4 More Billion

[gatorback]

Billion?  4 more  Billion dollars for Houston's Light rail?  Wow.  Talk about burning thru some money.  I don't think the tax payers would ever approve a tax to pay for light rail in jacksonville.   They all want to drive their SUV's thru downtown and into that parking garage, walk into that Brick Building, get served some Christ and get back to their homes which is the hell away from those homeless they don't help.

I'm so sorry to post this but LRT has my vote.

December 12, 2007
It could happen here

This earlier post noted that a not very flattering analysis of the economic debacle that is the San Jose, California light rail system might very well describe Houston's light rail system in a few years if we don't come to our senses. Following up on those thoughts, this Randal O'Toole post reviews a San Jose Mercury News newspaper article that reports on the state of the San Jose transit system on the 20-year anniversary of light rail there. It's not a pretty picture:

    Santa Clara County taxpayers pay as much or more for transit, yet their transit system carries fewer riders, than almost any system with light rail in the country. “The heavy tax commitment to transit,” the article notes, “means fewer dollars for road upgrades.” Especially since a half-cent sales tax that voters approved of for roads was hijacked by the transit agency in 2000. [. . .]

    “The light-rail system should be considered a 100-year investment,” says San Jose’s director of transportation planning. That shows how shallow planners are: within another 20 years, that investment will be completely worn out and San Jose will have to decide whether to scrap it or spend another few billion replacing it.

    . . . [the] Silicon Valley, with its jobs spread out more thinly than almost anywhere else in the country, was unsuited for large-bus transit service. So to go from buses to light rail, which requires even more job concentration to work, was a mistake. Having made that mistake, VTA now wants to build BART, which requires even more job concentration. . .

    Light rail was the wrong solution for San Jose in 1987, it is the wrong solution today, and it still will be the wrong solution in 2027. We can only hope that San Jose’s leaders and opinion makers, including the Mercury-News, come to their senses by then and decide to junk the whole thing.

Meanwhile, in Houston, as our local "leaders" continue planning to spend upwards of $4 billion on expansion of a light rail system that relatively few citizens of the area will use, alternative transit projects that make much more sense are relegated to discussion in the blogosphere.

The Houston area is a big place with a vibrant and resilient economy. But Metro's light rail system is the one urban boondoggle going right now that has the potential to become a serious economic drag on the local economy in the not-to-distant future. It's far past time that our local leadership noticed and started taking actions to hedge this risk.

Posted by Tom at December 12, 2007 12:10 AM

[second_pancake]

Well, gator, if it's as poorly planned as the one in the article, than I would agree.  This is just another great argument for the appropriate time and assesment to be used, to be sure EVERY possible solution is reviewed instead of just throwing money at one person's 'great' idea while dismissing all others.  Just like people's diets, one solution does not fit all. 

[Ocklawaha]

Budget problems of San Jose's regional Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) have been given wide publicity. While most of this is a result of California's statewide budget crisis, and deep economic problems besetting Northern California and Silicon Valley in particular, VTA's policies and management have in many respects compounded its problems. Rail opponents and some in the news media have been taking the opportunity to go after VTA's light rail transit (LRT) system with a hatchet. it's time to sort out the real facts.

There is nothing wrong with VTA's LRT system that good management could not fix. San Jose's critical policy issues go all the way back to National City Lines, Inc. â€" the notorious highway industry outfit which bought up electric streetcar lines in order to convert them to buses.

The fall and rise of San Jose transit

After years of running San Jose's transit, NCL's management methods drove ridership so low that there seemed to be no hope for transit in that low-density area. Bus transit just faded away, till there was virtually nothing left. Eventually Santa Clara County had to take over. Unfortunately, the county transit agency lost so much money they bought into the craze for paratransit, and eliminated all bus service in favor of an extensive dial-a-ride service, running van-sized vehicles in an operation "automated" by MIT.

The demand-actuated dial-a-ride system was an even bigger failure than the earlier bus system, with very low ridership and very high cost. it was such a colossal failure that new management was hired, and they went back to basic conventional, line-haul bus service, cutting costs and, with the help of sales tax revenue, gradually boosting ridership. While ridership was very low per capita, it was much better than with dial-a-ride or with National City Lines at the time of their demise.

