Archive: Box and Horn from the Austinist, 2008

Beginning this week, Austinist will host a Friday guest column hereby named Box and Horn where an Austinist reader is given full floor to write about… well, whatever’s on their mind. For this week, everyone please welcome the writings of Mike Dahmus! All opinions expressed in Box and Horn are strictly those of the writer and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the Ist Network. Word to words – Austinist Columnist Editor

Photo of Mike Dahmus courtesy of himself

Howdy istites. My name's Mike Dahmus, otherwise known all around various ratholes of the internet as M1EK, and I've been invited to write an honest-to-goodness post instead of a wimpy little comment. Normally, I crackplog ("crackplot blog") at my own place, M1EK's Bake-Sale of Bile, which is "Mostly Austin. Mostly Transportation. Mostly Bile.". I served on the city's Urban Transportation Commission from 2000 to 2005, before Daryl Slusher gave me the boot for being insufficiently slavish to Mike Krusee's plan to screw Austin's rail fans forever. I've been writing that crackplog since about 2003, starting in the run-up to the commuter rail disaster.

Today I shall regale you with part one of a one-part series entitled "Bile-Filled Corrections To Infrequently Answered Questions". Yes, grammar fans, that's questionably composed. But I couldn't pass up the acronym "BFATIAQ", because it's so similar to that of my good friends at BATPAC. Here we go!

Photo of Cap Metro bus courtesy of cloverity on Flickr

Q1. "The buses are always empty!?"

A1. Screw you, Kelso. That's not even a question! The buses are always ‘empty’ when you see them because you can't get your fat ass out to the midpoint of the route during rush hours - where they are almost always full. Just a week or so ago, I gamely tried an awful 1:45 2-bus commute from my company's new office out in lovely downtown Westlake, and both the #30 and the #5 were quite full, the #5 eventually having several people standing. (Yes, that was a half-hour walk, a half-hour bus ride, a 10-minute wait, and 35-minute bus ride. No, I won't do it again). Here's the key: if you're a suburbanite, you're usually seeing the buses at the very END of their route - the part at which they're SUPPOSED to be empty or only have a couple of people on them. If you see a full bus at the end of its route, that's a sign that Capital Metro cut the route off too early. Think about it.

Q2. "We shouldn't spend all this money to run rail when Capital Metro can't make the bus system work well enough for me! If the buses ran every ten minutes, I'd definitely use them!"

A2. Screw you, BATPAC. Also not a question! Most people who are actually served by Capital Metro and will ride buses are already riding them; running them more often won't do anything other than make it a bit more convenient for those who already ride at a huge expense for taxpayers, which has to be made up for somewhere else. Most people know how to read a schedule book and their watch; that's not the problem. The problem is that the bus is stuck in traffic behind everybody else's car, and it runs a lot worse in traffic than your car does. The bus can't switch over to Guadalupe when Lamar is backed up; it has to stay in the right lane to pick up and drop off; and it accelerates like a dead cat.

Q3. "Hey, we're building light rail, right?"

A3. Screw you, Krusee. We almost did; Capital Metro had a good plan underway in 2000 and was shooting for an election in 2001, May or November. Then state rep Mike Krusee, of lovable Round Rock, decided that even though his constituents weren't even in the Capital Metro service and tax area, he was the boss; and forced a November 2000 election, before Capital Metro was ready. Some jackass of particular local interest was running for president that year, if you remember, and drew out the suburban vote in droves. So no, we're not building light rail. We're building commuter rail. See question 6. By the way, neither Houston nor Dallas had to have an election before building their first rail line.

Q4. "Well, the voters spoke. Austin rejected light rail, right?"

A4. Screw you, Daugherty. In an election rigged as far as possible - forcing Capital Metro to go to the polls before they had settled exactly where and how far the line would run and where the stations would be, the voters in the city of Austin actually approved the measure anyways. Only the inclusion of our friends in the exurbs (including Leander, of course) tipped the scales for "no", and barely so (less than 2000 votes; less than 1%).

Long exposure photo of DART Rail in Plano (Dallas) by zbowling on Flickr

Q5. "Well, nobody would ride light rail anyways! Our city's too small and not dense enough!"

A5. Screw you, Skaggs. Tens of thousands of people every single day are now riding lines just like our 2000 proposal in Houston, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Denver, Minneapolis, and Portland. The Feds loved our 2000 plan and would have kicked in 50% of the cost, unlike our commuter rail disaster, for which Capital Metro wisely decided not to even ask. We’re actually denser where it counts than most of those cities.

Q6. "But then we approved light rail in 2004, though, right?"

A6. SCREW YOU, KRUSEE. Capital Metro could have and should have come back with a scaled-down (and nailed-down) version of the 2000 plan, but Krusee made them an offer they couldn't refuse - forcing a different plan on them, which is NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT light rail. It's called "commuter rail", which is also a bit of a misnomer, since nobody who commutes will like it. Ironically, the only people it really serves are the people in Leander who voted against rail in 2000 - and it serves them poorly. The dirty hippies in Central Austin who really wanted rail in 2000 get nothing but the back of Krusee's hand.

