Human Transit

Guest Post: U.S. Transit Needs an “Emergency Operations Fund”

Posted on January 24, 2010 in Guest Posts, US Federal Policy

This guest post is by Ron Kilcoyne, General Manager/CEO of Greater Bridgeport Transit in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Ron’s previous posts include CEO of Santa Clarita Transit near Los Angeles and manager of research and planning for AC Transit in Oakland, California. The views expressed are his own and not those of his agency.

What will it take to restore all the transit service cuts over the past two years and prevent additional service reductions? I haven’t found an exact number but 10% of the total cost of providing transit service nationally would be good rough estimate. For example, at least two suburban transit systems – one in Cleveland OH, another in Atlanta — have or will shut down completely this year. The Chicago Transit Authority anticipates eliminating 14% of it service on February 7. Colorado Springs CO reduced service by 53% on January 1. Between late 2008 and this spring Orange County Transit reduced service by 22%. Continue Reading →

Quote of the Week

Posted on January 24, 2010 in US Federal Policy

When everyone was “driving” horses, and nobody had cars, and there were no gas stations, every isolated new stretch of road built in 1902 could not possibly have passed FTA cost benefit analysis criteria. — Russell Bozian, in an email.

Comment Policy

Posted on January 22, 2010 in 2-Keepers, General

Human Transit welcomes and encourages comments from people who want to

share relevant information, including narratives about their own experience, or
ask questions, or
engage in thoughtful conversations that could potentially transform or enrich their own views.

The following policies and guidelines are intended to foster such an environment. I reserve the right to delete comments for violating any of these policies. Continue Reading →

Breaking News: Jack Saves Downtown Portland from Transit Blog

Posted on January 22, 2010 in Portland, Streetcars (Trams)

It’s a rite of passage for a blogger to encounter his first populist attack-link. The widely-read Portland blogger Jack Bogdanski had this to say about my post wondering if all-day parking in downtown Portland might be too cheap:

Let’s kill off downtown Portland once and for all

Jack up the cost of parking down there even higher. Jarrett, old buddy — a lot of us ain’t gonna ride your goofy streetcar, no matter how much you charge for a parking space.

Longtime Human Transit readers will find that streetcar reference pretty funny, considering this.

Three Paths to a Low-Car City

Posted on January 20, 2010 in Philosophy, Portland, Urban Structure

If you want to live in a city with fewer cars, how do you get there? What do low-car cities have in common? Anything? Or are there in fact different ways to reach low car-dependence, demonstrated by very different cities achieving the same high scores?

All these questions came to mind as I perused Wikipedia’s helpful list of the US cities over 100,000 population with the most zero-car households (thanks to commenter Alon Levy). I find the list so interesting that I’m just going to copy all of it here, then add some thoughts at the end. The figure given for each city is the percentage of households that do not own a car. Continue Reading →

San Francisco: “The Fuse Has Been Lit”

Posted on January 16, 2010 in Cuts, Fares, Frequent Networks, Mobility, San Francisco, Streetcars (Trams)

Updated Jan 16

The next round of San Francisco service cuts have been announced, or as commenter Ted King puts it, “the fuse has been lit.” For local coverage see the SF Chronicle and Streetsblog SF.

Here are some of the most interesting points from the budget summary (via Streetsblog, not the Chronicle):

Although the budget hole to be closed is $16.9m, the service cuts are only $4.8m. That’s impressive. They achieve so much non-service savings by a whole pile of cuts to other things, designed to have wide but manageable impacts. Labor takes a ping: not just 0.7m in “concessions,” but also charges for parking at the workplace. (Since a huge share of the drivers report to work around 4:30 in the morning, many don’t have good transit options.) Continue Reading →

A Visit From the Loyal Opposition

Posted on January 15, 2010 in Meta, Philosophy, Urban Structure

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.

Continue Reading →

Big News on U.S. Federal Transit Funding

Posted on January 13, 2010 in General

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.

Continue Reading →

The High Cost of Free Parking: The Movie

Posted on January 13, 2010 in General

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?

Posted on January 12, 2010 in Downtowns, Parking, Portland

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 →

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