Looking at success stories like San Diego, the Santa Clara transit agency became interested in the potential of LRT to further build ridership and, at the same time, revitalize the city's moribund downtown. The Guadalupe corridor roadway project, running south of downtown, offered an opportunity. Because Guadalupe was to be an expressway, not a freeway, median LRT operation made the most sense, with level crossings, traffic signals, and at-grade stations. First Street, running north from downtown, had room for a median rail line to Great America, so they extended Guadalupe up there.

Light rail: Early problems

However, after the LRT project was under way, the Guadalupe highway project managers basically bollixed the transit project by redesigning the roadway into a freeway â€" forcing a redesign of the Guadalupe LRT alignment, with full grade separations, and making access to LRT more difficult and costly. At the same time, the new design speeded up highway travel, ultimately impacting actual vs. projected ridership.

One of the county's foremost leaders, a wildly enthusiastic transit supporter, was convinced that the transit agency could afford both LRT and full bus service, including in the same corridor .

An expanding Silicon Valley was bringing in ever-higher tax revenues.

Thus Santa Clara's transit system developed the highest cost per vehicle hour virtuslly anywhere, for both bus and rail. it should be recognized that high living and housing costs in Santa Clara County exert upward pressure on wage levels, which in turn tend to push the VTA's costs higher than anywhere else. Meanwhile, at the same time, the new GM also boosted ridership far above anything seen in thirty years.

With the addition of light rail, ridership has grown at a faster rate in Silicon Valley than almost anywhere else (but keep in mind it started from a very low base). The Santa Clara transit system â€" now reconstituted as VTA â€" got to more than 30,000 LRT riders ... before Silicon Valley crashed. Downtown San Jose came back from the dead â€" certainly far more alive than it used to be.

The LRT trains run in a downtown transit mall â€" virtually on the sidewalk â€" so must be limited to 15 miles per hour; but that gives them good downtown distribution. And the trains move right along at a good speed (35 to 55 mph) when on reserved or private-right-of-way.

The Mountain View and Sunnyside LRT extensions may seem dubious now, but these communities wanted these lines enough to bid money for them.

San Jose's LRT performance should be assessed in the context of VTA's system as a whole. By 2001, figures from the Federal Transit Administration's National Transit Data Base reported that LRT at VTA cost 85 cents per passenger-mile, while the agency's bus operations cost $ 1.04. Thus LRT, prior to the systemwide loss of ridership, was demonstrating that it was less of a subsidy problem than the buses â€" contrary to the implications of various rail critics. (*Jacksonville's Skyway by contrast cost $17.00 per passenger!)

Until recent economic downturn and budget crisis, VTA's LRT was operating at lower cost per passenger-mile than VTA's bus services.

Economic crash opens opportunities for critics

As it's now widely recognized, VTA is in financial crisis. Rail opponents try to lay this problem at the door of the agency's LRT system, but that is a deception. To understand VTA's current problems, one must recognize that the entire region has fallen into deep economic and financial crisis.

Virtually every public agency and social program is now grappling with near-catastrophic budget cuts. California's public education is in crisis â€" in the San Jose area, some school districts are considering closing entire schools. Over a two-year period, the region has lost 10 percent of its total employment. The San Francisco Bay Area has been experiencing its worst economic downturn in the past fifty years.

And other transit agencies have also been hit hard by the slump. Even a relentless opponent of VTA's rail system, the San Jose Mercury News, reported that

This catastrophic downturn has impacted travel. Commuter trains lost 19 percent of their Silicon Valley ridership with the severe unemployment. Thus it should not be that shocking that the previous 30,000 LRT weekday rider-trips would drop to 17,000 (Third Quarter, 2003).

However, an even greater drop was caused by VTA's cutbacks in service of 33 percent, which almost surely have disrupted timed transfers.

Unfortunately, the Mercury News "analysis" (seizing on selected aspects of the consultant's review) failed to provide anything approaching an accurate, credible, and reliable gauge of VTA's LRT operations or the performance of the system, nor a useful understanding of its current problems. The report in the Mercury News contained serious misrepresentations and factual errors.

