Tag Archives: transit

Imagining a city without its public transportation

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The Atlantic Cities reviews the work of WMATA (DC’s transit agency) on the business case for transit.  They turned off public transportation in the regional transportation model.

“It was literally just imagining Washington, and all of a sudden, you wake up tomorrow, and the transit system isn’t there, Antos says. “What would you do?”

People, it turns out, do something very interesting. They stop making long car trips because the traffic is so bad. In one hypothetical scenario, Antos took away the transit but kept the rest of the area’s road infrastructure the same. People were allowed to change their trip patterns – to chose different jobs or shopping centers – and most of them stopped crossing the region to get to those things.

“The congestion was forcing people to regress into a more local economy,” Antos says. “We looked at that and realized we were watching the economy splinter. All of a sudden, we weren’t watching a regional economy function where workers could find jobs in the whole region.”

People weren’t crossing county lines – or even rivers – to get anywhere.

Let’s welcome “Rapid Bus”

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Metro Transit is studying 11 corridors for significant upgrades to bus service.  These corridors represent high-ridership, dense locations with high potential for service improvements.  Sharp-eyed readers might recognize these “rapid bus” corridors as something that is called “arterial bus rapid transit” in the 2030 Transportation Policy Plan.

So what designates a rapid bus route? Fewer stops, off-bus fare collection, all-door boarding – all equal faster service.  At the open house last week, project displays showed between 20 and 30% travel time savings, depending on the corridor.  Stops will become stations, with shelters, dynamic signage and possibly raised curbs and bumpouts.  These look like great improvements.

Metro Transit staff told me the next step is to identify first corridors for implementation by looking at what corridors have the most potential for service improvement (and probably which are most politically feasible).  The rapid bus concept will also be used in the alternatives analysis for Nicollet (sometimes called the streetcar study).

Linklist – backlog edition

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I don’t frequently do the “link list” post, but blogging has not been at the top of the priority list lately and I didn’t want to deprive all the dear readers of the good stuff I’ve been seeing.   Each deserves longer comment then I’m giving here.

Should local transit just be built by the states?

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One of my new favorite snarks, Lisa Schweitzer at Sustainable Cities and Transport, discusses whether local transit funding shouldn’t just “devolve” to the states.

Federal involvement in transit also has led to a heavy capital bias in transit investment, prompting local and regional agencies to build transit projects, again and again, that they can’t afford to run with any frequency. This leads to a wider geographic coverage for transit–which probably still isn’t wide enough to deal with spreading regions–and with lower frequencies than really make for high service quality. (And sprawl is bad, bad, bad, evil and terrible! The worst thing ever! There? Will that sentence keep some of you land-use people outta my grill for the purposes of this post? Can I talk about something else now? Thanks.)

Transit has been on the teeter-tottery edge of those issues and criticisms for a long time. Why can’t New York pay for its own subways? Or Los Angeles? Or anywhere? That’s why we have local taxes and general funds, right? If you want transit, don’t go holler at the feds. Make it happen if you want it. Perhaps there would be a greater chance of that self-helping if leaders know that the buck really began and stopped with them, and they might instead be much more careful to match investments to operations.

The US Congress is overly dominated by rural interests, and many of us for years have argued that this creates a hostile environment for transit funding in the first place, as many rural senators wonder: “what’s in it for my constituents?” and the ineffectual spreading of scarce resources around to systems that aren’t particularly viable or worth investing in. Porky McPorktown.

The key drawback to devolution? Locals might not have the stomach for a local gas tax to replace the federal one.

So if places like California, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota were running their own budgetary shop, they could keep the revenues they are currently sending to Portland and Memphis and Charlotte.

Here’s the glitch: these donor state are only fiscally better off with Federal gas tax elimination or erosion if those donor states prove capable of passing a gas tax on its residents equal to or better than the 18 cents a gallon [- whatever the Feds give away to other jurisdictions]. And I’m not seeing that happen, at least not in California. Maybe in Minnesota. Maybe in New York, or Massachusetts. Maybe.

