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This still apparently gets some people the wrong way. Please read it all the way through. Vomited out quickly because I really don’t have time to blog, but I have even less time to say this 140 characters at a time.

Despite appearances from this blog, in real life I’m an introvert – fairly shy. Especially don’t like being in situations where I have to talk a lot to people I don’t know.

In 2000, I got on the Urban Transportation Commission and enjoyed the collegial relationship with a bunch of people who were like-minded to varying degrees, access to interesting subjects and speakers, the whole shebang. Still look back with fondness. In 2004, I became the public face of the “pro-rail but anti-Red-Line” campaign because nobody else would. This was a huge stretch for me – I’m not a politician; I don’t like to gladhand; and I’m petrified about giving speeches (not as much now, but definitely then).

It was just that important, though; nobody else would do it, so I had to. I gave speeches next to that asshat Jim Skaggs and said “if we build the Red Line, we can’t have good light rail”. I opposed the Red Line so vociferously and publically that, as expected, I got the boot from the UTC shortly after the election, and many people I used to talk to wouldn’t talk to me any more after that.

Of course, every prediction I made during that campaign turned out to be true – ridership was underwhelming; operating subsidies continue to be unmanageably huge.

Ever since then, I’ve struggled with people who don’t get why this was important. Why not just start with the Red Line and go from there, they say. Why not just expand the Red Line into something that works better?

This is insulting, people. Let me explain why.

1. I’m a smart guy.
2. I know transit really well.
3. I did something very uncomfortable for me for a long time and burned down a lot of stuff I liked to do because nobody else would say anything.

Do you folks honestly think I would have done that if I thought there was even a 1% chance we could get from “The Red Line exists” to “40,000 happy rail passengers a day at a sustainable operating subsidy of, say, 5 dollars per ride”? This was not and is not a simple difference of opinion. This was not me being a pessimist. I have lots of differences of opinion. I’m pessimistic and optimistic about lots of things. I wouldn’t go to all that trouble and burn down something I liked if I was only 99% sure the Red Line was going to be a disaster. Or 99.9%.

What most of the remaining optimists don’t understand is that there is quite literally NO way out of this mess that doesn’t require tearing up the Red Line unless you don’t care at all about how much money we spend on capital, operations, or both. Even the long-range plan the city and Cap Metro recently shat out admits this – getting up to something like 25,000 rail passengers in the year 2045 by, finally, ripping up part of the Red Line and replacing it with urban rail (of course, if we wait until 2045 to do this, it’ll be long too late for our city’s health, but still).

Even the city and Cap Metro get this. There’s no way to get “there” (40,000 happy rail passengers at a reasonable operating subsidy) from “here” (pretending the Red Line isn’t a huge disaster at operating subsidies of $25/ride for customers who mostly don’t even pay Capital Metro taxes). Again, the long-term plan of record right now is to build a bad urban rail line to Mueller, getting something shy of 10,000 riders/day; and then eventually building a second urban rail line that, once I’m retired or dead, will finally go up to about US 183 (pushing the DMU service out to the suburbs where it belonged all along). Again, this happens in 2045. At the end of all this, in 2045, we’ve spent five times as much money to get back to where we could be if we tore up the Red Line and built the 2000 route, and might get almost as many passengers, at a higher operating cost.

This isn’t a simple difference of opinion. For you to believe that there’s a way out of this mess now that doesn’t involve replacing the Red Line, you have to believe that I’m an idiot.

I’m not an idiot, people. We really are fucked.

Hope this helps.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

2012 now. At the earliest. And don’t be fooled; this is a direct result of the abyssmal ridership on the Red Line, demonstrated in April as it fell off a cliff even while the bloom was supposed to still be on the rose.
I was actually not going to bother with a blog post on this since this is so demoralizing and I’m pretty damn busy with my real life and (NON-POLITICAL) real job, but two of my facebook ‘friends’ insist that it’s unbecoming to demand that those who have attacked and belittled for all these years sack up and admit they were wrong. I don’t take direction well.
From this post in 2004:

The danger here is that a starter line that is bad ENOUGH will completely destroy the momentum among the public (that actually WANTS rail right now by at least a slim margin, in Austin itself). This is what happened in South Florida with a system which is identical in every way that matters to the one proposed by Capital Metro.