The reporters argued that the system's average speed is too slow.

But their statement that the San Jose LRT operates "at an average speed under 15 miles an hour" is at odds with the facts. The LRT's average schedule speed, based on schedule times and distance data from VTA, is 20 miles per hour, end-to-end from Santa Teresa to Baypointe . That is approximately the same average speed as in Dallas's acclaimed LRT, and is relatively high for a system routed predominantly in street right-of-way.

On a similar theme, the reporters suggested that downtown San Jose should have been left off the LRT route: "Light rail was originally intended to bypass downtown and go to Mineta San Jose international Airport, which would have made it faster and perhaps more popular."

Apparently to bolster their contention that the LRT is nothing more than a slow "streetcar", and that routing it through the CBD was a mistake, the reporters claimed that LRT trains "inch through downtown San Jose at 3 mph." But according to VTA's schedule and distance data, LRT's schedule speed through the CBD is more than 9 miles per hour â€" three times faster than the Mercury News claimed, and a respectable average for any transit service making closely spaced stops in the relatively dense, congested core of its city.

Indeed, an average of nine miles per hour downtown is the same speed as the San Diego Trolley on C Street in that city. Buses on Broadway, parallel to C St., were running at an average 5 miles per hour the last time I timed them.

Bus operations in some downtown areas have been known to run yet more slowly ~ even as "BRT". Busways in New Orleans ran at an average 2.5 miles per hour, and bus lanes in downtown Philadelphia also averaged 2.5 miles per hour in the peak hour before the PATCO high-speed rail transit line opened for business (after that, with fewer buses, Philadelphia's downtown buses got a little faster).

In short, transit operations in any downtown tend to be unusually slow, particularly because of the heavy pedestrian traffic and the frequent stop spacing. But, for VTA's rail critics â€" whose preferred alternative transit mode seems to be buses â€" it's convenient to ignore comparative averages and the context of transit industry experience.

"...San Jose officials considered the trolleys essential to redeveloping a dying downtown...." And indeed, San Jose's downtown has revived substantially since the LRT system was installed â€" but the Mercury News article made no mention of that achievement.

But facts don't seem to matter much to critics â€" including Mercury News reporters and others â€" crusading against the LRT system. A stream of relentless attacks on VTA, and its LRT service in particular, has persisted steadily.

T. J. Rodgers, president and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, and a dedicated ideological opponent of government-funded public transport and rail transit, proclaimed that "VTA light rail is a slow, expensive loser. ...
[San Jose Mercury News, 9 June 2003]

Rodgers, who boasts of his preference for his car and declares "we [motorists] hope that others will use public transportation to give us more room on the roads." (What Rodgers proposes for public transportation "to give us more room on the roads" is, curiously, more motor vehicles â€" "innovative express bus schemes" and "Bus Rapid Transit".)

The article also refers to "some experts" who claim that "Santa Clara County's light-rail problems are likely to persist once the economy improves" because, among other reasons, these problems are supposedly "inherent in the design of the system ...." However, the only "expert" the article cites is Tom Rubin, described merely as "a nationwide transit consultant". But in reality Rubin is a nationally known anti-rail crusader, paid by several far-right, anti-transit "think tanks", and a familiar "hired gun" for opponents of major transit initiatives and rail systems.

Management Decisions

VTA does need some serious policy changes. For a start, the agency needs to rationalize the bus system to fit the ridership, and re-route much of it to feed and interact with their LRT lines. They need to find ways to bring their cost per hour down.

VTA's management has got to get tough. A 15-minute LRT headway works fine for Sacramento, a much smaller city than San Jose. VTA needs to establish its own 15-minute headway standard and cut the train size to fit, running one car except when two are required. Even with just 17,000 weekday passengers (under the current economic crisis conditions), that is substantially more ridership than Salt Lake City expected and approximately what Salt Lake City initially accomplished, in a very successful, very low-cost operation.

