If the subway through West Hollywood and the West Side does get finished, then we probably will see some more white passengers, since it will then be possible for suburbanites living near the Metrolink lines to travel by subway to offices on the Westside, after arriving downtown on Metrolink. But as far as I’m concerned it doesn’t matter who uses transit. The more the better.

Well, anyway, legitimate research has shown that the fuel tax, excise tax, and other motor vehicles taxes don’t even come close to paying for the cost of the road network. They don’t even pay for the Interstate Highway system, they don’t pay for the state roads, and don’t get me started about the big cost center: the local roads.

…That is NOT Growth Management and certainly not the State Mandated Growth Management one finds in Washington State!

But by all means, continue the conservative tradition! Blame them furriners and “the bankers”.

http://www.heritage.org/research/smartGrowth/bg2283.cfm

Comparing all of MAX with all of the TriMet bus system would be better than using Tacoma Link (a free shuttle from downtown to a free parking garage) but it’s still not going to compare apples to apples. Cost per boarding tells you nothing about cost per passenger mile, usually doesn’t include cost of capital, sometimes doesn’t include fare recovery and all of the other required pieces of data to determine cost effectiveness. CPB is really only valid when comparing alternatives for a given route or a comparision of similar systems. For example you could compare cost of boarding for Tacoma Link to the CPB of the free bus service it replaced. Or compare the cost per boarding of Tacoma Link to the SLU trolley. An interesting one would be the cost per boarding of South Sounder with it’s sister route to the north (factoring in fare recovery).

I guess liberals have their own myths.

Common sense tells us that a new lane relieves congestion. Simple. Almost everyone who drives says the same thing, “This road is always backed up. Why can’t they make it [bigger/better/wider]?”

At a transit forum hosted by Dave Ross, I attempted to make a simple (at least I thought it was) comparison, and he replied (after his eyes glazed over) “By this time, you’ve lost half of my listeners!”.

Since I was so immersed in the transportation process at that time, I figured I WAS simplifying the argument.

Although, be careful, if you make the point TOO SIMPLY, it then becomes a target for those opposing your point of view. For instance, take the statement describing “induced demand” for freeway lanes – “Build it and they will come”.

Sounds good to transit supporters, but road warriors will dismiss it, and the data behind it.

Even when I was deep in the analysis for I-405, I still didn’t have the clear mental picture of how, what, why, and where (and when, come to think of it).

But here is one approach that started forming a more cohesive picture.

Start by going back in time, when PRIVATE COMPANIES ran the transit systems. That alone tells you that, at minimum, transit PAID FOR ITSELF (and presumably generated a profit). What put them out of business? Government funded highways. Except for a few major roadways back east, no investor came along and built a parallel roadway, and charged a fare to use it. Since the government used various tax sources (in addtion to gas taxes) to fund these roads, it would stand to reason that road building was a socialist redistribution of resources. Social Engineering!

So when someone proposes that more lanes are the answer, simply ask for the ‘business plan’. How will it make money? Or at least, pay for itself.

There really aren’t many numbers you have to internalize to make the argument for transit.

1 freeway lane carries 2100 vehicles per hour uncongested (defined as 45mph avg).
A congested freeway lane, at maximum carries 3100 vph (35mph avg).
In order to decongest a freeway lane, you only need to draw 1000 ‘riders’ from that lane.
Now the Induced Demand portion of the equation comes into play. If people see uncongested freeways and decide to make a trip, (i.e. those who come when you build it), they clog up the ‘congestion reducing’ capacity of that new lane. For the I-405 analysis, it was set at about 1/3.
So your new lane will really only pull over about 1500 vehicles. Works if you only have a 1-lane-in-each-direction freeway. Most freeways I’ve seen have 2.
Solution? Build another lane. Then you take care of decongesting the 2 lanes, and have a little excess capacity for future growth.

The other side of the coin is the cost.
Figures we used for 1 mile of freeway lane:
At grade, in the rural areas – $7 Million
In the Puget Sound Region, closer to $11 Million
Elevated – $60 Million
Tunneled – $100 Million
Tunneled, built to Mercer Island standards – $200 Million
In the Puget Sound area, an average freeway lane is around $20 Million per lane, per mile.

Freeway lanes do a better job at relieving congestion because you don’t have to convince anyone (of the 1000 vph) in the adjacent lanes to ‘change modes’, they just change lanes.

Play with these numbers. It’s simple. Just pretend you’re going to be that Private Company that will solve the congestion problems without the big bad government, and think about how you would get ‘new customers’ to use it.

And if you think the gas tax is the so-called “user fee”, then realize that you should only be getting the contribution based on the amount of driving done on your segment of roadway.

And don’t cloud the issue with ‘trips’. You would only get money for gas burned for the miles driven on your new road. If you had a small freeway, with a beginning, an endpoint, and one on/off interchange in the middle the number of ‘trips’ doesn’t matter, since you can’t charge full bore for someone only going halfway.

