Author Archive | Jarrett

A Visit From the Loyal Opposition

Very interesting and civil comment threads have grown on the last several posts.  Comment threads, of course, have a tendency to start with the post’s topic but then turn into conversations among the commenters, often leading far from the source.  As long as everyone’s civil, I don’t worry about that much.  I’ve learned not to treat the comment count as a measure of my relevance.

But I do want to note the efforts of commenter Watson, who lucidly argued for parking subsidies, sprawl land use patterns, etc. on the this recent post.  The resulting comment thread is worth a read.  On the subject of whether downtown Portland all-day parking rates should be higher, he began:

Be careful what you wish for. In the short-term, a sharp increase in central city parking prices might induce a significant shift from autos to transit. But over the long-term, the primary effect may be to drive businesses and people out of the city and into the suburbs where land is cheaper and parking can be provided at lower cost.

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Big News on U.S. Federal Transit Funding

Federal funding for transit projects will now consider their impacts on overall urban livability and sustainability, not just the cost-per-unit of time savings.

In a dramatic change from existing policy, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood today proposed that new funding guidelines for major transit projects be based on livability issues such as economic development opportunities and environmental benefits, in addition to cost and time saved, which are currently the primary criteria.

In remarks at the Transportation Research Board annual meeting, the Secretary announced the Obama Administration’s plans to change how projects are selected to receive federal financial assistance in the Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) New Starts and Small Starts programs. As part of this initiative, the FTA will immediately rescind budget restrictions issued by the Bush Administration in March of 2005 that focused primarily on how much a project shortened commute times in comparison to its cost.

Great news, perhaps, but I look forward to seeing how FTA is going to turn something as subjective as livability into a quantifiable measure that can be used to score projects, particularly since the payoffs lie in development that a proposed transit line might be expected to trigger, but that usually isn’t a sure thing at the point when you’re deciding to fund the line.  And of course, travel time does still matter.

Read the complete statement from Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood below.

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The High Cost of Free Parking: The Movie

My New Zealand colleagues Julie Ann Genter and Stuart Donovan have built a great practice doing research on transport and land use policy issues for national and local government.  They are both especially strong on parking policy.  They’ve put together a little video explaining the problems with hidden parking subsidies in an urban context, also featuring Auckland University’s Tim Hazeldine.

The video is based on Donald Shoup’s definitive book, The High Cost of Free Parking.  It obviously talks mostly about Auckland, but the issues it presents are the same in almost any New World city.

Julie Anne Genter also has a paper on the topic here.

Thanks to Joshua Arbury of the Auckland Transport Blog for reminding me about this.

Portland: Is Parking the Problem?

In the last post I pointed to a set of data out of the City of Portland showing that in a 12-year period when the city added four new rail transit lines, including the globally marketed Portland Streetcar, the percentage of Portland residents who take transit to work (called transit’s “journey-to-work mode share”) seems not to have changed at all.

Commenter Pantheon dug into Canadian statistics and found that in the period 1996-2006, when Portland’s transit journey-to-work mode share was idling in the 12-15% range, Canadian cities posted these gains: Continue Reading →

Portland: A Challenging Chart

Portland is supposed to be one of the US’s great transit success stories.  Is it still?  Do we know what it’s achieving?  Do we know how to measure it?

A couple of months ago, Portland reader Adrian Lawson pointed me to an Oregon Catalyst article ridiculing the Portland Metro goal of tripling non-auto mode share by 2035.  The author, John Charles, Jr., is the CEO of the Cascade Policy Institute, a conservative Oregon think tank that opposes Oregon’s land use planning system and generally favors roads over transit, so this is not a surprising view. Continue Reading →

San Francisco: Those Service Cuts Were Fun! Let’s (not) Do It Again!

In posts here and here (with leftovers here), I praised the way San Francisco MTA crafted the budget-driven service cuts that went into effect last month. By deleting whole lines and line segments that had alternative services nearby, they managed to reduce service without reducing many people’s abundant access. So the implementation went fairly well.

Unfortunately, it looks like more cuts will be needed in 2010, made worse by Governor Schwarzenegger’s raids on state transit funding. So it’s understandable but distressing to hear the MTA Board’s conversation going along these lines: Continue Reading →

Chokepoints as Traffic Meters and Transit Opportunities

My post on the strategic value of chokepoints, using the example of chokepoint-rich Seattle, led to an interesting comment thread at the Seattle Transit Blog.  As often happens, discussion quickly turned to my references to rail and Bus Rapid Transit, as readers argued over whether my real agenda was to advance one of those modes.

As regular readers will know, it’s rarely that simple.  But chokepoints do point to an advantage for Bus Rapid Transit if you’re trying to do things cheaply.  That advantage is that a chokepoint that affects private vehicle traffic is effectively a kind of traffic meter.  In our* work for Seattle Dept. of Transportation in the mid 00s, for example, we noticed that congestion was actually worse at the chokepoints around the edges of downtown than right in the center of downtown.  The chokepoints were restricting the rate of flow of vehicles so that they couldn’t congest the core, exactly the way a system of freeway ramp meters can limit congestion on a freeway. Continue Reading →

Leadership from Columbus: A Great Transit Advocacy Website

As someone who designs transit networks for a living, it’s often lonely trying to promote good network design.  When changing services to create a better network, everyone who is negatively impacted complains at once, while those who would benefit (including people who care about the efficiency and usability of their city as a whole) tend not to tune in.  So the political process of getting change approved is often unpleasant to say the least.

I-71NExpressRoutes_GoogleMap-large It would help if every city had advocates promoting basic principles of efficient network design.  For a good example of what this might look like, have a look at the Columbus Bus Rapid Transit Plan.  This appears to be the work of a local advocate who signs comments as “John,” but like Shakespeare he seems to have completely submerged his identity under his work.  I can’t find out anything else about him, nor does he have an obvious place to get feedback. Continue Reading →

Chokepoints for Effective Transit: The Example of Seattle

Seattleskyline1cropped In December, Alex Steffen wrote a provocative article at Worldchanging proposing that Seattle aim to become North America’s first carbon-neutral city.  I’m not an expert on carbon-neutrality as a whole, but I can certainly comment on the transport dimensions of it.  Here are some reasons to bet on Seattle, in particular, as a place that might get closer to carbon-neutrality in transportation than most other North American cities.  Ultimately, all of these are about geography. Continue Reading →

Good News on American Census Data

The New Republic’s blog The Avenue notices some good news for US transportation planners and advocates:

Last week, President Obama signed the 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act, an amalgam of six separate appropriations bills providing $447 billion to an array of federal departments. A small fraction of this funding is devoted to supporting federal statistical agencies that generate the demographic, economic, and social data that will help metros better understand themselves. …

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