8 habits of highly successful commuter rail lines

If a conservative is a “liberal who has been mugged”, approved there as the hoary old saying goes, here then a modern proponent of socialized medicine could be said to have been a fiscal conservative who has had more than five health care plans in the last four years (yours truly). I used to be 180 degrees opposed on this, but frankly, what we have is so much worse than even the bad socialized systems that it’s nothing more than ideological idiocy not to join the rest of the civilized world. To say nothing of the fact that we could easily match the French system, for instance, if we think the British or Canadian ones suck too much; and we’d spend less money overall, by all rational estimates (we already spend more public money than the average completely-socialized system; but we spend it stupidly and inefficiently on things like emergency care for the uninsured).

The people opposing such a move continue to spout baloney about waiting times, as if even those of us with insurance don’t wait as much or more in the US (and this matches my experience). For the benefit of equal or worse waiting times, I get to kick in thousands per year, and drown in paperwork (for all the payment plans we’re on to try to make sure we pay out of our HSA rather than out of after-tax money, and of course, to make sure I don’t overdraw the stupid thing). What’s worse is that the modern know-nothings who still push this disaster we live under are lying about the options people really have. You don’t realistically have the option to go to another doctor, even if you’re willing to pay standard (non-discounted) rates. Nor should you accept that as an answer – you’re already paying dearly for health care which these idiots claim is the “best in the world”.
Enough is enough. I’m turning in my capitalist-medicine decoder-ring. Call me Fidel LaFrenchie if you must. Better an honest socialist, if only for pragmatic reasons, than a lying capitalist.

Posted to comments and as letter-to-editor in their new interface, cialis but who knows if this new technology will work, condom so it’s reposted here for your pleasure. The 2nd Hawaii report coming as soon as work calms down a bit.

Commuters will only switch to transit if they are delivered to their final destination – within a couple of blocks. Failing to provide that “last mile” transport can doom an entire regional rail system. If far-flung suburbanites hate the bus, rx and their offices are too far to walk from the last rail or rapid-bus stop, then they’ll just keep driving, however long their commutes.

The part which was left out, in what’s becoming a disturbing trend of analysis-free journalism at the Chronicle, is that choice commuters will also NOT accept transfers as part of their daily commute, unless we’re talking about the Manhattan end of the scale where the transit alternative has the benefit of competing against 50-dollar parking.
Transfers from commuter rail to streetcar will not be any more attractive to daily commuters than transfers from commuter rail to shuttlebus – and choice commuters, as shown in South Florida with Tri-Rail, simply will not do the latter. Once you ride every day, the fact that the streetcar isn’t any faster or more reliable than the bus was becomes very obvious.
It’s time to remind people yet again: we did NOT decide to build what worked in Dallas, Portland, Denver, Salt Lake, Houston, and Minneapolis (light rail, or, what we would have built in 2000 and should have tried again in 2004). What we’re building instead was what failed in South Florida – a transit alternative which is utterly non-competitive with the car and will continue to serve only the transit-dependent at an incredibly high cost, while derailing transit momentum for decades.
Mike Dahmus
Urban Transportation Commission, 2000-2005

This subject keeps coming up; and although I’ve explained it in bits and pieces in many crackplogs here, viagra as well as in other forums, prostate I’ve never put it all in one place before. But I’m also short on time, so I’ll reuse most of a post I made today to the excellent SkyScraperPage forums and just expand a bit.
The immediate relevance is a somewhat petulant response from Michael King to my letter to the editor in the Chronicle next week. I suppose this means I’ll be published, at least. The money quote:

we don’t find it particularly useful to hold our breaths on transit questions until we turn blue (or bile green), nor particularly helpful to respond to every interim proposal with cheerless variations on “it’s pointless and it won’t work.”

So, here it is: why it’s important to keep bringing up that this thing won’t work and WHY it won’t work, and what WOULD have worked instead:
South Florida built almost exactly what we’re going to build: a commuter rail line on existing tracks which is too far away from destinations people actually want to go to – so they have to transfer to shuttle buses for the final leg of their journey to work in the morning (and back from work in the evening). It has proved a miserable failure at attracting so-called “choice commuters”, i.e., those who own a car but are considering leaving it at home today to take the train to work.
Here’s how the experience has gone in the area:

