Shame on Transportation Board Chair David Doss

The Atlanta streetcar aside, I was outraged by the gall of Surface Transportation Board Chair David Doss' claim that "he supports transit, too" in "Streetcar victorious" (Oct 20) while plugging the $1.4 billion managed lanes and its potential 34000 riders. Its predecessor agency, the Transportation Planning Board did a study on commuter rail, released in 2007, when building costs were, if anything, higher than today. It found that for $1.17 billion dollars, we could build ALL 7 proposed commuter rail lines (cutting off the Athens line at Tucker and the Macon line at Lovejoy, but keeping the full lines to Bremen, Canton, Gainesville, Madison and Senoia), run 12 trains on each line per day (6 in, 6 out) and get as many as 32400 riders per day. The Canton line via Marietta, in particular would have provided an option for a large number of drivers on the I-75/I-575 corridor. If this state had even a modicum of support for transit in its political leaders outside of the perimeter, we'd be in final design mode by now. As things stand, we haven't heard a peep out of GDOT about it since then.

I-75/I-575 Corridor Project: Elimination of Transit REDUCES Environmental Impact?

This state is nuts. Really. Georgia is absolutely nuts.

Because of a lack of leadership and the continued consequences of the racially-tinged failure of Cobb, Gwinnett and Clayton (all of which now have large minority populations anyway so they didn't even "win" on keeping their counties lily-white) to join MARTA, rather than moving forward on something that would be really, really useful (commuter rail/MARTA extension to Cobb, Gwinnett, Alpharetta/Roswell), we're going to be building a streetcar that is no more than a 30 minute end-to-end walk and is very close to existing heavy rail MARTA lines. (I guess this doesn't explain why we didn't go for the BeltLine; I guess stupidity/anti-tax idiocy/Central Atlanta Progress and businesses not putting up sufficient cash for it).


Instead, we're going to go with, yet again, more highway lanes. Now, I guess two lanes each direction is a little low given the rampant sprawl growth in I-75/I-575 area, so it's not entirely bad.

Except for two thing. The worst part is here, in the project's Winter Newsletter

The Bus Rapid Transit system with supporting facilities
and the Truck Only Lanes are no longer included as part of the project. These
changes result in a reduced project footprint with reduced costs and less severe environmental impacts, while still addressing the original Purpose and Need for the project.

Yeah, elimination of transit will reduce environmental impact. Also, gay people cause earthquakes and the moon landing was filmed in Hollywood.

They're also, of course, basically doing what amounts to $350 million subsidy to a corporation that will be running these additions for a profit (via tolls); of course, the state won't get any of the toll money even though it's paying for a hefty chunk of the road. We could build quite a bit of commuter rail for that much, thereby massively decreasing congestion.

So depressing, Atlanta policy is.

How Does Atlanta Compare on Public Transportation Use

Thought of a good idea for something to look up and write about today: how does Atlanta compare to other urban areas in terms of usage of public transportation and various other methods of commuting to work.

I am using urban areas (from the 2000 Census) because urban areas were defined by the Census Bureau in a fairly technical way.

Their reason for defining these urban areas were to avoid the imprecisions of using legally defined places in determining how many people live in an urban area. Using city limits obviously does not work (this makes, for instance, El Paso, Omaha, Fresno and Tucson seem larger than Miami).

The idea of metropolitan areas, which were created at least 60 years to try to address this problem, are better, but the use of legally defined places (counties) means that some rural areas in counties that qualify for being part of the metro area get counted.

The exact criteria used by the Census Bureau can be found in the Federal Register from March 15, 2002 and is quite technical and detailed (they tweaked things when empirical tests did not "look right"), but is probably about as good as it could be.

I am using data from the American Community Survey 2006-2008 3 year estimates (these are the most recent data available, and the 3 year combined estimates greatly reduce the error caused by low sample sizes).

Anyway, here is how Atlanta ranks among the 25 largest urban areas in the United States in terms of the transportation they use to get to work (using that form of transportation that takes them the longest distance):

Note that other means is anything not listed elsewhere on the table, but includes bicycles, motorcycles, taxicabs and everything that isn't in another category

Of the 25 urban areas, Atlanta ranks 10th in terms of percentage of workers who get to work by driving their car by themselves (76.1%). This, of course, is the least efficient and overall most expensive way to get to work, but it is unfortunately often most convenient. Those urban areas even worse in this category (i.e. a larger percentage get to work by driving their car by themselves) are, in order, Detroit (84.4%), St. Louis (81.8%), Cleveland (81.7%), Tampa (80.4%), Dallas-Fort Worth (79.6%), Miami (78.6%), San Jose (78.0%), Houston (77.5%) and Minneapolis-St. Paul (77.5%).

Atlanta's urban area ranked 15th in percentage using public transit (4.28%), ahead of Miami, San Jose, San Diego, St. Louis, Houston, Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth, Riverside-San Bernardino, Detroit and Tampa.

Atlanta's worst categories are percentage of people walking to work (1.52%), which places it 24th, ahead of only Dallas-Fort Worth (1.36%), and percentage of people who bicycle to work (this is my category, incidentally), where it places dead last (.14%), just behind Dallas-Fort Worth (.15%), meaning it also places 24th in percentage of people getting to work on their own personal power (1.66%), one of just 5 of the top 25 urban areas where less than 2% of people get to work on their own power, along with Dallas (1.52%), Detroit (1.79%), Houston (1.87%) and St. Louis (1.84%).

