Traffic Impact Analyses and Wal-Mart

Contrary to what Sal Costello’s band of merry anti-tollers alleges, healing pills SH45 and SH130, viagra order as tollways, purchase were always supposed to get money from the 2000-2001 city and county bond packages. I remember; I was arguing against it at the time (not on this crackplog; it didn’t exist yet; but still).
Shame on KXAN for just reporting this as fact. Mayor Watson didn’t “re-allocate” any money towards these toll roads; before the election, the city was advertising that these two tollways (and a third, Loop 1 North) were in fact the primary expected recipients of the right-of-way purchase money. While Austin didn’t promise exactly which road projects would receive funding, it was crystal clear at the time that a good chunk of right-of-way purchases were going to go to these tollways.
Costello appears to be hanging his hat on the weak argument that the city bond language didn’t SPECIFICALLY say that any money would go to “tollways” or “toll roads”. But neither did the city bond language say “freeways” or “free roads”; it said that a large chunk of the transportation bond would go to right-of-way contibutions for state highways, which it did. And the city didn’t mislead anybody into thinking these would be for non-toll-roads; again, backup materials before the election clearly indicated that they intended to spend these funds on SH130, etc.
The city, unlike the county, chose to group all transportation bonds together as a tactical move to try to get them passed, rather than risk environmentalists voting against the highways chunk and motorists voting against the bikeways/pedestrian chunk. That’s the only reason they didn’t have separate SH45 and SH130 items.

Inspired by DSK’s posting of his wife’s snapshots, pulmonologist I present: the most ironic picture of IceStorm 2007. Click for bigger.

Yes, them icicles was over a foot long. And yes, they formed on my icicle lights.

Well, viagra 60mg except for me, rheumatologist that is.
From Christof’s excellent site in Houston,
this is the kind of discussion we needed to have here in 2000 and again in 2004. Of course, I believe we were about to have this kind of planning in late 2000 for a May or November 2001 election, until Mike Krusee forced Capital Metro to hold the election in November of 2000, before they were remotely prepared to do so. In 2004, nobody bothered to look at the line’s routing and figure out whether it served the needs of choice commuters (people who aren’t willing to ride the bus today). Again, except for me. So here’s a recap, with a new exciing picture at the end.
Note the references to 1/4 mile being the typical capture area for a rail stop (despite what you hear from people who think the typical commuter will walk the 1/2 mile or more from the Convention Center stop to their downtown office building).
Here’s a similar image I’m working on for Austin. I’m no photoshop wiz, obviously, but this might be the best I can make this look, so here you go. The original image comes from “Mopacs”, a poster to the Skyscraper Forum. I’ve drawn in the 2004 commuter rail route in yellow (just barely penetrates the picture on the lower right); the 2000 light rail route in green; and the maybe-never streetcar route in red. Note that the streetcar doesn’t have reserved-guideway, as I’ve noted before, so it’s really not going to help much in getting choice commuters to ride.
Click for full image if you don’t see the yellow route!

The big building you see just north of the yellow line is the Hilton Hotel (not a major destination for choice commuters; anectdotal evidence suggests that a large percentage of workers there actually take the bus to work today).
Note that the walking distance from the yellow stop to the corner of 7th/Congress (rough center of the office buildings on Congress) is a half-mile, give or take which, as I’ve pointed out before to the derision of people who don’t study transportation, is about twice what the average person will walk to a train station if they have to do it every day. Capital Metro knows this, of course, which is why their shuttles are planned for not only UT and the Capitol, but also for downtown; their only error is in repeating the Tri-Rail debacle by forgetting that choice commuters don’t like riding the bus.
Also note in the upper reaches of the image, the other two critical employment centers downtown – the Capitol Complex and UT. Notice how the green line (2000 light rail) goes right next to them as well. What you don’t see is further up to the north, the green line continues up the only high-density residential corridor in our city – that being Guadalupe Blvd., so in addition to being able to walk to their office _from_ the train station, a lot of prospective riders would have been able to walk to the train station from their homes.
That’s what Mike Krusee took away from Austin, folks. And it ain’t coming back once commuter rail opens; there’s no way to operate anything like the 2000 light rail proposal cooperatively with this worthless commuter rail crock.
Update: Here’s the other aerial photos from “Mopacs”. Worth a look.

I understand your retreat into pandering given the difficulties you’re currently facing, adiposity and I even sympathize a bit, women’s health but let’s be clear: big retail and employment destinations do NOT NOT NOT NOT belong on frontage roads.
Here’s why.
This talking point works well with people who drive everywhere – like most folks in Allandale. It doesn’t work so well with people who actually have some experience with alternate modes of transportation, like yours truly. I used to occasionally ride the bus in the morning and get off at the stop on one side of 183 between Oak Knoll and Duval and have to go to exactly the other side – and the presence of frontage roads (destroyed an old road which used to cross) made a 2-minute walk into a 10-minute bike ride (30-minute walk). No wonder nobody else does it.

