Category Archives: Transit

Good News, Bad News

Some good news here in DC:

Ryan Avent notes that despite the recession, the District is still a popular destination for people moving in.  It will be very interesting to see where DC’s population number ends up with the 2010 Census.

Bad news:

Construction within the District is way down from a year ago.

But there’s more good news!

Union Station’s bike station has glass!

From around the nation, some other promising tidbits:

72% of Charlotte’s LRT riders hadn’t used transit before.  Like The Overhead Wire, I think that’s a huge number.  Some of it might be to good timing with the nationwide increase in transit ridership and gas price spikes coinciding with the opening of the line – after all, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.  Still, that’s a fantastic number and shows the kind of bias for rail potential riders have.

Small scale solutions to water issues get some publicity in Roll Call.

Most of us think of water and wastewater infrastructure as consisting of big pipes, treatment plants and reservoirs. Few of us recognize the importance of our natural infrastructure — the forests, wetlands, flood plains and grassy, permeable landscapes, which filter and purify water for humans, provide habitat for fish and wildlife, and mitigate hot summers in city and town. Our natural landscape provides us with the most cost-effective and efficient system for recycling, reusing and filtering water.

This way of thinking has to change. Our infrastructure is aging. We pay relatively low water rates, which fail to cover the full value or cost of clean and safe water. We are losing more undeveloped land each year along with its trees, shrubs and grasses and are replacing it with impervious surfaces — roofs, roads, parking lots — that allow pollution to be carried off into our waters. We find ourselves in a changing climate, whatever the cause, bringing with it chaotic weather patterns including droughts in some places and greater precipitation and polluted runoff in others.

This kind of small scale thinking is something the Feds should encourage cities to take on, as it fits into their purview far more than, say, massive and expensive deep tunnel projects.  (Hat tip – Infrastructurist)

And one bit of bad news from New York: The Feds don’t like the delays and budget projections for the Second Avenue Subway.

The story is simple: The MTA has been unable to meet any of its self-imposed deadlines, and it now faces the prospects of massive cost overruns and a six-year delay in delivering Phase I of the Second Ave. Subway. Original plans called for the entire line to be constructed by 2020. That is but a pipe dream right now.

The FTA numbers are alarming. The MTA is budgeting for an expected cost of $4.451 billion with a high end of $4.775 billion. The FTA believes a low budget estimate to be $4.978 billion with an August 2017 completion date. The federal government’s high end is $5.728 billion — over $1 billion more than the current MTA estimate — with a June 2018 opening date.

It’s too bad, since mismanagement like this (and Boston’s Big Dig also comes to mind) turns people away from thinking big and long term.

More investment, please.

It’s all a matter of time horizons.  If you have a long term investment horizon, you can think big.  If you’re thinking short term, you need something that makes an impact right away.  As this applies to transit and transportation planning, it’s much easier to implement a service, such as a bus route than it is to plan, design, and build a rail line.

Advocacy for change is important, but some are annoyed with the focus on the near term instead of keeping our eyes on the long term prize.  The Overhead Wire takes Streetsblog to task for perceived Bus Rapid Transit advocacy.  Buses are great, and we should certainly invest in them and upgrade them wherever possible.  But we also should acknowledge that they don’t have the long term impacts that rails do.

You want less people to ride transit? Then build inferior transit. In all actuality though, this country needs more Metro Subways. You know, the kinds of things they have in first world countries on the European continent. Washington DC is an example of a place that has developed more recently around the subway. Regions that build BRT will always be car cities. If you want to truely transform regions, we’re going to have to think bigger.

I think a lot of people talk about Arlington County because of the great success it has had in development. Yet no one talks about what Atlanta was like on Peachtree just north of downtown or in the Buckhead area just north of there before MARTA. Not a lot of people seem to realize that San Francisco is much more dense now because of BART and Caltrain connections as well as the Muni Metro than it ever would have been without. In fact, certain companies have pushed the MTA in San Francisco to make Muni better or they will leave. They wouldn’t be saying that if we had a system that actually worked.

The problem with places like San Francisco and Atlanta is that they didn’t go far enough. They built a couple of lines and then stopped. If we truely want to see our cities transform, we need to go further and without BRT as THE substitute idea for Heavy Rail or Semi Metro Light Rail. It’s an outrage to think that people actually think this is a real alternative to transform our cities and turn the population to transit. It’s just us being cheap. We’re already cheap with transit, and look where that gets us. To more people riding cars and more sprawl.

It’s important to note the Arlington County case.  The “Oranjington” corridor is always hailed as a paragon of transit oriented development.  And it is.  But any quick glance at aerial photos from that area shows plenty of surface parking lots yet to be redeveloped:

That section of the Orange line opened in 1979.  We’ve made a lot of progress in 30 years, but the long term land use changes and reinvestment in those areas takes time.

Ryan Avent takes it one step further:

It seems to me that the only thing more remarkable than the great success cities have had when they’ve focused on improving land use around fixed-guideway transit is the fact that cities seem so reluctant to repeat the experiment. Metro’s Green Line through the District has been a gold mine for the city, leading to billions in new investment, thousands of new residents, hundreds of new businesses, and so on. And there is absolutely no momentum in the District’s government to try and create more opportunities for this kind of growth.