The cost per mile that people are paying via the gas tax is $.015 (1 1/2 cents)

If you want to look at all-day number, take a page from the SR-520 analysis. The Evergreen Point Bridge carries approximately 130,000 vehicles a day. Generally, there are now about 6 hours of congested commute daily. (The daily use of the lanes is roughly 32,000 vehicles)

Remember, SR-520 is considered congested, but NOT all day. If you have your new freeway there, you won’t be able to draw people over if they are getting the existing roadway for free.

How much will you charge?
How much did the roadway cost? (use 30 years for the lifespan)

When will it be paid off?

Exercise your business sense.
MAKE the road proponents exercise theirs!

Jim

There are reasons why Amtrak is more expensive than comparable inner-city bus service, which I will not go into detail, but it’s similar to why Sounder has a pretty high CPB. You pretty much hit the nail on the head yourself. We don’t compare buses with Amtrak precisely because you’re looking at long-distance, diesel locomotive trains that DON’T carry comparable passengers or capacity with rapid transit.

I think you missed the point here. Cost-effectiveness of trains goes up once ridership increases. How much easier is it going to be drawing new passengers aboard a bus as opposed to a train?

This argument reveals an almost Republican abhorrance for facts. When you get into tacoma link, you go 20 blocks. When you get into an ST Express Bus, you go 20 miles. Which one of those two things should be cheaper? By this argument, why don’t we just replace all the express buses with half mile trolleys? I hear they are cheaper per boarding. Between the ADC and this argument, I’d say the ADC’s reasoning is (astonishingly) the more well-reasoned.

By the way, as far as the point of this article is concerned, buses are way cheaper than trains. Period. Say you are in Penn Station. What would be cheaper, paying Bolt bus cost plus profit to bring you to Washington DC, or paying a subsidized price to take Amtrak? I’ll give you a hint: Bolt bus costs $20, Amtrak costs $80. And Bolt bus is the one making a profit. Trains make sense for two reasons: 1) sheer capacity (and I mean a subway train with 1500 passengers each, not a dinky light rail train) or 2) when everybody refuses to ride buses but is willing to ride a train (as is the case in Washington). Those are the legitimate arguments for trains, don’t try and fight an uphill battle by trying to insist they are cheaper, it hurts my brain to hear that.

The other rebuttal that’s easy is not really to an anti-transit argument, but more to a Link misconception sometimes even overheard on the train, last time I heard it as we came out of Beacon Hill into Mount Baker: “There are no park and rides.” Me: “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help but overheard your conversation. There’s a park and ride right there that’s run by a private company [pointing to a near-empty parking lot].”

The vehicles used on the O-Train are interesting, and I would have prefered them being tested here on some of the rail lines that have become trails. The Swiss seem to be cornering the light DMU market in the US, with Southern New Jersey, Austin, and Denton County, TX. Siemens has North San Diego County(makes sense, with San Diego Trolley)

Still, while the Central Link is a good thing, I would have preferred that the Downtown Transit Tunnel be a rail tunnel more. At least Ottawa won’t try to copy this downtown, as opposed to the problematic crowding at the moment. The comparability is, in one sense, based on area population sizes. I hear people claim Ottawa is “too small and spread out” for light rail. By the same standards they use, then, it means that Calgary, Edmonton, and Salt Lake City should have built busways, or better yet highways, instead of light rail. Duh. (Of course, all three cities and my city are snowier than your area at winter.) :)

Here’s a video I recently shot of the downtown crowding. Sorry about the absence of sound.

Simply put, O’Toole is a liar. I’ll bet his favourite burger at Burger King is the Whopper, ha ha. And I don’t want to eat there again, ever.

Yes, Kemper Freeman is a member of the ADC. I’ve seen this before.

Matt J. Fisher
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada (home of the Transitway, as heralded by bus boosters as much as Curitiba) (I’m not a huge fan of BRT)

P.S. At least we are going to go with making the Transitway LRT, but only partially. You can see what I did here. I’ve sent a letter to the editor of my city’s newspaper, the Ottawa Citizen, complaining about BRT and bringing up Curitiba and concluding with arguments in favour of LRT over BRT. There were some others I left out, like the fact that OC Transpo (the local transit authority) went on strike over the past winter. Given that the O-Train (which is actually light rail that isn’t electrified) was the only transit in Ottawa from Feb. 2-6 (after the strike ended, and before buses could start again as they were frozen by all the snow), it would seem that LRT is better than BRT, in the end. I hope the Transitway isn’t going to end up like your downtown tunnel with LRT, as I would prefer. It’s good to sometimes have buses, but I think that can be problematic, so LRT makes more sense to me. We’re more comparable to Calgary, Edmonton, and Salt Lake City than to Curitiba or Bogota.