Category: Orphan Road

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

File this one under “only in Vancouver.” Trevor Boddy has an interesting piece in the Canadian Globe and Mail critiquing New Urbanism from the left. It’s not an argument one hears often in the states:

We Vancouverites sell American planners and developers high density, high amenity urban development attuned to the needs of the new century. Then local developers like the Century Group go consultant shopping in Miami and end up buying the terminally pleasant nostalgia of New Urbanism. Go figure.

Actually, checking the figures helps puncture New Urbanism’s claims, especially the spiel that schemes like the one for the Southlands development present a radical increase in suburban residential densities. While this may be true by the standards of the sunbelt United States, Canadian cities have historically developed at higher densities, largely because we lack such sprawl-inducing public policies as the tax deductibility of mortgage interest and the federally funded interstate highway system.

New Urbanism is dangerous because it claims to cure the very sprawl and social class separation that it causes. There are worse ways to develop the suburbs, but none are so two-faced. The New Urbanism is city planning’s equivalent of the “compact SUV.”

In the States, of course, folks like me tend to view New Urbanism as a step in the right direction. But for Boddy it’s a mirage. One one level, he seems miffed that the developers of this particular Vancouver suburb flew in [gasp!] American consultants instead of relying on homegrown talent in Vancouver, but his larger point is that the local consultants would have presumably advocated “real” density.

For my money, New Urbanism is mostly a mirage when it’s divorced from holistic regional planning that takes into account land use, employment centers, and, of course transit. The devil’s in the details, as they say.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I didn’t live in Seattle when Sound Transit planned the route of the light rail, so stop me if this has already been debated to death. Also, I know it’s far too late to change anything. I’m just curious.

Can someone tell me why, exactly, Link takes it’s expensive and circuitus path? Considering it will take as long (or longer) as it currently does via bus to get from downtown to the airport, this would not seem like a great idea.

One would think a straight line would be the easiest, cheapest, and fastest route. This would take us through some industrial areas, which would seem to have inexpensive land. It would also drive by Boeing Field, which could be useful if it ever runs as a commercial airport. Plus it seems like there would have been little/no boring reqired.

Yes, the route drives through a few communities, but this seems like a reason to not put light rail there – you end up stopping at stoplights. Building communities around transit seems like a much better idea.

I imagine a strong difference between city-based transit, that tries to conform to neighborhoods, and regional transit, that should be built for speed. This is clearly regional transit, but seems to be designed as city transit.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

What Jeremy Barker said.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I’ve gotten so numb to huge ridership gains for transit in the past few months that it didn’t quite sink in that Sound Transit’s increase of 15% in March is a really big deal, so thanks to Martin for pointing it out. He’s right to be amazed at how ST has managed to keep the costs-per-boarding almost flat while it adds new, relatively empty reverse-commute trains.

Here’s a chart from the report (.pdf) that caught my eye:

It’s interesting that many of the biggest gains were on routes that don’t begin or end in Seattle: Lynwood-Bellevue, Issaquah-Northgate, Lakewood-SeaTac, etc. This says to me that some very car-centric communities have caught the transit bug, which is great.

Of course, many of the really, really popular routes, in absolute numbers, are the ones that go between Seattle, Lynwood, Bellevue and Redmond. You know, the kind of high-capacity, high-demand corridors that would be most economically served by, say, a choo-choo train.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

TOW notes that Minnesota’s James Oberstar is pushing changes to the Federal Transportation Administration’s guidelines for cost-effectiveness so that they take into account more factors, like the potential for development around the route. The FTA thinks BRT is the solution for everything, but this relatively obscure bureaucratic change could make it much easier to get federal funding for light rail instead.

I love the way minor changes like this in the large organism that is government can have such large ramifications. It’s very similar to the way WSDOT redefined capacity last year, opening up the possibility of a surface-transit replacement for the viaduct.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The new interactive map on California’s HSR site is very cool.

That is all.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I wish the Seattle Streetcar Alliance well in their efforts to expand our nascent Streetcar network. I’m not sure whether it will succeed, but I think the approach is right-on, to create a coalition that forces the relevant municipalities into action.

This stands in stark contrast to the approach of the Monorail folks, who created an entirely separate municipality, one that didn’t require any local pols to put any skin in the game. This made it easier for Sims, Nickels, et. al. to walk away when support started to slip.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I was going to put a lot of thought and energy into critiquing this anti-rail Crosscut article, but really, why bother? It’s abundantly clear that David Brewster has developed some sort of computer program that churns out the same article over and over again under different bylines. I mean, “Ross Anderson?” Really? Like that’s actually a human name.

Let’s see: cherry-picked statistics to support the author’s argumet? Check. Obligatory quote from local anti-transit crank John Niles? Check. Nonsensical reference to rail as a “19th-century technology”? Check. (Eyeglasses are far older, but many people still find them rather indespensible!).

It’s like anti-rail mad libs. And this is what passes for political discourse in our city…

Update: it looks like Erica Barnett has a similar reaction.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Around the country, local governments are relying on existing freight tracks to provide commuter rail service quickly and cheaply. In the Puget Sound we have the very popular Sounder running on BNSF tracks, South Florida uses CSX tracks to run Tri-Rail commuter rail, and Utah’s FrontRunner and New Mexico’s Rail Runner operate with similar arrangements.

These services require complicated leasing arranements with the freight companies involved, and service is often limited or delayed because the freight trains have priority on the tracks. This is the major reason Sound Transit hasn’t been able to offer as many round trips as it would like to.

Today I came across not one, but two stories from back East on this issue: one involving Florida and CSX, and the other related to Massachusetts and CSX. Both issues center around liability agreements: CSX is saying to both states, in effect, “sure, you can lease our tracks, but we don’t want to be liable in the event of a passenger train crash, even if it’s caused by our neglegence.”

Lawmakers are understandably skeptical about agreeing to such conditions. But what else can they do? We’ve let our passenger rail system atrophy over the last 100 years, and building new rights-of-way is time consuming and expensive. Even Amtrak only owns the Northeast Corridor tracks — their trains run on leased freight rail everywhere else in the country, as far as I know.

Add to this the fact that demand for freight rail is surging in America. You’ve no doubt seen the factoid being pushed by the freight rail industry that it can move one ton of freight 400 miles on a gallon of gas. With business booming, freight companies have little incentive to give up track capacity to passenger rail.

And so we have a bit of a crisis simmering between local goverments and big rail companies, one that could evenutally come to a boil as demand for rail — both for freight and passenger travel — continues to rise. Could we nationalize the freight rail industry like France? I very much doubt our Congress would do something that bold. Yet even if the two sides can come to an agreement on the liability issue, the capacity problem will still be there, and getting worse.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Thinking about the two posts I did last night, linking to the New York Times and the Financial Times, it occurs to me that we may have actually turned the corner in this country with respect to land use and transportation planning.

I’ve been ranting for a while now about the connection between land use patterns and energy consumption, but for a whle it seemed like shouting into the wind, especially as national politicians talked about how some magic pill like ethanol was going to solve all our problems. Lately, though, it seems like the connection between land use, public transit, energy consumption and national security is finally starting to gel in people’s minds.

It’s going to take a generation or more to slowly re-shape our cities to accommodate a world of expensive oil and gas, of course. And even in 2008 highway funding dwarfs transit funding. But I can’t help but get the sense that, after the ethanol miracle failed to deliver, people are finally getting serious about the idea that we need to approach the end of cheap oil with a holistic effort to change the way live and move on the planet.