Sound Transit Expansion Plan Polling Well

The Sound Transit District, serving the Seattle metropolitan area, has a proposition on the ballot to increase taxes to fund expansions of mass transit.

SurveyUSA has polled the measure, and things look promising:

65% lean toward yes while only 20% lean toward no.

It receives nearly unanimous support from young people who will be around to experience the benefits: 77 lean yes, 9 lean no, and Democrats, who believe in investing in our country for the future (81 lean yes, 9 lean no): however, even among Republicans, 45% lean yes, 42% lean no, and conservatives just barely oppose it, with 42% leaning yes and 44% leaning no.

Us young people realize that we may never get a full solution for liquid fuels, and we believe in livability.

Should it pass, it will help Seattle (which has always had a very good bus system back from when my dad lived there as a grad student at the University of Washington in the 1970's) catch up with fellow Western cities like Salt Lake City, Denver and the gold standard of light rail, Portland.

Los Angeles County has a ballot measure to expand its own transit system, still waitin on Schwarzenegger's signature (because for some reason the whole state has to approve the county measure (the state, of course, also has its high-speed rail bonding measure on the ballot).

And of course, Honolulu has a smart measure to put grade-separated commuter rail along the unbelievably congested Highway 1; perfect place for a rail line if there ever was one.

Panos Prevedouros is an Idiot

I knew the anti-rail candidate for mayor of the City and County of Honolulu (basically the entire island of Oahu) was wrong-headed. There are quite possibly problems with the specifics of Mufi Hannemann's rail plan, but the general plan makes a great deal of sense. Hawaii has the density and the congestion necessary for better transportation options (everybody agrees on this).

Given that 75% of the Honolulu urbanized area's residents (based on the official over 60% of Oahu's residents number (> 525,000 people in the corridor in 2000) divided by the 718,182 residents of the urbanized area live no more than 2 miles (eyeballing, but seems pretty accurate) of the corridor, a fixed guideway makes sense since most people could walk to a station and pretty much everybody in the area could bike to one. Everyone can get the bus to it.

Since Hawaii

a) has to have liquid fuel shipped in from the mainland at huge cost
b) has unbelievable renewable energy sources
1. geothermal from the volcanoes
2. solar from the beautiful tropical sun
3. fairly steady wind from a ton of places
4. a whole bunch of great ocean-based energy sources (tide, waves, thermal energy), being an island
5. already has several hydroelectric plants

it makes sense for the guideway to be electrified. Rail is compact so that makes sense, and grade separation makes sense given the heavy traffic (to avoid delaying the traffic) and the heavy expected ridership given the affinity of Hawaiians toward public transportation (based on ridership of TheBus).

But Dr. Prevedouros being wrong on rail isn't what makes him an idiot.

This article he wrote for the alternative Hawaii Reporter is what makes him an idiot.

It's particularly bad since he's supposed to have a degree in transportation engineering.

The article is entitled "City Transportation Priorities: Phoenix Versus Honolulu," and basically says that Honolulu should follow Phoenix in its priorities.

First of all, nobody should be following Phoenix in its priorities. That area may be utterly screwed by its irresponsible sprawl (but it may overcome the rising heat and ebbing water supply; let's not count it out).

But that very sprawl makes Phoenix a particularly terrible role model for Honolulu.

As noted above, 75% of Honolulu residents live (and I would guess 60%+ work) no more than 2 miles from the corridor.

Oahu has a grand total of 8 major highways (only one [H1] fully in the urbanized area), and the other two freeways are branches off of H1, which is the main corridor where the rail would run (H2 is 8 miles long north to the inland military bases, H3 is 14 miles east across the island to the northeast side).

The Phoenix metroplex is spread out over about 800 sq. miles. Nowhere is there even close to the population density over a 3-4 mile wide corridor as there is along the Honolulu corridor.

Phoenix denizens also tend to have legs solely to reach the accelerator. Honolulu people take more trips on transit than Phoenix denizens.

That's not just more per person, that's more, period.

The about 3.6 million people in the Phoenix-Mesa urbanized area took 64,330,702 unlinked trips on transit in 2006.

