ADDENDUM: How a fixed guideway rapid transit scenario might play out (Light Rail)

Bus, express bus, BRT-lite and BRT can all be considered steps in a progression of incremental investment in transit routes, gradually increasing the speed, comfort, and reliability, moving it toward a Rapid Transit standard. Because most of these investments are in operations (greater frequency, extended hours) they are reversible. In contrast, fixed-guideway transit investments such as those funded by the FTA typically represent a complete package of Rapid Transit elements, all at once: Dedicated guideway, signal priority, substantial stations to speed boarding, wider stop spacing, higher frequency and longer operating hours. They also come with a required guarantee of minimum service standards, to ensure that expensive capital investments are properly used. Because all of the improvements happen once, simultaneously, rather than incrementally, fixed-guideway rapid transit projects are perceived as development catalysts, capable of inducing development and revitalizing nearby areas. Streetcars represent the apogee of such a catalyst: providing a sudden increase in property values in a limited area, potentially spurring new, denser development.

Feasibly, in combination with appropriate revisions to zoning and parking requirements, a new light rail line could result in substantial additional multi-family development. Multifamily development is characterized by lower car ownership, and higher density residential is associated with great transit use (more people nearby the transit station generates more riders). The influx of residential population could then trigger a surge in demand for nearby retail and services, leading to the re-use or redevelopment of older buildings nearby. Following the exhaustion of available space nearby, the oldest and most-run down buildings will be torn down and replaced by new development. At sufficiently high densities, the combination of residential density generates sufficient street-life to represent an attractive walkable urban center, which attracts further residential develop, and additional retail and services.  Walkable mixed-use districts are generally considered to be highly attractive to both college-age populations and college educated professionals, and makes it possible for the region to compete to attract such populations. 

In contrast, incremental development will generate an incremental response: there will be no sudden upsurge in property values, the process of re-use, rehabilitation and redevelopment will be spread out over more years, and new development generated will be at a lower intensity. Incremental investment will never make the nearby area a ‘hot’ neighborhood. Correspondingly, the feedback loop of benefits to the area will be slower, the annual return on capital lower, and the whole area less attractive to developers. 

Fixed guideway rapid transit systems also offer an opportunity to attract ‘choice’ riders to the system, who elect to ride transit out of choice, rather than lack of alternatives. A fully implemented rapid transit route is exponentially better than it’s non-rapid equivalent due to the synergy between the elements: frequency and longer operating hours. Vehicles move faster and spend less time stopped, making is possible to provide the same amount of transit service with fewer vehicles. The combination of high frequency and dedicated guideway improve the reliability of the transit route. But the improved reliability of a central rapid transit ‘spine’ makes a transfer-based transit network feasible. 

Urban Economics for Curbed

Reading this: <https://www.curbed.com/2019/12/20/21031126/free-transit-universal-transportation-access>

Households spend a fixed amount of the household budget on housing+transportation. 30%+12%, IIRC. The trade-off between rents and transport costs is well known in urban economics. If you reduce transport costs, people are just going to spend more on housing. And given that, for housing, the stock dominates, the net effect will be more expensive housing, as households engage in competitive bidding for limited housing supplies. Yet all is not bleak: this very same relationship suggests that if we were to increase transportation costs (by tolling roads as we toll transit use), transportation costs would increase, resulting in lower rent costs. This would make housing more affordable, and given that housing prices are simply rents capitalized, would lower the housing values, which would, as one of the primary barriers to home-ownership is the initial cost, more home ownership more  accessible. 

Miami builds more incompatible transit

Miami builds more incompatible transit

Head over to humantransit.org, look up the monorail archive. But here is the take away: monorails suck because you have an interconnection problem. They only go so far, and when you want to go further, you have to change vehicles, modes, and routes. Which adds hassle and consumes time.

Pop quiz, which of the following does Miami have?

1. High Speed Rail
2. Passenger Rail (Amtrak)
3. Commuter Rail
4. Heavy Rail (Metro)
5. Light Rail
6. Streetcar
7. People Mover
8. Personal Rapid Transit
9. Gondola
10. Elevated Tram
11. Cable Car
12. Monorail
13. Bus Rapid Transit
14. Local Bus

HSR is on the way, Amtrak is has, Tri-Rail  (Commuter Rail), MetroRail (Heavy Rail)...