  1. Start with a largely transit-friendly population (retirees from New York, for instance)
  2. In the mid-to-late 1980s, commuter rail gets built (requiring shuttle transfers).
  3. Everybody who says anything says “this is going to work; rail ALWAYS works!”
  4. Nobody but the transit-dependent rides it. (“we tried it and it didn’t work”).
  5. Ten years later, whenever somebody brings up light rail, “we tried rail and it didn’t work here”.
  6. In the meantime, a huge amount of money is spent double-tracking the corridor and increasing service; but still, essentially nobody who can choose to drive will ride the thing, because the three-seat ride (car, train, shuttle-bus) makes it so uncompetitive. (Remember that, like our rail line, it doesn’t run through any dense residential areas where people might be tempted to walk to the station – all passengers arrive either by car or by bus).
  7. Fifteen years later, when people still don’t ride, somebody reads about TOD and thinks “maybe that will help”. Millions are spent trying to encourage developers to build residential density around the train stations to no avail (a bit unlike Austin in that here, all we need to do is allow more density and it will crop up by itself due to pent-up demand for living in that part of town). Nothing comes of this – because people don’t want to pay extra to live next to a train station where they can hop a train to… a shuttle-bus.
  8. Twenty years later, whenever somebody brings up light rail, “we tried rail and it didn’t work here” is still the primary response – but finally some people are starting to say “well, we built the wrong thing last time”.

If there had been more people pointing out before, during, and after the system opened that a rail line which didn’t go where the people wanted to go would be a failure, it might not have taken twenty years just to restart the rail conversation there.
I don’t want it to take twenty years to restart the conversation here in Austin.
Don’t believe it will happen? Remember: the pro-commuter-rail forces, before the election, were saying let’s ride and then decide. People in South Florida rode. They decided. It didn’t work. It has taken twenty years to even start seriously talking about building rail in the right places (along the FEC corridor, or light-rail in Fort Lauderdale). We can’t afford twenty years here.

There are 119 schools in Division 1-A. ESPN has ranked them (well, oncology they’ve only done the bottom 19 so far). Among the 4 non-conference opponents for my school this year? #117, pill #118, and #119.
THIS IS NOT HOW YOU WON THE TITLE IN 1982 AND 1986, DAMMIT.
I didn’t think this could be any worse than last year. I was rong.
Thanks to RUTS for the find. FUH GUH BUH.

Absent other options (and local bus is not an option) they will drive. That’s where rail comes in. We can build it, dosage as some have suggested, in places where people don’t want to live right now in hopes that people will want to live there. Or we can build it where people already are, and where more people are coming, to take some of that load. We’ve learned from Main that people will ride rail if it goes where they want to go. We’ve also learned that dense development is most likely to occur in places that are already dense. Rail isn’t causing density — the density is coming anyway. Rail, done right, is a way to deal with the traffic that density brings.

Focus on this sentence:

We’ve also learned that dense development is most likely to occur in places that are already dense.

What parts of Austin are already dense? Why, the parts served by 2000’s light rail proposal, and skipped by commuter rail (and streetcar). And, no, sorry, TOD won’t make much of a difference.
We ignore lessons from other cities at our own peril.

From the online Chronicle letters; don’t know if they’ll have the guts to publish it given their overwhelming tilt towards Karen McGraw‘s ANC “granola mafia”:

Just caught your piece [“Naked City, recipe ” News] in the July 27 issue about our [Vino Vino] off-site parking hearing before the Planning Commission on Tuesday, July 24, and the opposition to our proposal by Karen McGraw. It’s good to see the Chronicle taking a peek, if even an ever-so-lightly colored one, at this little turf war going on right here in bucolic Hyde Park (you could have given us a ring, you know). As you correctly point out, parking in Hyde Park and along the run of Guadalupe in question (from 40th to 43rd) is extremely tight. That’s why we, along with our landlord, Thad Avery, have looked into every possibility to lighten our parking load along this slowly revitalizing stretch of Guadalupe. Ms. McGraw has led a “spirited” opposition to our attempts to find a solution. In spite of overwhelming approval by the Hyde Park Neighborhood Association back in February and last Tuesday’s unanimous approval by the Planning Commission, we still await the green light to do our thing. We’ve been at this process, grinding it out, for two years now, and this is a wee bit frustrating. As to the concern Ms. McGraw expressed for her parking lot, we have no intention of letting any of our customers use her lot. Ain’t gonna happen. No matter what she may say. About half of our customers are Hyde Park residents who have walked from their nearby homes, and this is part of the charm of being here in the first place. However, we are happy that some of the lunch customers of the deli located in Ms. McGraw’s building use our lot to park their cars.
But that’s a whole other story. In fact, there is so much more to the story. Anyway, thanks for all the coverage of all things Austin.
Sincerely,
Jerry Reid
Manager, etc.
Vino Vino
p.s. As for the mass-demolishing-of-homes-on-Avenue A-scenario Ms. McGraw fears, got a clue as to how much those houses go for these days? That would be one friggin’ expensive parking lot! Oh, and the bus? Yep, we rented a bus for our supporters. With more than 30 folks turning up to show their support, it was the least we could do. We had room for Ms. McGraw and her two supporters. They should have come along.

