The Problem With Rail On The Drag

1 May

I’ve thrown this argument and picture around a hundred times, but have probably never put them together into a single post, so here we go.

The 2000 light rail proposal had one section that was particularly problematic: where Guadalupe narrows to 4 skinny lanes between 29th and 27th streets. The ‘solution’ to light rail as envisioned back then by the city and by Capital Metro was something like the picture you see below, but first I’ll explain it.

Light rail, to be any good, needs to run in its own space – free of cars. Also, in a two-way street, this space should be in the middle of the street – so that both directions of travel can share some infrastructure; so stations are easier to locate; etc.

Guadalupe is a wide street – mostly. Especially south of 24th, it would have been possible to keep two train lanes and (likely) two other lanes going each direction – or at a bare minimum, one lane each direction plus the tracks with no real trouble.

Except, again, for 27th to 30th. Right now there’s about 44 feet of right of way there (4 11-foot lanes). This is not enough to safely fit two train lanes and two vehicle lanes, unfortunately.

So what to do? Here’s my really crappy freehand reconstruction from memory of an engineering drawing that was on the wall of our UTC meeting room for several months in 2003, if I remember correctly.

Now, I might be getting northbound wrong here – it might have gone up Hemphill Park, but you get the idea. Both directions of through travel on Guadalupe would have been disrupted by moving to side streets.

Can you imagine trying to sell this to the public?

Well, in 2000 (and 2004, had we not rolled over for Mike Krusee), you could have made this argument:

Carrying 40,000 riders/day (boardings) is a more efficient use of this space than the cars (and buses) are currently able to pull off. An arterial lane like these can carry only 1000-1500 vehicles per hour – and this proposal trades 3 of the 4 through travel lanes for that train capacity. The travel demand in this corridor is highly directional – peak demand generally inbound in the morning and outbound in the afternoon with little reverse commuting. We could reasonably expect to somewhat increase the number of people able to use this corridor by making this change. Given there’s somewhere in the high single digit of thousands of boardings for buses in this corridor now, a safe estimate might be that you could almost double(*1) the people moved on the corridor by adding light rail that went directly from the suburban park-and-rides through the urban core into downtown.

Now move to 2012, and try to imagine making the same sale, in the world where the Red Line exists. Except those 40,000 boardings/day are nowhere in sight – because a lot of those people were suburban park-and-ride passengers who won’t ride a service that requires them to transfer (yes, even from train to train); and a few of the urban passengers who would be going up to suburban destinations. I think a reasonable estimate for ridership in this corridor, if we did what Lyndon Henry now wants and just built a stub urban rail line from the 2000 plan, would be 20,000 boardings/day. In other words, most of the urban ridership of the 2000 proposal plus the current Red Line riders. Is it worth the incredible disruption now – when you’re probably just adding a couple of thousands of boardings/day to the corridor?

No, sad to say, it is not.

And that, in addition to the political problems relating to Rapid Bus (see future post), is why we will never see rail in front of UT in our lifetimes. The key lesson here is that the entire reason I fought the Red Line in 2004 is precisely because it meant we couldn’t get rail later on Guadalupe (where it needs to be) if we built it. See here: Don’t Kid Yourself: Commuter Rail Precludes Light Rail, although that post emphasizes more of the technical and Rapid Bus related issues. I did warn people – if you start with the Red Line, you don’t get rail on Guadalupe, period.

(1: Yes, I could do the math. No, I don’t have time now. I did it on a piece of notebook paper back in the 20-oughts. You’ll have to trust me, or go look it up yourselves.)

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Stop lying about TOD, Capital Metro

23 Mar

I know you guys know better than this. And I know you’re just repeating what the developer says, but you know better, and so repeating something you know to be false makes you, well, liars.

Here is a picture from Google Earth showing the straight-line path from the 2900 Manor Road “TOD” to the MLK station. Google Earth shows this as 0.47 miles, which is not even in the same universe as “close enough to call this a transit-oriented development”. VTPI, who essentially invented the term, allows for walks of up to a half mile IF AND ONLY IF some necessary preconditions are met, which the Red Line does not even come close to meeting. Otherwise? Quarter-mile – and that’s for a large TOD area. If you want to call a small development a TOD, it needs to be very close to the transit.

It’s bad enough to count the M Station as a TOD – but at least it’s close enough to be a reasonable distance to walk, although still much further than the prospective passenger would walk to their car in the free surface parking lot. It’s bad enough to count Midtown Commons as a TOD, given that it’s less dense than the Triangle, which has no rail transit at all.

But this? This is enough. Stop it. Stop it now.

Your pal,

M1EK

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Who Is Riding The Red Line, Part Three

22 Mar

A friend of the crackplog (but strong Red Line supporter) who I will not identify unless I receive permission, scouted out some fellow riders at Lakeline recently (while I was on Maui) and reported the following:

Riding train in today. Very informal raise your hand survey when I boarded at Lakeline. Abt 20% of folks boarding live in Austin.