Looks like light rail and streetcar are perpetually being suggested. And PRT (Personal Rapid Transit ) (GASP) is still considered an alternative. And therer is a 4.4 mile 'people mover'. Crazily enough, it appears to work, with quite high daily ridership (33,000) .

Bus Rapid Transit is provided by the Miami-Dade Busway. Quick googling suggests monorail not build, but in alternative analysis. And of course their is some local bus, including some branded as 'trolley' despite lacking a trolley pole or rails.

MetroMover seems odd to be. It's rapid transit guideway, suitable for a heavy rail system, but with station spacing (every blocks) similar to a sad local bus. It's probably faster than walking, simply because there is no need to wait at intersections. So...it's basically an elevated streetcar, at 3x the costs? On the up side, MetroMover is automated, so frequency is limited by capital investment, rather than ongoing labor costs. It's the transit system the chamber of commerce wants! Wonder how late it operates--no reason not to operate 24/7, with automation.

Metro Mover is free, which helps out with MetroRail ridership, by providing the 'last mile connection' that the heavy rail network can't provide on it's own.

Funny to think about rapid transit that way--halve the price and you can double the length. Miami has 24 miles of heavy rail, for a population of 6.1m people. Salt Lake metro has 1.3m people and 44 miles of light rail. I feel like Miami is punching under its weight.

Salt Lake, you can take the mainline TRAX along freight right of way to a location about 1.5 miles from city center. Then TRAX is street-running (albeit in dedicated guideway) for the rest of the distance. So there is no need to transfer. That's not a thing that can be done with a heavy rail metro, which has to be grade separated (elevated or underground). Which makes it 3-9x more costly per mile than LRT, all else equal*. Following our earlier assumption, that means you can only have 1/3 to 1/9 as much of it--achieving that mile of  downtown subway destroys the opportunity for 9 miles of suburban at-grade railway. The mile-long bridge over the interchange chops 3 miles off the end of the railway.

In which context, MetroMover suddenly makes so much sense. It's too expensive to bring MetroRail into the downtown, so a cheaper mode is used. But since it's a transfer network, high frequency becomes very important--a mode to ferry users to the (nicer?) Metrorail stations, while they wait.

Cheapest alternative is walk, followed by local bus. But Miami is a sunbelt city, so presumably it's cut into sections by wide roads, making walking unpleasant and dangerous. As it's auto-dependent, there will be huge demand for parking, so obtaining the on-street right of way for bus lane probably didn't happen, so local buses are probably slower than walking. So something elevated would be very attractive, implying people mover or monorail. Monorail capacity would have been too high.

I'm a little surprised gondola/cable car wasn't considered, but that technology larger post-dates the metro-mover, and it's innovation was caused by the need to deal with steep grades, which Miami lacks. Exceptions do exist, such as tram systems (NYC Rooselevat island tram) intended to bridge waterways. But an elevated tram is basically a point-to-point high-wire act, so its necessarily straight. So that would have been a no-go for the non-linear and distributed array of destinations of downtown Miami.

With this in mind, the hunger for PRT makes sense. If the MetroMover has one clear flaw, it's going to be speed. Stopping every 2 blocks, I can't imagine it moving faster than ten miles an hour, and (drumroll) Wikipedia says it averages 9 miles an hour. So about as fast as a running man or a leisurely cyclist.  And thus that covering 3 miles takes 20 minutes. Which probably isn't very competitive with just taking an UBER across Biscayne Bay on I-195, which Google maps suggest is about 13 minutes, call it 10 without congestion. So the UBER is actually not much faster...it just eliminates the (much slower/less pleasant) walk portion of the trip.

