Think Tanks, BRT, Money

Why Paul Weyrich doesn't side with the Think Tanks on BRT. Also, has anyone else noticed the Orange Line BRT ridership in LA has stayed flat while the other lines have gone up? I've heard it's at capacity. Two car trains and you're at 35,000 riders easy and 15 minutes off travel time. Thanks Zev.

And on a side note: Greenpeace found out how much money conservative think tanks took for Global Warming Denial, I tallied the Think Tanks I know of that have paid O'Toole and Cox for a Grand total of $1.87 million from Exxon Mobile alone between 1998-2006.

Assorted Bay Area News

Update: I changed the time of the Livermore meeting to 6pm as it was pointed out in the comments.

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.

Media Framing on LRT Expansion

In the last two days the media narrative in two cities on light rail expansion hit me as odd. Immediately the framing from the title hit against the rail line, without going into the basics of the story or being somewhat neutral.

In Phoenix it was the light rail "displacing" homeowners, as if there was a train booting out the owners with its foot, ...er pantograph. We later find out at the bottom of the article that the homeowner didn't really have to leave and that about 15 feet was being taken from the property, more than likely not where the line was going to be running. That and he asked that the transit authority buy the whole property, which they did. It seems to me that leaving out those points until the end of the article is a bit misleading.

A buyer told Goodrich that he would buy the house if it were rezoned as commercial property. Goodrich approached the city to change the status and found out it was interested in buying 15 feet of the front yard that faced 19th Avenue. Goodrich petitioned the city, asking they buy the entire property. They agreed and bought the house.

Then there's a story in the Rocky Mountain News in Denver where the Light Rail Line again by itself is "forcing" the business to close. Reading down further in the article, the local transit agency is just saying that the property owner won't be able to use the RTD ROW that it has owned and kindly allowed the business owner to use as a crossing.

But an RTD spokeswoman Sunday said Crespin's business is caught up in an unfortunate crisis of access. RTD has allowed access to the property over its right-of-way for years. But now the agency needs the route for light rail.

"RTD for many years has kept that offer going, and we've allowed them to cross the tracks, which are our property, to have access to the (business)," said RTD spokeswoman Pauletta Tonilas. "Last July we sent them a notification letter letting them know they were going to have to cease doing that."

This is the kind of narrative we've had to go through for a long time, the idea that the new transit lines are the problem. No one (well no one in the news) discusses the insane displacement that occurred during the construction of the interstate highway system. Putting it into perspective, during the time of Moses, half a million people were displaced by the New York freeway system construction.

I wish CNU had put together a youtube video of that speech Robert Caro gave at the Congress in Austin about his book about Robert Moses, The Power Broker. It was very moving and showed the pain and suffering that went into building the interstate highway system.

But back to the above. If we're going to change the idea that transit is second class, there needs to be a framing and narrative change. I'm not quite sure how to go about it, but I thought I would at least start by pointing it out.

Sunday Photo Blogging

Here are some photos I picked up last weekend before dinner with some transit friends who were in town for the APTA rail conference.

I know folks complain about Muni signage. But here is one to give some hope. But just a little since this is the first time I've seen a map of this kind. It's a braille map of the Muni light rail system at the Embarcadero station.



Here's a small pocket park, just on the other side of the shrubs is the busy Embarcadero. I wonder how many people know this is here. It's at the intersection of Greenwich and Embarcadero, right before the Fog City Diner.



And who wants to stand in the middle of a rail ROW taking pictures? Why me of course. This is the F-Line tracks, and hopefully soon to be E-Line.



And the F-Line is at Crush Load as usual.

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.
...
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.