All my criticism of $250 B for road building got ignored -- so maybe you'll listen to an expert.

[Leopolds Ghost]

What am I kidding? The most liberal campaign staffers here in the DC area don't support Metrorail in their own neighborhoods. They don't even understand the distinctions.

They voted for a $1 B trolley and a $2 B 8-lane highway and yet continue to tell me (when I meet them on a daily basis) that we can't afford Metrorail because it would cost "twice as much" as $1 B.

"Light rail" is a side issue for suburban Democratic policymakers, and hence not worth spending more than the "already high expense" in order to fund subway construction. They drive everywhere. They include many DC-area DUers.

All Aboard: Public Transit Deserves a Big Chunk of Stimulus



By Roger K. Lewis
Saturday, January 31, 2009

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/30/AR2009013001637.html?sub=AR

The share of President Obama's more than $800 billion economic stimulus package aimed at public transportation seems marginal, and that's a shortsighted approach to spending.

Most of the money in the transportation portion is to stimulate work on roads and bridges. Relatively little is aimed at enhancing existing transit or launching new transit projects.

Of course, billions must be spent quickly to create jobs associated with fixing deteriorating bridges and roads, thereby ensuring safety and mobility. We also must improve pedestrian-unfriendly streets to accommodate walking and biking.

But let's not widen highways or build new roads just because voters, and thus their Capitol Hill representatives, want easier commutes. Not every shovel-ready project should be funded, especially if it means not having money for worthy transit projects.

In fact, in light of energy constraints and environmental sustainability aspirations, sometimes we should decide not to spend to relieve roadway congestion or speed up traffic. Congestion is an incentive, a catalyst indispensable to constructively changing American behavior.

Congestion motivates people to think differently about how to travel and where to live. It induces carpooling, transit riding, walking and biking. And it can prompt people to live in transit-accessible, pedestrian-friendly locations.

If making America greener is indeed a high-priority goal of the new administration, then transportation spending should include generous amounts for municipal bus and tram systems, as well as for regional and interstate rail.

This seems especially timely as America's urban population, after decades of decrease, is on the rise. More than half of all American households are not traditional families with children, but rather retirees, empty nesters and singles, many of whom prefer urban environments served by public transit.

http://wamu.org/programs/kn/09/01/28.php

Leopolds Ghost notes:

Of course none of this will happen. The "shovel-ready" rapid transit proposals all got vetoed by supposedly liberal voters at the local level, afraid that the price tag was too high. They knew that neither Clinton nor Bush would spend more money on transit than what Reagan did, nor will they raise the restriction requiring every city to submit each line of its supposed transit "system" as a separate project to compete for funding on a corridor basis -- with the only measurable benefits being traffic relief in that corridor -- and no more than $1 billion in funding on any one corridor allowed.

To quote a local official in Maryland when the "Purple Line" got downgraded / approved for funding recently:

"It's about development around stations. It's not a question of getting people from point A to point B."

Because they don't want rapid transit, since that would cut into projected continually increasing automobile market share. So they justify it as a development tool only.

[BlooInBloo]

1. Dude. Atrios and Yglesias and a host of others have been pushing for transit sooo hard...

and for soooo long.

You're neither the first, the best, nor the only.

[Captain Hilts]

3. We're DCers talking about DC specifically. nt

[BlooInBloo]

6. So is Yglesias.

(or *was*, I forget if he moved *to* there, or *from* there.)

[Leopolds Ghost]

15. Does Yglesias support the current transit plans, or does he recognize the problem?

Current transit plans for the DC area are broken.

Metrorail has been defunded and Metrorail expansion has been sidelined.
They even tried to take the Dulles line out of WMATA's hands. It won't
even be built to WMATA design standards.

The Purple Line "light rail" is part of an organized attempt to redirect transit funds away from rapid transit and towards localized, small capacity trolleys that are oriented to condo development schemes in specific areas along specific corridors, with no regard for the system as a whole.

Even where light rail is needed, it is defunded and restricted to run along specific corridors with no integrated planning and no effort to create a rapid transit system capable of competing with the automobile over distances.