In only 8 of the top 25 urban areas do more than 4% get to work on their own power; Boston (5.85%), New York (6.75%), Philadelphia (4.43%), Pittsburgh (4.46%), Portland (5.18%), San Francisco-Oakland (6.88%), Seattle (4.49%) and Washington (4.04%).

With the exception of Pittsburgh, these are also the top 8 urban areas in terms of least percentage of people driving to work alone. Chicago (probably due to the freezing winters) has only 3.64% of people getting to work on their own power, but their high use of transit ranks them 6th in this category; Pittsburgh's relatively lower rankings in carpooling (15th), public transit (9th), and working at home (24th) push it to 12th in least driving alone, behind the aforementioned 8, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Phoenix (with Phoenix's rate due to a rather high rate of carpooling)

Dedicate Gwinnett I-85 HOT tolls to fund commuter rail

The inability of the Georgia Department of Transportation to think beyond the highway is mind-boggling.

Now, let me be clear. I am in no way against High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes as a way of raising revenue; a HOT lane is a special lane that is either open free of charge to people in high occupancy vehicles (in this case I believe 3 or more people); I believe these lanes usually have their special status only during peak hours of use.

Why am I not against it? First of all, it is a progressive use fee (tax, if you wish) in two different ways. First of all, in general, lower-earning workers are already far more likely to be carpooling to work. In Gwinnett, according to American Community Survey Estimates over 2006-2008, 18% of workers in the lower third or so of income ( less than $25000 a year) carpooled, while 12% of workers in the middle third of income and 7% of workers in the top third or so of income (more than $50000 a year) did.

Now, admittedly, while there is a major gap between percentage of workers in the lower third (68.1%) and middle third (81.9%) driving to work alone, the gap between the middle third and the upper third (82.8%) is small. This is largely due to the fact that only 79.2% of those making over $75000 drove to work alone. This is due to several factors, the largest being that those people are far more likely to work at home. Additionally, they are slightly more likely to (because they can more easily afford it) live close enough to work to walk or bicycle and may have the time to do so as well. Finally, the way public transportation is structured in Gwinnett County (quite little of it in-county, but with express buses to the big office towers in Atlanta) means that a little bit more of this group actually commutes by public transit than the public at large.

Second of all, it is a tax on unnecessary energy use (single-person commuting), which is good for the environment and for a sound energy policy. So yes, I have no issue with the tax, as it will be a tax primarily on the rich, and of course the state does need money it can get.

What is mind-boggling to me is the way Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) spokespeople answered the final question posed to them by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Q: Is this just another tax?

A: No, it’s optional, Barron said. Besides, with limited road funds, the state is running out of options, Rabun said. "Twenty years into the future traffic is going to be 50 percent more. We cannot put enough lanes out there to handle that traffic. What do you want me to do?"

This is a rather silly defense of the HOT lane. Making a HOV lane into a HOT lane is unlikely to take cars off the road, since carpooling's benefits were already increased by the existence of the HOV lane. It will move some cars to the HOT lane, and perhaps with the capacity they have, the increased carpooling from having the high occupancy lane and getting some rich people off of the rest of the road is the best private-vehicle way to reduce congestion.

But there are other options, and the Georgia Department of Transportation knows it. Look at this picture of proposed commuter rail lines that dates from July 2002.



How much has been done on this? Less than has been done on the BeltLine, for which MARTA still has not submitted anything to the Federal Transit Administration (but that is another story).

Seriously, though. Commuter rail today does not make sense only in New York, any more than any form of rail transit makes sense only in New York. 12 of the 16 metropolitan areas with over three million people have commuter rail (assuming the lines from California's Inland Empire to (largely) allow people to commute to Los Angeles counts), of which 7, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco have at least three lines to augment their good (well, Los Angeles does not really qualify as 'good', per se, but it is surprisingly extensive these days, and gets more trips on heavy and light rail combined than MARTA does, even though 15 years ago it only got about 1/3 the riders combined and even though the Atlanta area has grown much much faster in the intervening period).


In the South and West, Atlanta is one of the few large metropolitan areas to have done absolutely nothing to upgrade its rail transit system in the last 10 years, since the extensions to North Springs and Sandy Springs were finished (seeing as nothing "serious" has been done with plans, and seeing as the stripped-down Peachtree Streetcar seems like a tourist attraction more than something to really help transportation and will, I suspect, not get full funding).

Systems have seen and/or are in progress to see significant expansions in Los Angeles, San Francisco-Oakland, Portland, San Jose, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Denver, Dallas, Sacramento, Miami

and began and are expanding in Albuquerque, Seattle, Houston, Charlotte, Austin, Phoenix, Nashville, with Norfolk/Virginia Beach/Newport News and Orlando to see openings soon.


This is not to say, of course, that we haven't seen extensions in some of the other metropolitan areas in that time period (New York, Washington, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and especially Minneapolis, which just started its system in the last 10 years, now has one light rail line, one commuter rail line, is in progress on an east-west line between Minneapolis and St. Paul and about to submit to the FTA on a southwestern line, and Pittsburgh is still in progress on its Bore to the Shore, which is not insignificant because it makes further extensions a lot cheaper).

The point is that Atlanta is missing the boat.

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