spend money more "cost effectively". They would say, why not build 400 buses or the next big trade off. The problem is you need both. In order to make transit useful, there need to be short trips and long trips made easy.

Now I know there is limited funding, but we need to start thinking like non-transit wonks think. And they think, why can't I get from a to b in under an hour if it takes that long in my car. Transit has to be competitive time wise, whether you're trying to hop a few blocks to get a bite to eat or going to a different city in the region.

FTA Privitization Program Hunts School Buses

Oh the places they will go...with their ideology. More tales of the Bush administration transferring wealth to private corporations. The FTA has decided to make it a requirement to allow charter services to bid for event transport that is now provided by the transit agency such as for baseball games and other special events. And now they are trying to make school bus service. But who is going to serve kids in downtrodden districts that no private entity wants to serve?

In the East Bay, about 30,000 schoolchildren use AC Transit buses to get to and from school, paying $15 a month for discounted youth passes. While many of those trips are on regular routes used for nonschool commuters, some of them with route numbers between 600 and 699 are specially scheduled and routed to serve specific schools. Local officials fear that the change sought by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) would ban those special routes.
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"If this came to pass, it would be a disastrous development for Oakland and for many school districts in California," said Troy Flint, spokesman for the Oakland school district. Flint said it would be "a huge financial burden" for the district to pay for private contractors, and that it wasn't clear whether private companies would even be willing to serve all of the areas covered by AC Transit.

I'm not sure what to think of this, but at first thought, its the stupidest thing I've heard yet. Especially from the FTA spokesman who when asked about AC Transit situation had this to say: "Federal Transit Administration spokesman Paul Griffo said that because the regulation process is under way, the agency cannot address specific concerns such as those raised by AC Transit." That's probably because they didn't think of it, as usual.

It's All About the Benjamins

Example 1: Charlotte

We talked with several riders who say gas prices and convenience have prompted them to give light rail a try, opting to pay $2.60 for a round trip ticket, rather than a gas guzzling trip to work.

“I did an analysis of it and I save $150 a month, not have to pay to park and drive my SUV uptown,” said Tim Gray, who has been riding light rail since its launch in November.

“I think I'm saving $75 to $100 a month. It really adds up,” said Bernice Parenti, who started riding a month ago.

That's the good kind of wealth transfer. Back into your pocket. So if all those folks filling up the lot at I-485 at the South End of the line saved $75 a month. That is $900 a year. No chump change for sure. It comes out to $672,000 a year in people's pockets. Or $20 million over the 30 year life of the vehicles. And that's just one station. Think about the folks who get rid of cars in the South End or Uptown Charlotte. Big money...for real people.

Cost Rocket

The Denver Transit Stop discusses how expensive roads are going to be to us in a few years.

Focusing just on CDOT, Governor Ritter's Blue Ribbon panel for Transportation Finance and Implementation found that there is a $51 Billion gap just in sustaining the infrastructure we already have. By 2030 that gap is expected to be $104 Billion. What does that mean exactly? According to CDOT, by 2016 if you spend an hour on the highway, about 40 min of it will be on rough pavement (currently it's 20 minutes).

But then again it will cost a lot for transit as well. Krugman jumped on the transit talk express, so Robert Reich joined up.

Even though it’s a hundred times more efficient for each of us to stop driving and use trains and buses, there’s not enough money in the public kitty for us to do so.

So are we gonna keep funding what helps people spend more money, or save it?

The Future is in the Past

Orphan Road has photos of a 1920 plan for a Seattle Subway System. It looks awfully familiar.

Second Avenue Sagas discusses the 1960 New York Subway Expansion that never happened.

Switchback laments the loss of the Arborway Branch of the Green Line in Boston. The State has a legal obligation to run it as a rail line again, but they just paved over the tracks, hoping the thought will just go away. I would say that Boston is second to AC Transit in rail hate. Not an easy feat when everyone else is trying to put rail lines back.

A post on the Political Environment Blog discusses the loss of a rail fight in Milwaukee back in 1997. Then Governor Tommy Thompson loved the idea, but apparently its demise was due to right-wing radio. It seems like some things never change. The city still can't quite beat back the scourge of winger radio and in a city that's set up well for transit (weighted density 5,830) with approaching $5 gas, things are starting to look up a little when the main paper is pushing both sides a bit harder.

Had Tommy stood up to the local conservative talk radio hosts who still use "light rail" as an all-purpose anti-urban code phrase, workers and students commuting from Waukesha could be riding the rails with some of that $4-gallon gas money in their pockets.

We can learn much from the past, so we don't make similar mistakes going forward.