Waco Streetcar?

If this gets built before Austin builds its light rail/streetcar line, I'm not sure what I'll do.

The Foot Bus to School

I remember walking to school as a kid and then riding my bike in middle school. Aside from being a public health benefit, I also think that kids learn direction and wayfinding this way. It's an important lesson that I think is overlooked much of the time.

I find it interesting that a small town in Italy is looking to cut greenhouse gases by creating foot buses, groups of kids walking to school together. Seems like a great idea to me. From the New York Times:

They set up a piedibus (literally foot-bus in Italian) — a bus route with a driver but no vehicle. Each morning a mix of paid staff members and parental volunteers in fluorescent yellow vests lead lines of walking students along Lecco’s twisting streets to the schools’ gates, Pied Piper-style, stopping here and there as their flock expands.

McCrory Gets on the Streetcar Wagon

It's interesting that the Charlotte Mayor is pushing for a streetcar over the maintenance bay that Keith Parker has lined up for stimulus money. Some of the tracks for the line are already in the ground and it would connect an east side destination with downtown. I walked the route when I was there but it's certainly a case where the streetcar would make a more physical connection between the two places. However I tend to agree that fixing the bus barn is of greater importance though I would like to see them do both.

But here's another idea. CATS laid tracks on Elizabeth Avenue that aren't being used. Why couldn't CATS install more streetcar track in phases but not operate it until it has a line long enough to span across uptown?

There's another thing I don't think McCrory gets. He says there was not enough stimulus money for roads. I think there was too much for roads. If more money was allocated for transit, they could have done both of these projects.

Public Transit Keeps You Fit

I would tend to agree with this. Especially considering my own experience that I walk much more than when I lived in Austin because I'm not just walking to my car and driving somewhere but walking to the store and taking transit to work.

The researchers say that the fact that transit trips by bus and train often involve walking to and from stops increases the likelihood that people will meet the recommended 30 minutes of moderate physical activity a day, five days a week.

According to them, people who drove the most were the least likely to meet the recommended level of physical activity.

The Noe Google Buses

These shuttle buses from Google (and other companies) come into the neighborhood in the evenings and mornings picking up tech workers and bringing them down to their respective south bay campuses. Many times I'll see the buses zooming up 24th street from the direction of the BART station on my way home and see them also almost bottom out at Dolores and 24th on the hill ridge. At times I myself will curse the Google kidz under my breath because of thier company heads' inability to locate near public transit so that these riders would patronize the system set up for everyone. How many of those workers would rather have a 15 minute ride on the J instead of a 40 minute ride to the campus.

I'm kind of torn on these shuttles. On one hand, it's a really huge freakin bus running up a residential street. But it is getting people that would likely be driving down 101 into more fuel efficienct ways. I don't have the same problem as others seem to have, complaining that affluent people have come to live in the neighborhood.



On the other hand, it's very stupid and un-environmental for these companies to locate such large office clusters away from conventional transit hubs. For all this talk of being green and forward thinking, companies like Google prove with their locational decisions that they don't understand how much transportation and land use plays into greenhouse gas emissions. But most of silicon valley is like that. Worst. Employment. Sprawl. Evah.

Because so many people want to live in a place that is walkable like San Francisco, you would think that businesses in the South Bay would look harder at trying to make more places like that instead of allowing even more junk down there. Facebook has actually caused a price spike in Palo Alto for helping thier workers live closer to work. I think this is a better solution than the shuttle buses but these companies are also skewing the local housing markets.

For "campuses" like Google, it seems that they could have built an office building downtown (they do have some offices in San Francisco) and saved more of thier employees money by allowing them to easily take transit to work. Instead they get more free parking which I would say if there is free parking at work, it is even more incentive to not live a location efficient lifestyle. Especially if you think you're special because you have solar panels over the parking. I wonder how much more Greenhouse Gases each of their employees emits because they drive a lot versus the amount of greenhouse gases those solar panels save.

Why People Are Going to Hate You

Because you're floating a bill that would make transit planning a state function instead of a more local one. That is dumb on so many levels.

The main reason the measure is so politically fraught is that it seeks to take metro-area transit authority away from the powerful and long-entrenched Metropolitan Council. Hausman says the present concentration of transit dollars and planning power in the Met Council and the Counties Transit Improved Board (CTIB) creates inefficiencies and unwisely forces the whole state to hew to a long-range rail transit policy dictated by a handful of metro entities--particularly Hennepin County and the city of Minneapolis.

Why would you take the transit authority away from the regional planning agency? This makes absolutely no sense unless you want to steal funding for "other" transportation priorities. One of the problems in the Twin Cities is that the current righty Governor appoints members of the Metro Council which controls regional policy. Somehow fix that first.

Oh for the Love of...

You can't make this up:

It would mean that the Millbrae-to-San Francisco route would have three separate electrified options for riders. Isn't that more than a bit redundant? Rail planners don't seem to be bothered one whit by the concept at this point. They are forging ahead.

How many roads go to San Francisco?

H/T BATN

China Metro Extension

Line 4 phase II gets the go.

Hadn't Thought of That

Some officials in the UK are saying that it would be cheaper to build new rail lines instead of renovating existing lines because they took into account people's time cost during the reconstruction that would disrupt service.

Building from scratch, he said, would not carry this cost, and it was "by no means clear that ostensibly lower-priced upgrades are always better value than new lines including new high-speed lines".

Additionally, he said the government had to take account of "the true cost of the disruption to passengers in services cancelled or diverted year after year".

He continued: "For the future, we need to assess the relative merits, including disruption saved, of building new lines rather than highly disruptive and expensive major upgrades of existing lines."

I hadn't thought of it that way but it seems like an interesting proposition to me. Reconstruction always seems to cause problems, and if they built new lines, that would open up the capacity on the old ones for later rehabilitation.

On the Hiawatha Today

So if you follow my twitter account you'd have seen my tweet noting that I was on the Hiawatha Light Rail line in Minneapolis. What you didn't see is what I was thinking on my way to downtown Minneapolis. It was strange now that I think back on it. A colleague and I were on the train and just chatting away with our bags in our laps but I didn't feel like it was out of the ordinary. I felt perhaps like some do when they dream in a foreign language after learning it for a long time. I've learned to take transit and expect it to be there yet this isn't a serious option in many of our regions and cities and that makes me a bit sad.

It should always be so easy to just hop on the train. In the last few weeks I've been able to not drive a car since I left Chicago. I took the Orange line to the airport, flew to San Francisco, took BART home. Today I walked down to BART, flew to Minneapolis and rode light rail to downtown. It's second nature now I guess, looking for the easy accessible transit. During those rides I was able to chill and not worry about whether I was going to be late. I was able to check email or listen to a podcast. I didn't need to worry about parking my car. I just needed to be. Is that so hard to understand for folks so opposed?