Where existing subway systems exist, planning efforts are diverted to light rail, or bus. Money is diverted from maintenance or expansion of the existing system, and plowed into small-capacity starter projects.

One of the "nice things" about downgrading rail from a planners' standpoint is that it is built and operated by corporate contractors like Bechtel at a healthy profit. Which is why they have no incentive to build out into complete system and lobby against efforts to build complete systems. They want a plethora of starter lines on developer-friendly corridors across the country. In isolation, these starter lines do nothing but result in the construction of parking garages with condominums grafted onto the side. They are not big enough to handle more than 5% of commute traffic.

What, pray tell, is Yglesias fighting against, if he is for current plans?

[BlooInBloo]

18. Once again, I'm not his/their press secretary....

I just gave you basic examples. If your curiosity extends further, I suggest you take it up with him/them.


EDIT: Typo.

EDITEDIT: And no matter how many times you repeat yourself, this will remain my answer.

[DCKit]

19. DC's light rail is proposed from one Metro (subway) station to another....

both on the Green Line - SW Waterfront to Anacostia. I guess only because we only have about six bus lines following the same route - with a transfer required, of course, so it costs as much as the train, but takes 8x longer.

Want to know why we have multiple bus routes following the same route as the subway? So many people are terrified of going underground (I've asked), an identical service is duplicated, above-ground with buses and, soon, light rail.

Meanwhile, as rates and ridership rise, WMATA keeps pushing for further rate increases. Their accountants must be Wall St. rejects.

[Leopolds Ghost]

4. Haven't seen em in trenches. Did they oppose the elimination of Seattle Monorail program?

Did they oppose the downgrading of the DC-MD Purple Line to a street-running trolley, necessitating the clear-cutting of an entire park and demolition of low-income apartments, to avoid, as one planner put it "unnecessary tunneling that we can't afford to pay for in this economy?"

It's not too late for them to weigh in on that one. After all, many of them DO live in the DC area, or nearby.

It's too late for them to weigh in on that fight, here in DC...

But as I recall, in Seattle the Washington State Democratic party came down squarely on the side of more money for the light rail and less for rapid transit (another bait and switch funding proposal that promises a 10-mile long tunnel in the future and a surface line to the airport in the present in return for killing the monorail project.) What kind of planning is that? (Especially since the tunnel is thru wealthy areas and the streetcar is thru poor areas -- who determines where tunnels get built in this country? Wealth? Not needed? The planners and the urban condo builders, who are also a big Democratic Party constituency, say tunneling is not needed because we can just have streetcars everywhere. Don't they realize you can't get more than 5% of the public to ride transit if it is no faster than existing buses?)

[BlooInBloo]

5. lol!

Sorry, I don't have a complete listing of the entirety of their opinions.


EDIT: I suppose this is an easy enough beginning, though:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=transit&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=10&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.eschatonblog.com%2F&as_qdr=all&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=off

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=transit&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=10&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=http%3A%2F%2Fyglesias.thinkprogress.org%2F&as_qdr=all&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=off


Obviously it misses a lot of their writing that don't use the word transit, but would be directly related, such as "urban development", and similar things. But it's a start.

[Leopolds Ghost]

8. Opinions are like assholes, every blog out there has them, especially when online or op-ed.

What I'd like to see is the same people weighing in AGAINST
the local Democratic elected officials who are pushing for less money,
not more, for transit.

My own state delegate, Tom Hucker, for instance, says tunneling
makes "no sense" on the Purple Line because it costs too much and
no matter what we do, people will still drive. Did I mention he's
on the left end of the MD political spectrum of elected officials?

[Leopolds Ghost]

11. Show me one activist group that wants to build subways into suburbs.

What I see is a lot of repeating of urban planning chestnuts, which are all focused on extending the orthodoxy of the New Urbanist approach to transit under the Clinton administration.

The people who DE-FUNDED all rapid transit in favor of light rail.

The people who want to focus on "choice" ridership at the expense of expanding the total percentage of commuters using transit, at the expense of serving all areas.

The people who want to build transit on a line-by-line basis, because light rail is too god-damned slow to build an integrated system out of.

FHA projects are required to be part of an integrated system.