The 720,000 or so in the Honolulu urbanized area took 71,695,536 unlinked transit trips that year (see the urbanized area totals, courtesy of the American Public Transportation Association


And point about the "oppressed and overtaxed" Honolulu leading to lack of growth? New York City, which clearly is overtaxed if anywhere is (Honolulu is a decent amount below the median of state's largest cities); New York is significantly more heavily taxed, and even moreso more heavily taxed than Phoenix.

But New York's gained 30,000 more residents (265,000 vs. 230,000 gain) than Phoenix in the period from 2000-2007.

Why has New York been growing so much?

Several reasons, but one of the biggest: its great great-separated rail transit system.

Senate Recommendations For Rail Transit Spending in FY 2009 Appropriations Bill

The U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and other Related Agencies released its marked-up fiscal year 2009 appropriations bill yesterday, and it is now available online.

While housing is definitely important in these times of foreclosures (granted, many of those being foreclosed on have to take some blame for buying houses beyond their means; at the same time, the real estate industry wasn't offering anything else other than the insane sprawling large subdivisions, and local governments have been completely failing to stop and even encouraging such housing), and urban development is very, very crucial, I'm going to focus mainly on the public transportation parts of the bill.

Keep in mind that the subcommittee has Senators from the following 21 states: Alabama (Shelby), Alaska (Stevens), California (Feinstein), Colorado (Allard), Illinois (Durbin), Iowa (Harkin), Kansas (Brownback), Maryland (Mikulski), Missouri (Bond), New Jersey (Lautenberg), New Mexico (Domenici), North Dakota (Dorgan), Pensylvania (Specter), South Dakota (Johnson), Tennessee (Alexander), Texas (Hutchison), Utah (Hatch), Vermont (Leahy), Washington (Murray), West Virginia (Byrd), and Wisconsin (Kohl).

While they are unfortunately still spending what I think is too much money on so-called "bus rapid transit", and far, far too little on metro-area rail transit (and, of course, even more so when it comes to intercity rail) there are still significant spending recommendations for rail. Of the nearly 1.75 billion dollars recommended, over 1.6 billion is for some sort of rail improvement

Here's a look by Metropolitan area:

Minneapolis-St. Paul

• $20,000,000 for the Central Corridor Light Rail Transit Project, which will be running between downtown St. Paul and downtown Minneapolis past the University of Minnesota


• $71,166,060 for the Northstar Corridor Rail Project, a commuter rail line from St. Cloud to Minneapolis

Denver

• $1,031,210 for futher improvements to the Southeast Light Rail Corridor (I believe to Lone Tree, Colorado)


• $70,000,000 for the West Corridor Light Rail to Jefferson County, Colorado in the Denver suburbs

Phoenix

• $91,800,000 for the finishing touches for the starter line for the Valley Metro; Phoenix is, along with the auto-based (and somewhat responsible for our situation) Detroit and sprawled out the wazoo Orlando, the only metro areas of over 2,000,000 people in the U.S. without a currently active rail system of some kind [though the TECO line Streetcar in Tampa barely, barely counts]

Washington, DC

• $34,700,000 for the Largo Metrorail Extension (I'm not exactly sure what this is for, but I'm guessing capacity extensions; they are desperately needed, as the system is hitting capacity in places; July 11, 2008 beat out the record set by Ronald Reagan's laying in the rotunda [so ironic given how anti-sustainability the man was])


• $30,000,000 for the Dulles Corridor Rail Project, VA (Silver Line); one of a very few major airports in the Northeast lacking a high-speed transit extension [Logan in Boston has the Silver Line, which is Bus Rapid Transit, and LaGuardia oddly has no rail link; I believe every other airport servicing the Northeast corridor does, except maybe one in Providence or Southern Connecticut]


• $5,000,000 for VRE Rolling Stock (New Trains)


• $2,000,000 for improvements to the highly congested Rosslyn Metro Station (where the orange and blue lines branch out on the East side; it's the next stop Virginia-wards from GWU's Foggy Bottom stop


• $15,000,000 for MARC Commuter Rail Improvements and Rolling Stock (New Trains and really desperately needed capacity increases; demand is now exceeding capacity for rush hour)