Of the rest almost all live in Cedar Park.

Talking to small group already on train, a few from Leander, 1 Cedar Park, rest neither.

While merely anecdotal, this tends to support the theory from my earlier posts that most riders at Lakeline are likely not residents of the city of Austin. My original (educated guess) estimate was that 10% of the boardings at Lakeline would be Austin residents; the anecdotal observation was 20%. Not too far off; and nowhere near the claims of Red Line defenders that because the station is within city limits, most passengers must be from Austin.

Unfortunately, the city just decided to use tax funds from the city of Austin to further subsidize suburbanites who do not contribute tax dollars to the running of the system. My letter to city council got just one response, from the council member I would have least expected to reply. So it goes.

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bookface

20 Feb

A page for the crackplog on the bookface. Because let it never be said I didn’t copy ideas from the other members of the urban-development-echo-chamber, for good or for ill.

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Yes, Austin, You Can Trust M1EK

20 Feb

Statesman, over the weekend:

Capital Metro’s long-anticipated, $47.6 million rapid bus project, designed to carry more passengers faster than existing bus lines along two busy north-south corridors, might not be as rapid as planned.

Despite an agency goal of offering time savings of 10 percent, in hopes of attracting more people to buses, the two lines would mostly offer minimal time savings, according to a Capital Metro presentation on the MetroRapid bus system, now scheduled to start operating in 2014.

In one case, a MetroRapid bus running from Howard Lane in North Austin to downtown would make the trip in 47 minutes — the same as an existing limited-stop bus that runs the same route. Trips between South Austin and downtown on that same line would offer time savings of just two to three minutes.

[...]

Capital Metro, which has an aging bus fleet, would have had to buy new buses – or even more buses, as Hemingson argues – at roughly the same time even if MetroRapid were not happening.

Yours truly, several times in the past few years, bold added for emphasis:

http://m1ek.dahmus.org/?p=629

Y’all may have fooled the Feds into buying you new rolling stock under the guise of BRT, but some of us aren’t buying it. The signal-holding device won’t be worth anything in the afternoon congestion on Guadalupe (it’s not the light in front of the bus holding it up; it’s the light six blocks down and the cars in front).

http://m1ek.dahmus.org/?p=706

Rapid Bus is just a way for Cap Metro to get the Feds to pay for new rolling stock – it provides practically zero time savings over existing limited-stop #101 service. It’s not rapid; it’s not anything like what light rail would have been. The cars of all the people stuck from the next light up will still be in your way even if you can hold the light directly in front of the bus green a bit longer.

 

http://m1ek.dahmus.org/?p=509

Rapid Bus continues to be a complete waste of time and money – our council members were right to put the kibosh on it the last time through. Investing this much money on a half-baked solution for the most important transit corridor in Austin is stupid, especially since this particular solution won’t actually work here (too many times the traffic backup goes far beyond the light immediately in front of the bus in question).
In other cities, and in a smarter Austin, we’d be seeing packed light rail trains run down Lamar and Guadalupe by now. There is no way rapid bus can provide enough mobility benefits here to be worth a tenth the investment you’re going to dump into this dead-end technology; and I hope our council members cut this program off again.
It’s time to demand that the residents of Austin, who provide almost all of Capital Metro’s funds, get some rail transit rather than spending our money providing train service to suburbs like Cedar Park that don’t even pay Capital Metro taxes. Rapid bus is an insult to the taxpayers of Austin, and it’s not going to be rapid.

Allow me to suggest to anybody with an interest in real governance rather than government-by-consultant that at this point Capital Metro’s paid spin people (including their de-facto PR people at the Alliance for Public Transportation) have no credibility on either Rapid Bus or the Red Line, and perhaps the media and city council should be listening to those of us who were right all along rather than those who were wrong but had the time to glad-hand about it.

All posts about Rapid Bus can be found in this category archive: Rapid Bus Ain’t Rapid

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Red Line weekend debate, in pictures

9 Feb

The city wants to spend this much:

per rider bringing people from OUTSIDE the

to come into town in the hopes that they’ll spend

of which the city gets back 1%, or this much:

Let’s repeat. Spend this much:

to get this much:

Here is how this all made me feel:

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Write the City Council on Red Line weekend subsidy

8 Feb

Here’s what I just sent.

Honorable mayor and council members:

Please reject efforts by some to use additional tax revenue from the city of Austin to subsidize service on Capital Metro’s Red Line. As a strong supporter of rail transit in general but also an Austin taxpayer, I don’t want to spend our scarce local transportation dollars on a service which primarily benefits non-Austin residents, and definitely not at such a high cost.

