Airplane Sprawl Exists

Apparently John Travolta's home is not only suburban sprawl, but Airplane Sprawl as well. I wonder what that house's transportation costs are...

Veto Proof Amtrak Bill Through

Via Greendem's Kos Diary.

Finally, the rail haters have been beaten back into their gas guzzling SUVs.

Every modern country supports their national rail system. Just ask the people stranded in Manhattan during the week of 9/11 how important Amtrak is to America. I was one of them.

The notion that Amtrak is supposed to be completely self-sustaining and require no federal subsidies is Republican hogwash.

Robert at CAHSR has more.

A Very Moving Speech by Robert Caro

Thanks to Lawrence and Jon. Here is the Caro speech from CNU in Austin. It might make you cry, but it explains how damaging Robert Moses was to the City of New York and this Country.

Housekeeping - TOW, CTA

Hey all. So I got back my admin panel for City Transit Advocates after trying out Newsgator Pro. I wasn't able to do anything with it and unfortunately the one thing I would have liked to do wasn't available. There is one drawback though. When I update the aggregator with new blogs, the name displayed will be the author and not the blog, which is the silliest thing ever and drives me crazy, but I don't have control over it.

So I've started fiddling with yahoo pipes. So far it has a lot of potential for filtering news stories about transit out of blogs that might not be completely transit oriented among other cool features. But it might be a while before I can create an aggregator there. So bear with me as I try to make CTA the best it can be. Most of you now hopefully have Google Reader to keep up with all the transit blogosphere, but its nice to see what the headlines are in a quick glance and have it on the side of your blog.

Lastly, if there is a transit blog I'm missing on the roll at CTA let me know.

Update: For an example of what you can do with Yahoo Pipes, I made a Pacific Northwest Transit Aggregator. Still working out some bugs though.

Why It's Not a Priority

I've been meaning to write about Ryan's article in Grist for a bit now, but have only gotten around to it now. Many of you have probably already read it but in case you didn't, check it out. Many kudos to him for putting his thumb on the problem.

He discusses why such a big issue doesn't get a lot of attention and no big plan has come to the forefront to address it. Part of the problem is Journalists afraid to tackle the subject.

And as part of the broader political conversation, transit lingers in relative obscurity. My informal polling of several environmental journalists in Washington suggested that discomfort with available information on transit and emissions reduced their willingness to write on the subject. As such, transit struggles to join the political conversation -- and since it's not part of the conversation, writers have little incentive to learn about it. On the cycle goes.

I'm going to chalk that up to the fact that they don't get it. I give Ben Wear of the Austin American Statesman a hard time on here because it's obvious he doesn't know a trolley pole from his .... but also the conversation is incredible boring, uninformative, and many times patronizing.

For my day job, I cycle through about 400 blogs and articles a day about transit, and if there is one thing that makes me super board its another lame national article without a substantive discussion of the issue but instead a "What is TOD?". This occurs in major newspapers and its not until there is a fiery issue like the Dulles extension that people get more informative news and information.

I'm glad however there is an informed blogosphere with blogs in almost every city to discuss these issues with substance. If only there was a transit beat reporter in every city that understood the issues. Then you might get a more pushy public, and politicians that care more about the issue and saw its importance.

Tacoma Streetcar Ridership

More on the ridership front. At the very end of an article discussing a workshop in Cincinnati on Streetcars, there was an interesting statistic thrown out.

The panelists struggled to explain why streetcars attract more riders than buses. Johnsen cited a Tacoma, Wash. bus line that carried 175,000 people a year was replaced by a streetcar, and ridership jumped to 800,000 a year.

I had never seen this before, but it makes sense. The Tacoma Streetcar has been rather successful with about 3,000 riders a day. This is in addition to the Portland Streetcar Ridership numbers which were modeled to be 3,500 by the usual modeling for transit. It started off there but by the time the extension was built, it was already at 6,500. Now its at 12,000 a day. And that is with 12 minute headways. I can't imagine what would happen if they halved them.

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.