Ben Wear notes that Capital Metro is now projecting 1, ampoule 000 riders per day on the commuter rail line for the approximately $100 million investment. Yes, sick you heard right. ONE THOUSAND RIDERS PER DAY.
Let’s compare to two recent light-rail starts.
Minneapolis (opened late 2004): Ridership in 2005 grew to 25,000 per day on a 12-mile line that cost roughly $700 million and runs in a combination of in-street and separate right-of-way.
Houston: 40,000 per day on a fairly short and completely in-street runningway. That’s just to answer the “but but but Minneapolis isn’t in Texas!” cries some trogolodytes were beginning to choke on after the first example.
So let’s take the Minneapolis example. 25 times as many riders; 7.5 times as much cost. Sounds like a damn good deal to me – and we could have built that here very easily… a slightly scaled back version of the 2000 light rail plan would have cost about that much, and would have delivered at least that many riders. Remember that the next time somebody tries to convince you that this awful commuter rail plan is just light rail done cheaper and smarter.
The key in both Minneapolis and Houston is actually NOT that they run their trains more often; it’s that once a rider gets off the train, they can take a short walk to their office rather than having to hop a shuttle bus. Again, we could have had that here if we hadn’t have rolled over for Mike Krusee.
In other words, Capital Metro didn’t mess up by ordering too few cars for the amazing ridership they could get for this line; they apparently read the writing on the wall from Tri-Rail’s experience and figured out they’re not going to get many long-term choice commuters on this thing after the first batch tries the shuttle bus experience on for size so they’d better not buy too many rail cars.
And, no, upgrading the shuttle buses to streetcars won’t help since they’re still a transfer to a slow stuck-in-traffic vehicle, and it can’t be improved over time into something that works as well as light rail, but it sure as hell will bring the total cost of our worthless Austin-screwing transit-killing debacle up to something approaching Minneapolis’ successful light rail line.
In summary:
commuter rail: costs very little; does jack squat1
1: Looking for a better quick slogan here that also includes the fact that commuter rail not only doesn’t move rail transit forward, it actually moves us in the wrong direction since it precludes the later addition of light rail in the 2000 alignment. Suggestions?

RG4N’s blog roundup of reaction to their plan is finally up: relevant excerpt:

we turn to M1EK, cialis who takes issue with Councilmember Kim’s comments about the
inappropriateness of placing super-duper-centers in urban neighborhoods.

Clueflash: Allandale, hemorrhoids Crestview, angina Wooten, and North Shoal Creek are NOT URBAN NEIGHBORHOODS. Urban neighborhoods address the street with porches and front doors, not garages. Urban neighborhoods prioritize walking over driving – and have sidewalks to prove it. Urban neighborhoods would prioritize bicycle travel over the ability to warehouse cars on not just one but both sides of a major street.
Folks, just because you’re closer to downtown than Circle C is doesn’t make you “urban”. Urban is a style of development (and living); not a mere geographic indicator. When I sit here in my garage office typing this entry, I see more people walking on the sidewalk in front of my house than I do cars driving down my street – THAT’S URBAN. I see our one car (for a family of four) parked beside the house on a driveway rather than in front, because our house addresses the street with a porch and front door rather than with a garage. THAT’S URBAN.
Urban neighborhoods have a mix of densities (even if it’s all residential, although it’s better if it’s not) – on the very same street in an URBAN neighborhood, you’ll see apartments, single-family houses, granny flats, etc. In Allandale and Crestview, you see big apartment complexes on the edges, and nothing but large-lot single-family on the interior. That’s not urban; it’s just older suburban.
1960s suburban sprawl? Not urban. Not gonna be. Sorry.