Update: Here’s the link to the letter in case anybody wants to comment. I highly encourage it.

Well, pills I’m all the way up to part 2 out of 3 on the May 2007 Hawaii trip, view and I still need to backtrack and talk about Newark in June and State College in July. Argh. Here goes. Go back and read Part One if so inclined.


Background: O’ahu is the only island with any real transit service (up to the standards of a medium-sized mainland city, ask that is; the Neighbor Islands have some desultory bus service). Inside Honolulu, buses run all the time – you see them more often than in most big mainland cities. The system in Honolulu has for a long time been a vast network somewhat centered on Ala Moana Mall – a huge mall with a couple of large bus areas. Waiting outside in Honolulu is no big deal, so that’s what they do. In Waikiki, where we spent almost all our time, the buses all run down the central two-way road (Kuhio) rather than the one-way couplet of Kalakaua and Ala Wai. The system is called TheBus which I find irritating.

The population on O’ahu outside Honolulu uses the buses a bit but the primary ridership is in Honolulu (and commuters to same). There’s a huge proportion of the population that is transit-dependent; and I’ll further divide that market segment (for the first time here, although I’ve been thinking about it for a long time) into two subgroups: the voluntarily transit-dependent (could afford to own a car but choose not to because the bus system is good enough) and the involuntarily (don’t own and can’t afford a car). Of course, choice commuters exist here too.

The transit-dependent are a larger proportion in Honolulu than in most cities on the mainland (save New York) because parking is difficult and expensive, wages aren’t that high, and the weather is very favorable for waiting for a bus or walking to/from the stop. Not too difficult to figure. Buses don’t get much priority boost except on the long Kapolei-to-Honolulu route, in which buses get a bit of a leg up by using the HOV “zipper lane”. In the city, there’s one bus boulevard (Hotel Street) in the small “downtown” Honolulu, but I have no experience there.

Bus fares are startlingly high. Subsidies are quite low – and you’d figure in an island where they have to simultaneously worry about earthquakes and running out of room, they’d want to subsidize people to leave their cars at home – but the farebox recovery ratio is very high (over 30 percent, which is quite high for a bus-only system). The system is recovering slowly from a strike a few years ago which induced a large number of the voluntarily transit-dependent (mentioned above) to get cars or find other ways to get to work. One-way adult fares are $2.00; anybody between toddler and adult is $1.00 each way. There are no short-term passes (shortest is a 4-day pass which isn’t that good of a deal anyways). Monthly passes seem more moderate compared to mainland prices.

Tourist usage is moderate – the system is used heavily by hotel workers, but you will see plenty of people who are obviously non-local getting on and off the bus in Waikiki. This crowd is heavily weighted towards the hotels on Kuhio and on the Ala Wai side – the people in the most expensive rooms on the Kalakaua side probably don’t even know the bus exists. But there’s far more young people staying along Kuhio anyways in the moderately priced stuff, and the books they read (like Lonely Planet) highly recommend the bus, and we saw plenty of that sort as well as a few retirees.

Now for our direct experience, first the two trips to Hanauma Bay:

The whole family took the #22 bus twice to Hanauma Bay, which is a really delightful place to snorkel, especially when you can get to the outer reef (we couldn’t on either time this trip due to high waves). Calm enough for very poor swimmers to get to see a lot of pretty fish; still interesting enough for the moderately adventurous; and very easy to get in. This is the beach where Elvis lived in “Blue Hawaii”, by the way; and I’ve been here about 15 times going back to my first visit as a middle-schooler.

Although the drive to Hanauma Bay is fine, and the views are nice, parking is a problem – the lot is fairly small compared to peak demand, and on a previous visit we actually were turned away once (this happens fairly often but we’ve been lucky overall). Parking fees, stupidly enough, are only like a buck. Somebody failed basic economics. So this seemed like a perfect opportunity to try out the bus – especially since the travel guides recommend it, and we were trying to save money by not having a mostly unused rental car all week.