The most recent operating subsidy information available from Capital Metro shows weekday service requiring an operating subsidy per ride of approximately 34 dollars. This is abominably high compared to good rail lines in other cities – and ten times the current bus subsidy across the system. But this subsidy, at least, is paid for by all Capital Metro members (including Leander residents, for instance). Not so the case with this new proposal.

Even if we exceed weekday numbers by perhaps double, my own quick estimates show we would likely be spending around 20 city tax dollars per rider to bring them downtown and take them back – and a reasonable expectation is that they might spend 40 or 50 dollars while here – meaning the city is asking taxpayers to spend 20 bucks to return 40 or 50 cents to the tax coffers (and this is assuming they wouldn’t have driven and paid to park were the Red Line not an option).

This money needs to be saved for the city’s own urban rail plans.

Regards,
Mike Dahmus
UTC 2000-2005
mike@dahmus.org

Since sending this I realized I should also have included a point I made on the phone to KUT an hour or so ago: that during the week, you can make an argument for (some) subsidy by referring to scarce space on highways and roadways and in parking lots and garages. This is not the case on the weekend – plenty of space to get into downtown, and plenty of places to park, some of which even make the city additional revenue.

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Oppose City Funding Of Additional Red Line Service

8 Feb

WHEREAS most riders of existing Red Line service are likely not residents of the City of Austin and the majority likely don’t even reside in jurisdictions which pay Capital Metro taxes

and

WHEREAS the City of Austin already excessively subsidizes the existing Red Line operations, as the overwhelming taxpayer to Capital Metro, contributing over 90% of Capital Metro’s revenue to allow the Red Line to be subsidized at a cost of nearly 34 dollars per ride

and

WHEREAS such funds as proposed to further subsidize the Red Line cannot possibly result in a positive economic outcome for the City of Austin given that weekend traffic on the highways is not substantial, and the city can only recover 1% of spending by visitors in the form of sales taxes

THEREFORE BE IT SUGGESTED that everybody reading this contact everyone you know and your city council members and advise AGAINST the City of Austin paying for expanded weekend service on the Red Line and saving the money, instead, for the city’s urban rail proposal – which, unlike the Red Line, will serve primarily Austinites and which desperately needs the money.

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Who is riding the Red Line, Part Two

7 Feb

Here’s a summary chart showing the data from Capital Metro from October, 2011; showing how many people board from each station in the AM peak, discussed yesterday in more detail.

Why break it up like this? Because as I mentioned yesterday, it should be pretty obvious that the 3 park-and-rides aren’t attracting a bunch of people from Austin itself. Nonsense, you say? Lakeline is in the city limits, you say? Let’s look at the map.

Here’s Lakeline Station.

Here’s Lakeline Station after I roughly draw the line representing the Austin city limits (by hand, so please excuse my poor skills). Map updated on 2/9/2012 to include a small section I inadvertently left out in my first poor attempt at freehand.

And here is the same image with an arrow helpfully representing the approximate direction all those transit passengers are going to work (note: Paint won’t let me go off straight vertical or horizontal; imagine it about 15 degrees to the southeast).


Now, here’s the thing: There are a few people inside that little part of Austin sticking up there who might be taking the Red Line. But it ought to be incredibly obvious based on nothing more than this picture (if it wasn’t just from words before) that most of the passengers getting on the train at Lakeline probably came from outside the city limits of Austin – because most people living inside the city limits of Austin would have to backtrack quite a ways to get to the train station.

Howard is the same – except it’s people from Pflugerville and Round Rock freeloading instead of Cedar Park. Any questions?

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How much are we subsidizing passengers on the Red Line now?

7 Feb

Erica McKewen from Capital Metro let me know that one of the most recent monthly reports does, finally, have the subsidy information available for the general public.

Example from page 7 of December’s report, blown up for your perusal below. The most recent subsidy information shows that even with higher ridership after the 2011 changes (closing competing express bus routes, dropping unproductive shuttles, adding a peak trip); the Red Line still requires a subsidy of nearly 35 dollars per passenger per trip. In most other cities with successful light rail lines (that pull boardings well into the 5 digits per day), operating costs are similar or even lower than the bus system as a whole – which, if you can get higher passenger fares, means that operating subsidies on good light rail lines are lower than comparable buses, not ten times as high.

In tabular form, the most important numbers only:

Mode Operating subsidy per ride Notes
Regular bus $3.22 On top of a regular fare of about $1 per trip, $2 for express. High productivity routes like the #1 have barely any subsidy at all.
UT shuttle $1.23 By contract, a certain percentage of operating costs is paid for directly by UT; the rest by Cap Metro – this is fare-free for students and de-facto fare-free for everybody else
Red Line $33.98 Fares were lowered for most people to be as low or even lower than express buses; many to most riders do not even pay Capital Metro taxes

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