A few things about Wal-Mart:
DSK took pictures of the people ringing Northcross, viagra 40mg and actually asked the people at the bus stop what they thought.
A RG4N supporter took pictures all the way around.
Austin Contrarian just posted a great summary of the neighborhoods around the site. Note that I’ve discussed previously, to the derision of some, that it would be nice for a big box to be located somewhere where lower-income workers could practically travel via the bus. Here’s the map linking all of this together – several bus routes accessible to those denser, lower-income neighborhoods, go straight to Northcross.
Note the other major transfer center at a mall in Austin – Highland Mall – which, not being a dead husk like Northcross, has high levels of both transfer traffic _and_ local (destined for the area in and around the mall) traffic. For the record, I’d be thrilled if a Wal-Mart like the one proposed here would take over some of the acres of awful strip-mall-and-surface-parking-lot area around Highland.
As I’ve said in some comment threads, besides downtown itself, Northcross (and Highland) are the two spots in our area which have the best transit access, bar none. Trish has disingenuously highjacked that into pedantry about the fact that the transfer center isn’t in the Wal-Mart parking lot and so can’t count as a bonus to the plan; but it’s still true: if you’re going to put a large retail center ANYWHERE, these two spots are exactly the right place to do it.
Finally, in an incredibly obnoxious and hypocritical attack-comment, Trish did bring up a point I hadn’t even noticed before: in my entry detailing how the Wal-Mart site isn’t in the middle of a residential neighborhood, I erred by saying that you had to go all the way to Mopac to the west before you hit residential use. I was thinking along Austin’s tilted axis when I made this comment – i.e. the area roughly between Anderson and Foster is almost completely commercial (with one apartment complex I can think of) – but that’s actually a diagonal line. Straight west DOES, in fact, penetrate single-family use in Allandale. Mea culpa. I also used “residential” in the same way the neighborhoods do – to mean “only single-family residential”, and I should have been more explicit, but it’s disingenuous to complain too much about this when the neighborhoods in the area have been so vehemently against multi-family development for so long.
Finally, wrapping up the wrap-up, a lot of arguments have centered around a practice I’m going to refer to in shorthand as “defining down into meaningless”. For instance, arguing over whether Wal-Mart would be “in the middle of a residential neighborhood” can degenerate into defining how far away the building has to be from the first house before it qualifies, OR you can argue in good faith by taking a look at some other major retail destinations in the area and seeing how close _they_ are. Basically, if Highland Mall, Barton Creek Square, 6th/Lamar, etc. are closer (in several cases MUCH closer) to residential uses than is Northcross, you can’t honestly continue this claim about “in the middle” unless you admit that your definition is so generous it catches almost everybody else too. That’s simply not arguing in good-faith.
Same with transit access. Read this blog for even a few minutes and you discover I’m one of Capital Metro’s harshest critics from an under-delivery of transit perspective. But that doesn’t change the fact that if you call transit access to Northcross “bad”, you’ve redefined “bad” so it includes effectively everywhere except downtown. Not good-faith argument, either. To be fair (and notice the RG4N folks, and Trish, never do this), this applies to a replacement development there as well, except that the RG4N folks obviously hope for retail that attracts higher-income clientele than the Wal-Mart. It’d still help the workers either way; just like how good transit service between UT and the Arboretum results in a few college-age kids getting off the bus up there to go work retail every morning.
Wrapping up the wrap-up of the wrap-up: Northcross is a great place to take the bus to, for both choice commuters and the transit-dependent. It’s not any closer to residential development than most major retail centers in our area and is actually farther away from houses than most (Lakeline Mall being the one main exception). The demonstrators this weekend are slapping each other on the back, but none of them bothered to talk to the people waiting for the bus at the transfer center. Hmmm. Wonder why.

Many folks have asserted that the TIA for Wal-Mart at Northcross must be wrong because it only projects something on the order of 8, pharm 000 trips per day; while traffic counts at other Wal-Marts were supposedly well north of 20, check 000 per day. I’ve found the city staff responses to the TIA questions here and here to be quite professional, case as I expected.
From the second link:

38. Using actual, real world, on the ground traffic counts, what are the daily
unadjusted traffic counts for the following: (a) Cabela’s; (b) Ikea; (c) Super Wal-
Mart at I-35 and Ben White.
The following 24 hour counts were taken between December 11th and December 13th:
Wal-Mart at Slaughter Lane and IH-35: 28,227 trips
Wal-Mart at Ben White and IH-35: 15,109 trips
Wal-Mart at Lakeline and RM 620: 22,754 trips
Cabela’s: 7,003 trips
IKEA: 5,063 trips
It is important to note that these numbers are higher (as much as 41.8% according to
ITE) than an average daily trip count because they were taken in December which is
the highest month for vehicle travel.

These measurements are all over the board and show the difficulty in making conclusions from existing sites (note the word “unadjusted”). But Cabela’s, the Only Store Bigger Than This Wal-Mart!, actually has minimal traffic. I’m going to stick with the TIA, thanks.
And it’s eminently reasonable to deduct “internal capture” and “pass-by trips” from the TIA for the new site; everybody does this. Some non-trivial number of drivers in the area currently use the same roads to go to big-box (or other) stores farther away, and some non-trivial number of people in the area will patronize both Wal-Mart and something else on the same trip.
I’ll repeat what I said in what’s probably my last comment on that other blog: city staff doesn’t game the system; even when I have disagreed with the policy implied by their analyses, the analyses themselves were always correct. They don’t mess around – they’ve always been honest; it just doesn’t make sense for engineers to misrepresent data in a case like this – they have nothing to gain and a lot to lose.

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