Rail (meaning streetcars since NO BLUE JURISDICTION IN AMERICA is pushing for subways)
is required to be considered in isolation from any existing rail system, with no
seamless transfers of any kind, only discounts for preferred users with RFID tags.

[Leopolds Ghost]

12. Again, one activist group that wants to extend subways into a Blue area is fine.

I'll single them out for praise.

Bloggers love to talk but when people point out that we're fucking up our existing transit and rendering it useless except for weekend outings and a rush-hour commute valve, you get crickets.

Even where light rail is justified, in smaller cities and exceptionally spread-out areas like Houston,

they are downgrading it to 17 mph running in mixed traffic.

Parallel freeways in such cities run at 70 mph.

---

I expect (crickets).

Look how little interest there is in the subject in general,

while threads on electric cars (which the federal government has much less control over) get millions of posts.

[Captain Hilts]

2. EXACTLY. That's why there are no metro stations in G-Town and Tyson's...

they would bring riff raff.

People opposed the creation of the Capital Crescent Trail for the same reason.

Check out the Action Committee for Transit website. The fight for the Purple Line has been rough and tumble.

People don't understand that even those who do not ride transit benefit from the actions of those that do.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

7. The same reason has been used...

To turn down mass transit development grants from the State of NJ in the rural county I live in. Not once, but several times. We are talking millions of dollars.

Drill down into it, and it don't need much drillin' and it has a clear cause: racism.

[Leopolds Ghost]

10. I took a whole course in the subject at a Rutgers program recently, drilling into that precise area

We conducted a mock public hearing to educate the scions of future developers and Bergen / Union / Essex / Middlesex county planners in how to get developments approved. The short answer: you must not just promise but prove that the projects will have no density, require no transit upgrades and contain no low-income residents and put no demands on the public school system.

Low density is required to meet the burden of no increased traffic in even the most liberal communities because progressives in liberal towns fail to make the distinction between density and parking.

They insist on more parking in order to "avoid traffic impacts on surrounding side streets" in supposedly ultra-liberal towns.

This of course displaces retail, makes the units more expensive, eliminates affordable housing (which is often a stated goal, see above: the laws require you PROVE that no more than the minimum required number of units will BE affordable) and INCENTIVIZES the wealthy incoming residents to have cars.

When this is pointed out to them, they say "that's why I want as little density as possible to preserve the environment. We need to confine all the tall buildings to existing built-up areas." That's what they say.

Which is why we'll end up with a string of wealthy urban condo enclaves connected by "for show" transit, while everyone else is forced to drive (and as a result, 80% of people on the "for show" / "demonstration" transit line will drive as well.)

Did I mention FTA rules require that transit lines be planned in isolation and not as part of a system, and reward states for building a large number of small demonstration projects (more ineffectual pork in more voting districts) and actually penalize them for trying to build an integrated system like the Seattle Monorail tried to do?

The FHA rules require the opposite -- supposedly "isolated" highway lines are always part of an integrated public road network expansion system planned decades ago which is often not discussed in public.

Transit lines are REQUIRED to be funded in isolation, line by line, which basically kills any effort to build subways or any form of integrated rapid transit, since you can only justify tunneling or end-to-end transit time upgrades on the basis of cumulative mileage and cumulative ridership.

[Leopolds Ghost]

9. Action Committee For Transit is part of problem IMO. Some of them are virulent Metrorail opponents.

Many are from Silver Spring and College Park. They want to redevelop low-income areas. I've spoken to their senior guys -- their insistence that we spend as little as possible and no money on tunneling, "or else it won't get built" has infected the entire DC area progressive community with crackpot ideas and false facts about how the Purple Line would operate. It won't achieve the stated purpose as a 10-mile long streetcar.

"But people won't be riding end to end" -- they insist -- when someone points out how slow it would have to run if you eliminate all tunneling -- and how many trees and buildings would have to be torn down and how little connectivity it would have to the existing Metro system if you make it a streetcar -- a problem that could be easily fixed, but they insist on separate ticketing using RFID smart cards, meaning an outdoor forced system transfer. "Besides, these areas aren't dense enough to support Metro," they insist. A three mile long subway tunnel, they claim, is a ridiculous boondoggle anywhere outside Manhattan island and they are not afraid to say so.