From another 2004 post:

The second message, and the one I’ll talk about today, is the idea that we can get light rail in the urban core “later” if we approve this plan now. The genius of this message is that it does a fairly good job of lumping opponents like me in with kooky pie-in-the-sky non-pragmatists who are unwilling to get something running on the ground because of the pursuit of the perfect solution.
The problem is that this message is misleading at best, and a lie at worst. The reason to oppose this plan is because it’s deadly to future transit operations in this city. IE, not just because it doesn’t do enough right away, but because it will actively prevent more effective solutions from ever happening.

Hey, decision-makers? How about we stop listening to the guys who were wrong, and start talking again to the guy who was right? You have my email address; some of you even wrote back once or twice.

“The taxpayer should not be subsidizing the density proposed in this downtown plan . . . When you know the value of property downtown is $15 to $25 per square feet, these are incredibly huge entitlements we’re giving developers.”—Neighborhood activist Jeff Jack.

Let’s start fresh with an updated conclusion:
It is very unlikely that any Crestview Station residents who work at UT can get any utility out of the Red Line. Residents of the complex itself form the best case scenario for people getting on at this stop, since everybody else would be transferring by bus (nearby residential density is fairly low and paths to the site are unpleasant; and there is no parking lot at this station). Following from that, we can conclude that the Crestview stop isn’t going to help anybody living in Austin who works at UT. (I had intended to pick some heavily publicized sources and destinations and use those as examples, but in the future I’ll try to mention both major destinations in future posts so that the immediate counter-argument doesn’t break out like it did yesterday. Bear in mind that the Capitol Complex is basically the same as UT as far as the endpoint is concerned – the shuttle rides are similar length).
Although I meant to only cover UT with that post, my conclusion was overly broad (mentioning zero benefit without specifying destination). “The Error Term” and I then hashed out that if you live at Crestview and work precisely at the Frost Bank Tower (the only downtown office building within the typically acceptable 1/4-mile walk from the Red Line terminus), you may see up to a 3-minute improvement on your commute over the express bus. You may also be a bit slower than the express bus option, depending on how fast you walk. (Google says 6 minutes, by the way; I am remembering 10 minutes from personal experience – I would have made 5 before the arthritis but I don’t know that your average middle-aged person in nice clothes is going to want to walk that fast).
This morning, while returning from the car dealer (maintenance), and avoiding a much-worse-than-usual parking lot on I-35, I went through East Austin and drove most of the shuttle route which applied yesterday. At 8:38, I turned from Airport on to MLK and immediately noticed that the entrance/exit to the Red Line station has nothing but a flashing light. How long is that ‘quick’ shuttle going to have to wait to pull out and turn left on to MLK?. I then ended up passing JMVC, I think, waiting for the #18; proceeded to hit almost every green light (including straight across I-35 without waiting); and got to the Trinity/MLK intersection at 8:44.
Conclusion: Best-case scenaro (late arrival, no major bus wait to leave the complex) hits just under 10 minutes (a minute or less to get on to MLK; 2-3 more minutes to get to the circle at 23rd – 4-way stops, other traffic in the way there). Unfortunately, I don’t know I’ll have the chance to try an earlier crossing of the interstate with more traffic, maybe hitting the 8:00 arrivals; and I know from painful experience that the outbound traffic in the evening is much worse.
I intend to hit many other prospective use cases (as I did before, when schedules were much less firm). Suggestions for ones I should do first are welcome.

OUTLINE
don’t bet against me on futurism
cornupcopians think economic incentives will result in a new power source
survivorship bias
economics might instead result in severe pain, esp for economies that have no other options
what about batteries?
- energy density
- life
- limits inherent in periodic table

Macy’s in Manhattan

Macy’s also has flagship (very large) stores in San Francisco and Chicago – and their Chicago store is pursuing adding a grocery store in the basement.
Harrod’s in London

Wal-Mart doesn’t have their cachet, it’s true, but Allandale also doesn’t have the cachet of central Austin. Nevertheless, the contention that big boxes belong out on the highway (which, in Texas, inevitably means on the frontage road where pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users mostly can’t get to them), is absolutely false – the normal pattern, before suburban sprawl took over, was that the biggest stores were downtown, not out in the boonies.
As for the inevitable claims of “bbbbbut if it was in YOUR neighborhood, you’d feel differently”, there was an Urban Target slated for 6th and Lamar (much closer to true central Austin – not just center of population) when I lived in Clarksville and I was thrilled to death at the prospect. Don’t remember square footage, but it was supposed to be 2 floors with some kind of neat cart escalator and whatnot.