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*Underground construction is funny. You can 'manufacture' more space, but only at incredible cost.
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You may have noticed I did not mention automated taxis. That's because they don't exist. I'm told that doesn't matter, that they will exist. I'm skeptical. I'm still waiting on my flying car. If it doesn't exist in Dubai, which is rich, sprawling, auto-centric, with unwalkable temperatures, and autocratic enough to ignore any death-toll, I'm very very skeptical such a thing will ever happen in America.
#---------------------------------------- There is an old Heinline story called 'The Roads Must Roll' about a futuristic network of moving sidewalks, some moving 60 mph. As an urban transport system, it makes a bemusing amount of sense--certainly solves the vehicle storage problem.
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I'm always bemused when UBER is used as a comparison to local bus. Of course it's faster. It also costs 5 times as much. If we're going to talk about a transit system where the average fare is $10, we can imagine 30,000 riders a day to get to $300,000 daily income, or $109m/year. Which would be over a mile of new light rail, annually...








 

Is BART commuter rail or rapid transit?

Neither. Both.

Reading up on BART, and BART is sui generis. It's part of that weird generation of US transit systems where we were reinventing transit (ie, the DC Metro, Buffalo Light rail) and ignoring best practices elsewhere in the world.

Why BART is weird: Non-standard track width--5' wide. So it can't re-use existing freight rail track (unlike every recent light rail and commuter rail in America). Which makes extensions preposterously expensive. (The new 'eBART' is standard gauge, btw).


Caltrain, on the other hand, does run standard gauge. And as it gets extended and electrified, it may become the 'regional rail' system for the Bay Area, rather than BART.Which suggests that, maybe, instead of extending BART, BART should be converted into a 'pure' rapid transit system, serving a limited area with very high headway.

Against Light Rail

Don't have a rail corridor handy? Don't build light rail. By the time congestion is bad enough for a metropolis to think about light rail, land costs are too high for any 'greenfield' corridor, and using existing right of way is the only feasible way. 

If the only existing right of way is public street, why spend the money to build a electrified railway? Electrified traction has undeniable perks over rubber-tired buses (fuel costs, acceleration, comfort), but the cost is rarely worth the marginal benefit.  

Neither ride comfort nor transit signal priority (TSP) nor dedicated/reserved guideway are specific to rail. Nor level boarding or off-board fare collection. With double-articulated buses, the rider capacity/driver ratio rail previously offered over bus has largely evaporated. 

So why do places like Portland keep building light rail? I suggest an availability heuristic: They have lots of old freight rail lines to convert to light rail. I seen symptoms of the same disease in Utah, and efforts to bring light rail to Utah County. 

The only actual advantage of rail over bus is political: its easier for a metro to create rail rapid transit than bus rapid transit. In the public imagination, light rail vehicles are like freight trains, whose necessary separation from cars is implicitly accepted. 

It is the separation from cars that the true virtues of rapid transit emerge - speed, safety and reliability. Rapid transit requires exclusive/dedicated guide way--exceptions generate accidents reliably, whether in travel lanes or turning lanes.  

So it's politically feasible for a light rail to claim a lane a lane on a congested arterial in a way no mere bus could ever attempt. That said, double-articulated buses seem to be able to make some of the same claims to exceptionalism and necessary special accommodations.  

Is suburban Sprawl an extractive industry?

Headline:

Crisis Intervention: First Suburb City Managers Are Our First Responders in a Declining Growth Environment

Cue Charles Marohn of StrongTowns, and the 'Growth Ponzi scheme'. (Google it). 

Suburbs aren't financially viable in a declining growth environment. Every suburban muni is, in effect, a long-duration ponzi scheme, because suburban growth doesn't pay for itself--doesn't pay enough in taxes to support the infrastructure it requires. Stage 1 is the desperate pivot toward commercial development as bedroom communities realize that they can't support an urban level of services (schools, fire, police, curb & gutter) on a residential tax base. Stage 2 is the dawning realization that all buildings depreciate, and with that depreciation comes falling tax revenue. And that's next pivot: either raise taxes or reduce services. Doesn't really matter which option is chosen, as the result is the same: The people who can move away, do. And the people who replace them only move in because housing is cheap, if somewhat unpleasant. And you get a muni made up of beige boxes with avocado kitchens and conversation pits, and streets lined with vacant strip malls, houses transformed into nail parlors, etc.