We left our timeshare and walked out to Kuhio and waited. Actually, I had observed several buses running the route bunched together right before we got down there on one of our two trips (can’t remember which one), which is understandable given traffic conditions on this route. The buses theoretically run every 20 minutes or so, but due to bunching we ended up waiting much longer one of the two times. Boarding the bus was fine but SLOW – they still use an old transfer scheme like Capital Metro did until a year or so ago (slips of paper), and feeding in dollar bills for us (5 bucks; Ethan was free) took quite a while. On the first trip, we were headed out in what was supposed to be early but ended up mid-afternoon (more like 2:30 as it turned out), and on the second trip we headed out right after lunch.
The route took us past Diamond Head and provided opportunities for a lot of nice views there on a road I actually haven’t driven before. Both times, the bus was very full – at times, every seat was full (perhaps 30 seats) and up to 10 were standing. People constantly got on and off the bus – apparently some folks use this same route to travel to/from Diamond Head to hike, although you have a much longer walk to the ostensible beginning of the hike from the bus stop than from the car parking. Also noticed many middle-school age kids using the bus to get from school to various spots along the Kalaniole – some to go home, others obviously to bodysurf (headed past us to Sandy’s Beach). A handful of tourists like us were obviously headed to Hanauma Bay on both occasions. The bus rejoined my normal driving route near the Kahala Mall and then I got to enjoy the views like I hadn’t since my one bike trip there (before the arthritis many years ago) since usually I’m driving in traffic with enough lights that I can’t look at the ocean as much as I’d like.

The dropoff/pickup location at Hanauma Bay is awful. It’s a much longer walk to the entrance – and I feel every inch of it on my bad feet while also carrying our heavy snorkel bag.

Compared to driving: The total trip time was about 50 minutes, compared to maybe 35 in the car (but add in 20-40 minutes for the wait for the bus, and add in 10-15 minutes for what it would have taken me to get the car out of the garage and come back to the timeshare for a more accurate comparison). The cost of the individual trip was competitive – figure $3.25/gallon gas and a 12 mile trip = $1.95 each way, $1 to park for a total of $4.90, compared to $10 for bus fare. But since we were “voluntarily transit-dependent”, we didn’t have to worry about being turned away, and for the whole trip we saved about $250 on rental car costs ($300ish for a weekly rental car + $10/day to park it, compared to two daily rentals we did do at about $60 each). That made going without a rental car a great decision for the week we spent in Waikiki, but as mentioned in part one, I wish I had rented one for the couple of days we spent on the Leeward side (about the same price as using the car service!)

Return trip: We waited with a large group each time at the inconveniently far out bus stop, where Ethan amused himself by chasing chickens. Don’t know how close to schedule the bus was; we didn’t care much at this point. Ride back was nice – again, standing room only at certain times.

I also hopped the bus once by myself on a trip back from the rental car dropoff (on the Sunday when we switched from the timeshare to the Hilton) and helped a couple figure out which bus would take them to the airport (they were Australian; most Americans, even those who took the bus while here, would know it’d be better to take a cab to the airport when you have to deal with luggage). Unventful for the most part, and at the Hilton it’s obvious that nobody there takes the bus – the stop is outside the property and a bit of a hike. The Hilton seems like a spot where people who don’t know what they’re doing end up spending $20/day warehousing rental cars, frankly. Like is often the case when I’m returning to my house from downtown, I had a choice of four or five bus routes – whichever one came first, in other words; I think the one I took was the #8.

Finally, we all took a tour bus to the Polynesian Cultural Center one day, which was a nice trip – but not transit per se. The place was a lot less hokey than I anticipated – I actually recommend giving this a try, although bring a hat – it’s very hot out there.

Summary recommendations: If you go to Honolulu once, rent a car. You’ll want it to do the North Shore, Pearl Harbor, and a few other things you should do at least once. But if you’ve already been to those places, try getting by without it if you can – you’ll be surprised at how much money you save, not to mention time (parking a car in Honolulu takes quite a bit of time as well as money – and rental car agencies are even slower there than on the mainland). On our trip, we rented a car for 2 out of the 11 days – I just walked to one of the four or five options in Waikiki, got a car, and went back to the timeshare to load up the family (Lanikai Beach, where we got married and where we spent parts of both of those two days, is unfortunately not feasible to reach on the bus – although you can circle the island on one route if you’re sufficiently adventurous, it doesn’t go back down towards Lanikai; the only way to get there is two transfers, the second one of which runs very infrequently).