Q7. But I HEARD it was light rail. And urban! Like a "light urban railway" or something!

Photo of proposed Highland Mall platform, by whiskeytangofoxtrot on Flickr

A7. Screw you, Lyndon Henry. That's not a question! Capital Metro stretched as far as they could without actually lying by claiming it was an "urban commuter rail service" that would serve Austin and even central Austin, but the closest station to what most of us would call Central Austin is going to be at Highland Mall, on the lovely walkable urban tableau of Airport Boulevard. After that, a station miles out east on MLK will "serve" commuters to UT and the Capitol, who will take a lovely "shuttle bus" the last couple of miles, jerking and wheezing through heavy traffic to their office. Then, it'll hit one more stop east and come into "downtown", and I use the air quotes because nobody really thinks that the Convention Center is the part of downtown anybody wants to go to. Except for helpful guys like Krusee, of course. Oh, if you're unlike most people and will walk more than a quarter-mile to your office from the train station, you might be a winner here. But most downtown office buildings aren't remotely close to the magic quarter-mile circle.

Q8. Well, people will just take the shuttle bus to work after they get off the train, right?

Image of artistic rendering for downtown Austin shuttle transfer, courtesy of Mike Dahmus

A8. Screw you, Capital Metro. There's already some real nice express buses which run from park-and-rides (the same ones you might be able to pick up the train at) straight to your office at UT, the Capitol, or downtown. They're slowed down some in traffic on Mopac, but only 10-15 minutes compared to the free-flow commute (30 minutes versus 45, say). Here's the kicker: if for whatever reason, you're not willing to ride that bus straight to your office today, why would you ride a SHUTTLE BUS that stops more often than the space shuttle delays a launch and is less reliable than Jennifer Kim's vote?

Q9. We can just expand commuter rail to run to UT and the Capitol. Why are you such a buzzkill?

Photo of Camden DMU, courtesy of Christof Spieler, CTC Houston

A9. Screw you, other 2000 light rail fans. The vehicles we chose, called “DMU”s, are way too porky to turn corners in the street. We might be able to extend down 4th street a bit, but there's no way it can turn up towards UT or the Capitol, or turn down Lamar at Airport like light rail would have. That is, unless we decide to knock down a whole bunch of buildings so the train can make some verrry gradual turns, which is how they "solved" this issue on the other DMU line people incorrectly call "light rail" in beautiful Camden, New Jersey.

Q10. We can build a streetcar line, and that'll fix it, right?

Photo of by Toronto Street Car stalled in car traffic, courtesy of Payton Chung

A10. Screw you, Connect Austin. These boneheads gave commuter rail legitimacy with skeptical Central Austin voters by getting an implicit promise (since broken) that the real urban parts of Austin would get rail right after the commuter rail election passed - the problem is that Capital Metro's streetcar plan isn't designed to serve them at all - it's just the same awful shuttle bus, except running on rails, which actually makes it even worse. You heard me; WORSE. Because this streetcar, unlike 2000's light rail plan, wouldn't have its own lane - it would have all the disadvantages of the shuttle bus AND all the disadvantages of trains, all in one shiny package. Yay! Every time somebody's double-parked, or there's an accident in your lane, you'll be wishing you were riding that old dowdy bus. Plus, instead of running in, you know, urban central Austin, Capital Metro combined with UT in a stunning festival of numbskullery to propose that this circulator should run up San Jacinto, where's there's nothing but a ton of state parking garages, and then out Manor, where nobody wants any more density. Leaving Guadalupe, where all the current density is and all the future density will be, with a big load of nothing.

Q11. But Rapid Bus is going to run in Central Austin, right?

A11. Screw you, Capital Metro. They sure said so, during the election. After the election, of course, it fell off the rails, or the rubber tires, or something. Of course, Rapid Bus was never going to do anything useful anyways, and now that the City Council has figured that out (our reps on the CM board basically stopped the bidding), it's basically shelved; and the most optimistic readings you can find now from CM are 2010).

Q12. Is anybody doing anything about this now?

A12. It's way too late to recover anything remotely as useful as 2000's plan, which now can not be built for a generation or more (at which point we'll probably be blasting through the alkali flats in our monkey-driven jet boats anyways). In the meantime, Brewster McCracken and Will Wynn are trying to float a rail plan for central Austin which, depending on the day, either sounds like it might not be half bad or might just be Capital Metro's awful circulator. McCracken, at least, has indicated in no uncertain terms that he understands that Capital Metro's route is useless and stinky; and that the train needs to run up Guadalupe where the people are; where the current density is; and where the future density is going to be; and he also knows it needs to run in its own lane at least a lot of the time to be of any real use. Please stay tuned.

Thanks to austinist and especially truecraig for letting me bile it up on their stage. Drop on by for a visit sometime.

Your pal,
M1EK

P.S. I am not a crackpot.

If you’re an Austin local, have something you’d like to say and are prepared to pen a future entry for this weekly column, send an inquiry to columnists [at ] austinist.com. Bucket-o-thanks! - Austinist Columnist Editor.