Beyond mobility – EPA delivers metrics for sustainable transportation

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Since the EPA, DOT and HUD joined forces to create the Partnership for Sustainable Communities and laid out six livability principles, there has been a lot of discussion: How might federal funding guidelines change? How will we measure livability?  Does this mean we can only have one kind of lettuce?

It appears answers may be arriving.  EPA has released a Guide to Sustainable Transportation Performance Measures.  According to EPA,

Many transportation agencies are now being called upon by their stakeholders to plan, build, and operate transportation systems that – in addition to achieving the important goals of mobility and safety – support a variety of environmental, economic, and social objectives. These include protecting natural resources, improving public health, strengthening energy security, expanding the economy, and providing mobility to disadvantaged people.

This shift has been decades in the making and is driven by a variety of factors. One factor is the desire for a more integrated and holistic approach to transportation decision-making. Researchers have been shedding light on the complex interrelationships between our built and natural environments and drawing attention to the need to better consider the multifaceted implications of transportation system changes. At the same time, advanced computer tools are making it easier to quantify and visualize these relationships.

The guide contains 12 examples measures for incorporating sustainable community objectives into transportation decision-making.  The key here is that these measures are going beyond mobility – looking at other factors like carbon intensity and mixed land uses, which should be important inputs into our transportation planning processes, but have not been uniformly adopted.

If you look closely, you’ll also notice many of these measures match well with another tool that HUD, one of the Sustainable Communities partners, has said they will use to evaluate projects: LEED ND.  Transit accessibility, bike and pedestrian level of service, mixed land uses, land consumption and carbon intensity are all measures which play an important role in the rating system.

The document includes a description of the stage in a planning process in which each measure might be useful, the specific metrics one would use, guidance on calculations and data sources and examples of planning process where that measure has been used.

This document doesn’t say how or if funding guidelines will change.  This also isn’t a comprehensive guide on how to include sustainability or livability into a specific planning process (environmental review, for example).  However, this could be a useful tool for any city, county or other entity involved in transportation decision-making to build a better process.   It starts to place metrics around the aspirational language we’ve heard from politicians.

Can Americans tolerate a robot car?

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Slate explores whether autonomy-loving Americans will be able to handle robot cars.

This American emphasis on the individual’s sovereignty poses a problem for new technologies designed precisely to deny personal agency. Autonomous technological agents—from military drones to the self-driving car—are increasingly prevalent. Their potential benefits and conveniences are immense. Yet as the currently cutting-edge becomes commonplace, these technologies could bump up against the prized American autonomy.

The United States drives more than any other society, and the self-driving car provides the glorious possibility of a hands-free cross-country road trip. But how will it harmonize with American drivers’ varied preferences for tailgating, conscientious speed-limit-monitoring, passive aggression toward walkway pedestrians, or highway-traversing pursuits of the fastest lane? General Motors, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Volvo, and Google are each currently testing driverless cars, with intentions to make the vehicle availablefor mass consumption by 2018. Recently, Nevada became the first state to pass legislation asking the Department of Motor Vehicles to formulate guidelines for driverless cars.

While engineers are perfecting the technology, they still must grapple with the drivers, who must both trust and enjoy the automated-car experience. Making a driver-free car safe and effective requires overlooking the uniqueness of each individual’s driver personality. Research suggests that autonomous technological agents like service robots and anthropomorphic computer interfaces can diminish users’ experiences of control. And we hate to give up control.

It is uncanny how many of these robot car issues have already been explored so thoroughly in Total Recall. (Start at the 17 second mark)

$70 million needed for freight rail interchange not accounted for in Southwest LRT alternatives evaluation

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MNDOT says that in order to accommodate the proposed alignment of the Southwest LRT line in the Kenilworth corridor, which currently includes a freight rail line, a $70 million rail interchange would need to be constructed in Saint Louis Park to reroute freight trains.  From the Strib:

The new [freight] connection is under study because the Kenilworth corridor is part of the route selected for the proposed southwest light-rail line between Minneapolis and Eden Prairie.

Hennepin County, which owns the Kenilworth corridor, says pinch points along the route — between Cedar Lake and Lake of the Isles — do not leave space for both freight and light rail. The county has planned the light-rail line assuming the freight tracks would be moved.

