Of Montréal Electrification

Looks like Montreal could reap the benefits of electrification sooner than others.

Agence Métropolitaine de Transport and Hydro-Québec agreed on May 5 to invite proposals for a study to determine the feasibility of electrifying four of Montréal’s commuter rail routes totalling 250 km.

In Calgary they ride the wind. Here they could ride the wave.

I Wear My Sunglasses At Night

Over at Politics and Place they're talking about the effect of train goggles with an excellent discussion on this issue that I mostly agree with. Yes I have them too. Apparently I'm a Choo Choo Head. I won't go into the dog whistle effect that the term choo choo has for rail transit opposition but it's there and it's strong. But as Paz states:

Munch on this for a second. If all of the sudden every streetcar and commuter train that ever ran was to suddenly reappear, would we still need buses? I would argue "absolutely, yes".

Ditto. As Bruce McF always says, buses and trains should be friends.

Knew It Was Gonna Happen

I've been waiting for that day. The day when the Busway in Miami is handed over to the cars. We knew it was gonna happen...somewhere.

Now they might get their wish if county commissioners and other local elected officials approve a proposed plan to convert the Busway into -- among other alternatives -- a four-lane highway with express toll lanes where private vehicles would share the road with buses. The revenue would then be used to fund the cash-strapped county transit agency.

This is one of the things I fear with BRT boosterism, that eventually the road will revert to cars. To some degree my fears are unfounded, but this should give us caution.

More Rock

There are tons of songs out there that deal with driving, wish there could be more like this...



Be careful though. It's kind of catchy...

Via BART's Blog

Silo X: Single Project vs. Complete System

There's been a lot of talk over this study today. It comes at a perfect time for journalists to skim the abstract and form their own conclusions before actually digging in to the details. What the study does though is look into the life cycle costs of different transportation modes. As Jebediah states in his post:

What’s totally missing in their “complete” estimates for these various transportation modes are the virtuous effects of rail: creating denser communities where people tend to walk more, own fewer cars, live in smaller abodes, and spend less time stuck in traffic jams.

Where could we get such a look into that community? Why Portland of course where they began preliminary calculations of these things in a basic way for transportation and building emissions.

This can and has been replicated (pdf pg 53) in other places such as Over the Rhine in Cincinnati. Hopefully other places will look holistically at the benefits of the whole package instead of just these news hopping studies that continue silo thinking. It is certainly good to look over the life of projects, but as mentioned, it's only the life cycle of that individual transportation project and nothing else related.

Oh Noes! Streetcars Go Slower!

The Salt Lake Tribune apparently doesn't get the point of Streetcars AT ALL.

According to the UTA's own study, capital investment for expanded bus service on 2100 South would cost only $10 million. The streetcar would cost $37 million. Buses are more expensive to operate, but you could run expanded bus service for 26 years on the difference in capital cost between buses and the streetcar.

Great, run buses on a private ROW that has a ton of development potential. No comments on the difference in development that will result or the benefits of electric transit. Also, they apparently also haven't even taken a look at Portland, Tacoma, or Seattle to see if people actually ride.

TRAX has shown that Utahns will ride trains when they won't ride buses. That might be another point in the streetcar's favor, except that Utah doesn't have experience with a slow-moving streetcar system.

Oh noes! Not a slower moving streetcar! It operates nothing like Trax in downtown Salt Lake!!!

Links & CNU Coming

The Reconnecting America site will have updates from the CNU this week on its twitter aggregator for the CNU17 hashtag. If you use twitter, I'll be tweeting from @reconnecting.
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Jarrett at Human Transit asks if Sim City rotted our brains. I've been playing since the early 90s and I'm pretty sure that if I didn't go to planning school I would have no idea that zones didn't need to be separated.
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Poor drivers, they just get no respect. No one loves them anymore. The Heritage Foundation is trying so hard its sad to see them twist the statistics without giving a full picture.
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A group files a civil rights suit on the Central Corridor. How much should be spent on gentrification mitigation on rail lines? Is there a limit?

Running: Determined to Be a Better Man

Sometimes I'll post something on running which many of you know happened to be a big part of my life before transit. Today I'd like to point folks to a post in Jogger's World about a friend of mine named Darren Brown. It's a good story about how DB dealt with his father's (who was a famous and decorated runner) suicide and came into running on his own. Recently DB broke 4 minutes in the mile and with his deceased father became the first father-son duo to break 4 in the United States. My tie to Darren is that I failed to get him to come to Texas when I recruited him out of high school. He eventually came to school at UT but we were glad he came late instead of not coming at all.

"You see, I want to become a better runner than my father," Darren Brown says, "but I'm determined to become a better man."

In Houston...

I'm in Houston visiting the fam and some friends. I've decided to take a little digital holiday. You might still get a tweet or two but I'm going to stay away (or try to at least) from the Reader and Blog till Sunday.

Always Someone Cooler Than You

Supervisor Chiu and others have called for a second Freeway revolt. This time its a bit more passive, but its good to have people start speaking out in favor of even more spending on transit. What is also shows is how clueless MTC is when it comes to the United States as a whole.

In response, Randy Rentschler, a spokesperson for the MTC, called the RTP "the most transit-friendly plan of any metro area in the entire country."

I'm sure it's not as friendly as New York City. As Ben Folds says, always someone cooler than you.



But the bigger point that even if you were the most transit friendly plan in the United States, that isn't really saying much, considering how regions in the United States treat transit.