The supposedly "progressive" urban planners, too. Many of them are in the pockets of local condo developers whose stated wish is to increase the income level of transit users, not to increase the number of people using it. The same folks lobbied for bus-rail transfers using RFID smart cards and EMIMINATED cash transfers for bus riders. Their only constituency that ACT seems to care about is white, affluent commuters.

The founder of ACT told me to my face that ridership didn't matter, because it was suburban transit, and subways (ACT insisted) weren't justified in the suburbs. Their ally Mike Madden on MNCPPC further told me once that Metrorail would not be extended "in your or my lifetime, so all this talk about future improvements is irrelevant; the important thing is to connect Silver Spring to Bethesda so we can redevelop those areas."

They want to re-zone all the old (already pedestrian friendly) retail buildings and tear down the restaurant district to build more high-rises. Why? Because nobody seems to want Metro oriented development anywhere BUT the low-income and/or older gentrifying areas where it can be justified by removing poor people as a side benefit. "All the locally owned businesses will be gone," one transit advocate put it. "Get used to it."

Meanwhile the same planners want to "upgrade" outlying Metro accessible business districts into highway interchanges using the lions share of the money proposed by the new Administration.

That's what those millions of "ped-friendly upgrades" will consist of under the new funding bill. Turning intersections into interchanges, widening roadways ALONG with adding sidewalks, diverting the new sidewalks into turn lanes that require circuitous pedestrian crossings of fast moving traffic. And they'll claim the intersection improvements were designed to speed up traffic flow AND help pedestrians! You can't do both.

These are the same people who oppose either subways or dense development in areas not ALREADY zoned for it. They want to build high-rise, high-income urban ghettoes connected by a single, low-capacity trolley line. Everyone else (especially people who have to commute over five miles across the suburbs) can either drive ("that's why we still need the ICC!" the guys at ACT said; they don't oppose it!) or go to hell. The trolley won't get them there.

It's not fast enough and its own advocates won't pay to upgrade it to a subway or rapid rail. The people at the core of the Purple Line NOW committee have said flat-out that they want transit to be visible, not underground they say putting it underground "discourages redevelopment and is a waste of funds that could be used on other projects, including, yes, highway projects."

And they're allied with light rail advocates who killed rapid transit projects on the West Coast. There's a lot of anti-rapid transit bad blood inherited from the West Coast where liberals in the planning profession side with more, cheaper, slower light rail lines to encourage ped-friendly development, but many of them oppose efforts to build high capacity rail systems that they think will be a waste of money --

The overriding goal of the new-urbanist movement has become that of Kunstler: to get a small, wealthy group to benefit from a collection of small scale systems in selected areas that can be urbanized under current zoning codes (a very select few places indeed) such as urban industrial areas (deemed obsolete) and let everyone who lives in suburbs stew in their own juices, because they refuse to extend subways into the suburbs.

Name one US city where progressives are pushing to extend a subway into a suburb.

I agree with Kunstler on much, but not his transit vision, and the New Urbanists are moving in the wrong direction. They want a collection of isolated streetcar lines in major US cities that serve ONLY places like Georgetown and Bethesda and college towns, because "nobody else will ever use transit, so we need to get them to move into areas where people do." Nonsense!

But this is central to the premise underlying the assumptions the FTA will be operating on in the new Administration, which will include many of Clinton's old transit advocates (who also defunded rapid rail in favor of streetcar lines contracted and built by private companies.) To quote Robocop "We had a contract with the city for ED-209. Parts and labor for 25 years -- who cares if it worked!"

Many progressives who support the Purple Line in theory don't know what's been done to it.

"This is about building beautiful buildings around transit stops and creating a ped-friendly base for the few who do use it", the guy from ACT told me. "Why should I go to Langley Park and not have a Borders and Starbucks? I WANT a Borders and Starbucks in Langley Park." And yes, it sounded exactly that crack-potish the way he put it.

These are the same architects and "progressives" who acknowledge that all those low-income immigrants won't be around to use the facility; they'll be displaced to make way for wealthy DINKs who are "more likely to use improved transit to get to work" as one "progressive" person on my local advisory committee put it.