The County may have planned the line this way, but it didn’t include these costs in the capital cost estimates for the 3A route.  This is from the Locally Preferred Alternative Evaluation Documents, Technical Memo #7A – Capital Costs:

Freight Rail Modifications – Modifications to freight rail operations were not separately quantified in the LRT alternative cost estimates. The relocation of TC&W near Louisiana Avenue is not considered a cost of any LRT alternative in this project. Minor shoofly alignments associated with bridge construction are included in the cost of the bridge in this estimate.

I assume this means that none of these costs made it into the Draft EIS which is under review by the Federal Transit Administration.

Train in the Woods

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The Minneapolis Station Area Strategic Planning Document for the Southwest Transitway is a pretty good piece of analysis.  It lays out the existing conditions at each of the five station locations, including barriers to pedestrian access and other details of urban form important to transit-oriented development.  It provides what seem to be realistic recommendations for opening-day improvements, as well as hypothetical build-out scenarios for transit-oriented development around the stations.

While I disagree with some of the specific design elements (low-density, over-parked development at Royalston, bike trail intersecting with pedestrian realm at Van White), I realize those details are all likely far from finalized, and overall I think the document is a great jumping-off point to decide where public investment is needed, how regulation might need to change, and what questions still need answering.  It provides details where there used to be few, and that moves the line one step closer to successful implementation.

What the plan illustrates that frustrates me so much, is how inappropriate the routing decision for the Southwest LRT line through Minneapolis really is.

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Legislative Auditor: To Improve Transit Governance, Met Council Should Have Elected And Appointed Members

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The Legislative Auditor has released a report, Governance of Transit in the Twin Cities Region, that recommends the Metropolitan Council be restructured to include both appointed members and local elected officials serving staggered terms. According to the report, local electeds would provide accountability, while staggered terms would provide institutional knowledge and “stability in strategic vision”.

Having a combination of local elected and appointed officials would provide the Council with an effective mix of regional and local perspectives. Additionally, having local elected officials on the Council would increase its credibility and accountability with transit stakeholders in the region. Option 2 would also enable the Council to implement regional priorities and provide continuity among its membership for ongoing initiatives.

I find the report to be a little too negative about directly electing Met Council representatives, claiming that it would not “promote consideration of regional perspectives”. Of course, this only applies if all members are elected from small districts, rather than at-large. I also fail to see how local elected officials can be seen to be less parochial than at-large elected members. The report notes that the Portland Metro is composed entirely of directly elected members, and we all know how poorly they do transit governance out there.

The good news from the report:

When compared with 11 peer regions around the country, transit in the Twin Cities region performed favorably. For example, in 2008, the Twin Cities region’s transit system performed better than most of its peers on efficiency measures, including subsidy per passenger and operating costs per passenger. The Twin Cities region also compared favorably when evaluating service-use measures, such as passengers per hour and passenger miles per mile of service.

Road Trains Tested In The Real World

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Road Train Test

Road trains (also called vehicle platooning) are convoys of semi-autonomous vehicles with a professional driver in the lead vehicle.  The Safe Roads and Trains for the Environment initiative (SARTRE) describes road trains as:

…a convoy of vehicles where a professional driver in a lead vehicle drives a line of other vehicles. Each car measures the distance, speed and direction and adjusts to the car in front. All vehicles are totally detached and can leave the procession at any time. But once in the platoon, drivers can relax and do other things while the platoon proceeds towards its long haul destination.

Road trains were actually tested in the real world by Volvo, who is part of the SARTRE team, in December.  They cite the benefits of road trains as numerous:

Platooning is designed to improve a number of things: Firstly road safety, since it minimises the human factor that is the cause of at least 80 percent of the road accidents. Secondly, it saves fuel consumption and thus CO2 emissions by up to 20 percent. It is also convenient for the driver because it frees up time for other matters than driving. And since the vehicles will travel at highway speed with only a few meters gap, platooning may also relieve traffic congestion.

There are some potential downsides to road trains as well, but ideally they can deliver many of the benefits of intra-city transit without some of the drawbacks.  Really road trains are just a stepping stone to fully autonomous cars, and caveats of same apply here as well.