Charlotte:
$18,000,000 for engineering the Northeast Extension to Charlotte's successful recently opened Blue Line in its significant planned rail system
Dallas
$87,974,716 for Dallas Area Rapid Transit Northwest/Southeast Light Rail MOS, building the Orange and Green line extensions to the Dallas light rail system, doubling its length and eventually servicing both Love Field and DFW International
Houston
$10,000,000 for further planning on its hopefully-to-happen 5 line light rail system
Honolulu
$20,000,000 for work on its "High-Capacity Transit Corridor Project". There is a huge fight over this going on in Hawai'i. A Paultard scumbag from Texas (ha, I was right, she literally is a Paultard; gave him $1,000) by the name of Jamie Story is heading an astroturf operation with a few misguided locals like Eric Ryan, who founded "Stop Rail Now", to stop what is an unbelievably sensible plan.

Honolulu

A) Has the 4th highest trips/person/year taken on transit of any urbanized area in the country, coming in behind only the extremely heavily rail infrastucture, developed Washington, DC; San Francisco/Oakland, and of course the New York City metro area; it beats out places like Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston,
B) Part of the reason is that Honolulu Has to ship in diesel/gasoline/any liquid fuels at significant expense to power itself and its cars and as such, has generally had the highest gasoline prices in the nation.
C) Due to the islands being very sunny and tropical, and of course, being volcanic, and having a lot of windy areas off the islands, the Hawaiian islands can probably power themselves solely with geothermal and solar and wind. But that does no good without an electrified transportation system.

New York

• $197,370,000 to build the East Side Access to allow the Long Island Railroad to come into Grand Central Station, making commutes far easier for many Long Islanders


• $1,103,860 for the highly successful (both in ridership and especially in redevelopment; anyone who'd been to the West Side of Hoboken 10 years ago but came back today will agree


• $249,927,000 for the Second Avenue subway-studies began when my late grandfather was living there as a 2-year old in 1919. Construction began 36 years ago and was halted; it will reduce congestion and I believe put all of Manhattan Island within half a mile of a subway stop


• $5,000,000 for studying a Stamford Urban Transitway, a proposed light rail system for Stamford


• $75,000,000 for moving towards construction of a Midtown tunnel under the Hudson to relieve capacity strains on the Northeast Corridor and the PATH and also increase access

Hampton Roads
$57,055,734 to continue building the first link in its light rail system
Portland

• $50,000,000 for the second streetcar loop for Portland


• $81,600,000 for building the South Corridor Light Rail line (heading down from the Portland Mall)

Boston/Providence

• $27,000,000 to increase speed and capacity on the Fitchburg Commuter Rail Line


• $1,345,500 for planning for the South County Commuter Rail, Wickford Junction Station, RI from Boston to Providence

Chicago

• $29,474,404 for rebuilding infrastructure and increasing capacity on the 100-year old Brown Line


• $8,000,000 for continued studying to build a much-needed Circle Line to allow travel between lines without having to go through the Loop


• $6,607,000 for continued studies to move forward on significant planned expansions of the METRA commuter rail service

Seattle

• $28,846,735 to finish the initial Central Link for Seattle's planned light rail system (it ran into some problems after voters rejected financing the new plans last November, but most of the system will likely still be built, if more slowly)


• $100,000,000 to start building the light rail link to the University of Washington [my dad got around Seattle as a grad student generally without a car, either by bike or by bus, but this'll make a car even less necessary, and students always use rail].

Sacramento
$7,000,000 to continue studying a new corridor (hopefully for rail) south of Sacramento
Miami
$20,000,000 for expansions of the Orange Line of the Miami-Dade metrorail
San Diego
$21,650,000 for building the mid-city rapid extension to the San Diego Trolley
San Francisco
$8,000,000 for continuing to move forward on the Third Street Light Rail/Subway Project
Los Angeles

• $50,000,000 for building the Perris Valley Extension to Metrolink


• $74,600,000 for building the East Extension to the Gold Line

Salt Lake City

• $10,000,000 for engineering/studying the Mid Jordan light rail extension


• $81,600,000 for final finishes to the first part of the Commuter Rail System