As long as a suburb can keep building, it's ok. New houses means new households, and new households have kids, and kids needs all kinds of stuff, and that attracts retail, and retail pays the taxes. And that works for about a generation. But over time the demand for new stuff falls, until the kids leave, and then the demand for even essential groceries halves. Then the retail leaves and the tax base collapse.

I grew up in SLC, Utah. There's only one highway to speak of, I-15. And the path of growth followed it, so you can see this process taking place simply by driving north from the county line. Every mile north the houses are a few years older, the store-front rents a bit cheaper.

It's funny to think of suburbs as extractive industries, as if suburban development was like coal mining. But in a way, it is--development extracts the accessibility of the land. And once that potential has been exhausted, what does a suburban muni have to offer, really? It's as dead as any Kentucky coal-mining company town, dead the same way the Detroit is dead.

Transit and Traffic Congestion

I hate to break it to you, but there is nothing that can be done to reduce traffic congestion. Some combination of the triple convergence and induced demand puts paid to any new highway capacity, and usually pretty quickly. 

The same is (sadly) true of transit. If my transit capacity reduces traffic congestion, the triple convergence still strikes: people divert from other times, other modes, and other routes, until traffic congestion reaches equilibrium again. 

I mapped all the commuter rail in the United States. Take a look.

I made a map of commuter rail in the United States. Admittedly, it's not as nice as the one at  TransportPolitic.com, but at least on mine you can click 'download as KML' and use the data.

The Dodgers

Do you know where the name comes from? Trolley Dodgers. Before they were in LA, they were in Brooklyn. Which was full of trolleys (street railways). Which ran fast, hard and heavy, and couldn't turn. So when one was coming, if you were in the way of a trolley-car...dodge it.

A surreal world, to think that there was a time before high speed travel, when failing to dodge a fast-moving vehicle didn't mean you would be maimed or killed. Modern life with the automobile has inured use to the idea, and modern law (jay-walking, 'accidents') omits blame for automobiles.

Technological Adoption of New Mobility Technologies

For my money, I like the Gibson quote: “The Future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed”.If I don’t see something working in Dubai/China (rich elite with a fondness for novelty in countries within minimal restrictions) I can’t see it making it to the US.

The adoption of new mobility technologies*  follows a consistent pattern: a successful implementation followed by a rash of less successful imitations that devour capital, followed by a crash. Capital intense networks (canals, railroads, cable-cars, broadband networks) often work out some kind of municipal/state takeover for public benefit).

*Canals, railroads, subways inter-urban railways, cable cars, automobiles, broadband modern streetcars, car-share, ride-hailing, bike-share, dockless bike-share, scooters, etc.

'Policy competition' is Neo-Liberal Gabble

The Reason Foundation has an axe to grind, and a story to sell.

https://reason.com/2019/11/26/how-can-our-dumb-infrastructure-accommodate-smart-cars/

They admit that created an environment for connected and autonomous vehicles is going to take a whole pile of new infrastructure to work. Rather than abandoning their ideological anchor that the personal automobile is a good thing, they suggest that places should 'compete' to soften regulations and install infrastructure, in order to support this new mobility option. Which is public subsidy of private consumption, for a select group (owners of CAVs), and to hell with anyone else.

 

Connected and autonomous vehicles

I’m becoming exponentially more skeptical of the value of connected/autonomous vehicles. I’ve known L5 automation is still a long way off, but some of the reports suggests many companies are still working on L3 automation. And there is zero evidence that the developers are working on anything system able to perceive pedestrians, implying that the cars will never be able to operate in a pedestrian rich center city environment.

Operating in ideal conditions (peak hour traffic, well-striped lanes, controlled access, no pedestrians/cyclists) could happen tomorrow. But that exposes CAV to their own ‘last mile problem’, on both ends of an auto trip, where such conditions are absent.

Starting with limited access highways, with ‘connected’ pylons to serve as a High Accuracy Repeater Network for GPS navigation for expressways and other divided highways is easy, and probably useful, as they represent the majority of VMT. But they are an extreme minority of lane miles, and extending the network beyond that would be problematic: road quality falls off quickly—striping is incomplete/damaged/incorrect, curb/gutter are sometimes absent, curb-cuts proliferate, and pavement quality declines.