From Light Rail Now
Ocklawaha

[gatorback]

Having every possible solution, reviewed, verified and cross verified, independently verified doesn't matter when we're not ready for it.  Betamax was a better format and that didn't win.  People don't like riding busses period.  If you have the best bus system on the planet people still not going to ride it because it's consider "low type class travel" and that's why people like LRT(and BRT OMG I said BRT check my temperature)....but how much money do you want to spend moving 4 people around because that's how many people ride the Houston system...a guy was counting.

[thelakelander]

Houston's 7.5 mile light rail line carries 45,000 daily passengers.  That's a number that it wasn't projected to reach until 2020.  That's pretty impressive for a short 3 year old starter line funded without the help of the FTA and State of Texas.  Our Skyway averages less than 3,000 riders a day and its been around for nearly 20 years. 

[thelakelander]

Btw, what Houston has planned is a large network of multiple light rail lines covering several areas of the region.  Even though that network may cost $4 billion, they still save $600 million by not building the lines as BRT first and then converting to rail later on.

Houston's proposed light rail lines.  Right now, the only one that exists is the red line from downtown south to the 610 Loop.  The Red North, Blue, Black, Purple and Green are all proposed.

[gatorback]

Houston's 7.5 mile light rail line carries 45,000 daily passengers.  That's a number that it wasn't projected to reach until 2020.  That's pretty impressive for a short 3 year old starter line funded without the help of the FTA and State of Texas.  Our Skyway averages less than 3,000 riders a day and its been around for nearly 20 years. 

And our Skyway moves 2,300 a day?    I'm still searching for a blog that has a guy counting the riders of each redline train at 5 (and that's given each time a train goes by there are 2 people bent over tying their shoes.)

Folks, I'm all for LRT, BRT, Bikes, etc., I think we all know that.  It's just how can you sell people oon a system that isn't going to pay back for 100 years.  I'm not going to be here in 100 years why raise my takes is all I hear.

[thelakelander]

I'm for mass transit when it fits in its rightful place as well.  Especially when it can be pulled off WITHOUT raising taxes (I don't want my taxes raised period IF it can be avoided).  However, we have to look at more then just the fare box or initial construction cost if we really want to determine if something is a wise investment or not.

Houston's 7.5 mile LRT line cost $300 million (or $40 million per mile) to build in 2001.  While definately a steep price, does the fact that it has encouraged transit oriented development to occur along its route mean anything?  At what point does that "indirect" economic impact (construction jobs, permanent jobs, increasing the annual tax rolls, increasing the community's quality of life, enhancing the city's image, etc.) equal and surpass the initial public investment?  For example, the Houston Pavilions development (now under construction) would have never happened if that rail line was not put in place.

Houston Pavilions
project size: 3 blocks; 360,000sf
project cost: $170 million
project tenants: House of Blues, Lucky Strike, Foreve 21, Books-a-Million, Lawdry's, McCormick & Schmick's, Yao's Restaurant & Bar, Antica Osteria, Red Cat Jazz Cafe, Tuscany Coffee, Lunco Boutique, Unity National Bank, BCBG, Journey Shoes, Old Havana, etc.
estimated jobs: 1,200



This is only one example of a development that has come in primarily because of the rail line increasing the accessibility and visibility of what had been surface parking lots for decades.  This is something that will forever chance the face and image of the heart of that city.  It will also benefit the community by being a destination anchor that will attract more complementing development (just like malls do in the suburbs).  So the bigger question for Houston residents (and Jax with our issue) would be can residents justify investing $300 million to positively change the face and international image of your community for eternity? 

[gatorback]

Another good positive impact is the reduction of Houton's carbon footprint.  A large proportion of a household’s carbon footprint results from personal and work-related transportation. The average American household carbon footprint is 22 metric tonnes per year. Only about one-third of travel is work or business-related. If one of the cars were an SUV, the share would increase to 56% of total household CO2 emissions.

One of the most significant actions that household members can take to reduce their carbon footprint is to use public transportation. Today, 78% of commuters drive to work alone.

So the question is what are you here for today?  Are you interested in saving the planet?  I'm not so sure poeple in Jacksonville care because if they did they'd be riding the busses, or carpooling.