And of course it's no coincidence that once a line is routed thru the wealthiest and/or most gentrifiable enclaves, all efforts are made to densify those areas and evict any low-income housing along the route, and no efforts are made to extend the system into "non-redevelopable" low-income areas, since that would result in aforementioned riff-raff.

The objective seems to be to create a "string of pearls" with all money spent on gentrifying the areas along the line, with no regard to ridership and no regard to how it connects to the existing Metro system.

The same strategy is being used on every system where FTA rules dictate a transit improvement must be:

a) planned in isolation from all future transit improvements;
b) maximum capacity (and thus maximum allowable investment) must be calculated on the basis of how many people will travel from point to point on the line itself, with no regard to any sort of citywide transit system; and
c) it must pay for itself in economic development (meaning displacement of transit dependent populations)
along the route itself.

In fact, decreasing "need-based" transit commuters and increasing the number of "choice" transit users
is a SPECIFIC GOAL of all transit administrations under Clinton and Bush.

[Captain Hilts]

20. Not true. nt

[Leopolds Ghost]

13. Put it a different way, both Chevy Chase and Action Committee for Transit oppose subway construction

They hate each other too much to work together on increased transit funding that a tunnel would necessitate,

and neither wishes to lobby for more funding -- both groups want it built as cheaply as possible.

(and neither has enough regard for the opportunity costs -- they think of the Purple Line in terms of 50,000 ridership, or the population of two Metro stations -- most of which would come from existing bus riders and development along the route -- no regard for the much larger number of people who want to use Metro -- who are uninterested in riding a 17mph trolley that doesn't even connect directly to the Metro -- but progressives all along the route who have SUVs parked in front of their houses want it built, so they can pat themselves on the back everytime they drive past it and admire the few who do ride it.)

Real transit is 25-50 mph.

The irony is folks in Takoma Park are the biggest backers of the Purple Line, but lobbied fiercely to re-route the line away from Takoma Park, away from the areas that needed to be served. They don't support subway either because they were told it would be more destructive than surface tracks. Destructive to single-family homes, that is. The low-income apartment buildings that would be torn down to build a surface light rail line, are ones both they and the planners want torn down anyway. Go figure! So the new zoning maps that show the light rail line are all clearly marked yellow for "Single Family TO REMAIN" and orange for "mixed-use NEW HOUSING AND RETAIL" in areas currently occupied by low-income apartments. Interesting double standard, there.

[Captain Hilts]

21. This is just not true.

ACT operates and deals with what they've got. The reluctance of MD, DC and VA to support dedicated funding for Metro explains the transit-hostile environment in which those in favor of mass transit have to operate. They are forced to fight for and accept 'half a loaf' at times because of this.

The folks in Takoma park are total hypocrites.

The idea of even digging a tunnel to get the light rail line under Wayne Ave. to allievate traffic at that intersection is even a no-go. So the idea of digging a subway line from even silver spring to Bethesda is just not going to happen.

[hedgehog]

14. I skimmed over the Stimulus Bill, and I think just about every section

required that the money be spent starting in about 2 weeks. If there are no public transit projects in the bill, it's because after 8 years of Bush nothing is ready to go. In fact, I think the bill specifically forbids money for design, the phrase "shovel ready" is pretty literal in this case. Give Obama at least another week or so to get things organized!

[Leopolds Ghost]

16. Which is why I don't like the Stimulus bill.

If Bush or Reagan were proposing it, we'd be noticing that it is a successful way to drown the government in debt, preventing any money from being spent on long-term solutions.

After all, everyone from the new Administration to local officials is already talking about a "new era of belt-tightening" that will be initiated the day after this bill is passed (and not a minute before!) that
will force austerity measures on ALL EXISTING PROGRAMS after the wad of cash from this bill is blown.

Grover Norquist had a term for this fiscal approach, "Spend and Spend until the Government can be drowned in a Bathtub."

The Post had a great front page article about progressive activists (like me, although I'm more of a purebred populist) beginning to turn against the stimulus bill for this very reason.

[hedgehog]

17. I don't know, I loked at an article about the amount of money that Madoff

stole, and put into that context the Stimulus Bill is nowhere as big as people would have you believe.