Whenever I get to it, look for the final part: Future plans for transit on O’ahu.

I am stuck on the porch of the condo with a purloined and slow internet connection, about it killing time while waiting for an install to complete for work, illness and for the flooring guys to show up (stuck in traffic in Georgetown). Here’s a short item I meant to link to much earlier:
Christof Speiler in Houston wrote a good article called 8 habits of highly successful commuter rail lines which was then followed up in an article on a LA portal. I highly recommend reading those links, sickness and then thinking about Austin’s line. Note how LA and Houston went back and forth about the difference between light rail and commuter rail – near the end a couple of folks point out that despite their differences, it is important to compare their ridership and cost because some stupid cities are pushing commuter rail lines in place of light rail alternatives, and that even in Manhattan, where parking costs far more than here, most commuter rail riders are disembarking at stations from which they walk to work, inducing the state to push for another LIRR stop on the east side because transfers are driving away many potential passengers. Now let’s grade Austin:
1. The ideal commuter rail line improves on current transit options.
Austin’s commuter rail line fails very badly on this metric. The existing 98x series express buses that run from the same far away park-and-rides will still beat the commuter rail + shuttle commute, even in heavier traffic than we have today, and there’s the long-term prospect of managed lanes on Mopac (if not done with the current stupid design) and on 183, which can bring the bus back ahead even when (not if) traffic gets much worse. And when traffic gets worse close-in, the shuttle buses will suffer (no reserved guideway, essentially forever, for the “connections” to UT and the Capitol and most of downtown).
2. The ideal commuter rail line makes use of unused rail capacity in a corridor where highway capacity is scarce.
Austin’s line passes this metric. Not much you can say here – the rail line is unused, and highway capacity is indeed scarce.
3. The ideal commuter rail line serves more than commuters.
(meaning, serves reverse commuters, people running midday errands, etc.). Austin’s rail line fails this metric badly. Only one mid-day trip, and no nighttime service at all.
4. The ideal commuter rail line has a city at each end.
Austin’s line fails this metric badly. No, the stuff being considered up in Leander isn’t going to make it a “city”; what they’re claiming as TOD is really just slightly more dense suburban sprawl (zoning restrictions slightly loosened, using commuter rail as an excuse). The design is standard suburbia – you will not see people from Austin riding the line up to Leander and then walking to anything worth going to.
5. The ideal commuter rail line offers good connections to multiple employment centers.
Fails. Badly. How many more times can we look at South Florida’s example (and other cities’) before we realize that people who aren’t willing to ride very nice buses today (98x express buses) aren’t going to be thrilled about two shuttle bus rides through stop-and-go city traffic every single day?
6. The ideal commuter rail line serves long trips.
Passes. Obviously. This line doesn’t serve close-in residents at all – but you can have Wifi for that hour-plus train ride from Leander to the station way out in East Austin. Of course, they have Wifi now on the express bus too.
7. The ideal commuter rail line connects to local transit.
Passes, marginally. Circulators will run from stations, but connections will be poor compared to the 2000 light rail line. This is Christof throwing a bone to the transit-dependent – if you’re going to run this thing and make it unattractive to choice commuters, you’d better at least have connections to local buses for the people who couldn’t afford to drive anyways. But that’s just catering to the people who have no choice but to accept multiple-transfer bus service today – you’re not making a dent in the number of people driving.
8. The ideal commuter rail line has stations you can walk (or bike) to.
Fails. Miserably. Capital Metro and their toadying sycophants already tried to push the lie that this line serves Central Austin. It doesn’t. Virtually nobody will be able to walk to stations, unlike the 2000 light rail proposal, which served all the same suburban park-and-rides, and additionally had stations within walking distance of dense residential areas and all of the major central employment destinations.
Looks like our score is a 2.5 out of 8. Christof, is that enough to be highly successful? I doubt it.
PS: Even though it’s one of the hottest days so far in a cool summer, I’m still comfortable working out here. Amazing how I can feel way too hot when the A/C in my garage office has it at 78, but out here with 94 and a breeze and something to look at, I feel fine. Now if I had only brought a cushion for my butt…

m1ek

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