I’d suspect the reason for this is precisely because of the long term time frame.  Add in cost factors, and thinking this big is simply not going to happen for most municipalities.  Perhaps regional entities could do better, but the Feds also have to be on board:

A big part of the problem, of course, is that the federal government doesn’t adequately take these kinds of land use changes into account in allocating funds. It’s nonetheless possible for cities to press ahead with these things, particularly since attitudes in Washington are changing. You’d think that someone down in the city government would be like, you know what? That worked really well. Maybe we should do it again.

Indeed.  However, going at it ‘alone’ is a tough road.  It’s somewhat heartening to see Senators considering transit within the climate bill, but transit’s biggest potential isn’t in energy savings but in land use changes.  These kinds of land use changes will make transportation cleaner all by themselves as well as slowly make carbon-friendly lifestyles more accessible to the population of America’s cities.  So many of the problems we face in terms of climate change stem from our land use patterns, yet we treat them as fixed when discussing solutions.  Again, some long-term perspective is in order.

Future ideas for DC's commuter rail system

MARC Train. Image from J.H.Gray on Flickr

MARC Train. Image from J.H.Gray on Flickr

Washington, DC is blessed to have Metro – a great urban transit system.  It’s probably the single best thing to happen to the city in the past 50 years – and even more notable considering the era it came from.  When most cities were depopulating and building freeways instead of transitways, DC built a subway system.  Several cities built subway lines, but DC managed to build an entire system.  Given the dominance of the automobile both in public policy and in public perception during this era, this accomplishment is nothing short of remarkable.

However, the success of Metro can sometimes hamstring future transit discussion in the region.  If people want transit, they want it to be Metro.  Even if Metro (specifically – heavy rail rapid transit – fully grade separated) isn’t the best option for the job.  Rapid transit lines are tremendously expensive and must have high ridership to justify their expense.  Still, when people talk about expanding transit in the DC region (which is good!) they tend to focus on simply extending Metro lines places.  Plenty of folks point out the oddity of putting the most expensive mode of transit out on the fringe – especially when some of those places (Orange line to Manassas, Blue Line in NoVA) already have existing commuter rail connections.

Some of that stems from the hybrid nature of Metro.  Unlike her sister system in the Bay Area, Metro at least functions as a more traditional subway within the core of DC.  However, out on the fringe, the rail speeds, station spacing, parking supply, and distances covered function much more like a commuter rail system than a subway.  Thus, it’s somewhat natural for people in the region to associate a commuter rail trip with Metro’s brand – but that doesn’t make it the best choice of mode.

The solution seems blindingly obvious – many of the corridors mentioned for Metro extension, whether that’s the Orange line to Manassas, the Blue line to Ft. Belvoir, or the Green line to BWI – are already served by commuter rail.  The issue is that commuter rail service in the DC region is sub-par.   MARC and VRE simply don’t have the good brand name that Metro does, and for good reason – the service they offer is inferior.

Plenty of people have opined about future commuter rail service in DC, including both MARC and VRE themselves. I won’t bother to re-hash what are essentially obvious arguments – bring MARC and VRE under one brand, increase headways, increase hours of operation, essentially make these services more like transit rather than just commuter rail.   Similar services in other places, whether being German S-Bahn services or even New York City’s commuter railroads show how these modes can both serve as express transit services as well as reliable transit.

The genesis of this post was simply a couple of things that came up during the past week.  First, BeyondDC made a few predictions on the state of the DC region in 2040.  The one observation that struck me concerned a future second intercity rail station in the area:

Intercity Travel:
Union Station will be past capacity and we will need a second depot, possibly in Arlington. There will be multiple trains per day running several short-distance intercity rail trips to all other population centers in the mid-Atlantic region. Camden Station will become more important in Baltimore. Dulles and BWI airports will continue to expand. National Airport may be sold and the land redeveloped, or it may continue to operate, depending on how much intercity travel continues to be done by plane.

The potential for a second major rail station in Arlington is intriguing.  It also dovetails nicely with this guest post on the transport politic about the future of regional and commuter rail in New York City.  The post harps on one key principle for New York, also applicable to DC – through-routing of trains:

The New York metro area has many stub-end terminals—Flatbush Avenue, Grand Central, Hoboken, Long Island City, St. George—as well as one station, Penn Station, which is a through-station by layout but a terminal by use, except by Amtrak. Such a configuration works in getting people to take commuter rail from the suburbs to Manhattan, but is inherently limited for all other functions…

Manhattan acts as a barrier to transportation, both by auto and by rail. By train, one needs to transfer. By car, one needs to cross jammed roads and pay multiple tolls. Through-running is a way of breaking this barrier by enabling people to live in North Jersey and work in Queens and Brooklyn, Long Island, or Connecticut, and vice versa. Though some people live on one side of Manhattan and work on another today, the current stub-end use of Penn Station lengthens those commuters’ travel time and restricts their number.

Worse, the stub-end layout reduces track capacity. A rapid transit train can dwell at a through station for under a minute, even if it is crush-loaded with passengers trying to enter or exit. At a terminal, the minimum dwell is about five minutes, and mainline trains discharging all or most passengers at the terminal typically dwell more. This clogs the tracks, leading to the absurd situation that while the RER’s central transfer point, Châtelet-Les Halles, serves 500,000 daily passengers on 6 tracks, Penn Station strains to serve 300,000 riders on 21 tracks.

Both MARC and VRE want to route trains through Union Station to serve regional destinations.   For MARC, the obvious choice would be serving employment centers at L’Enfant Plaza, Crystal City, and Alexandria directly.  For VRE, the same principle applies to Silver Spring and even through to Fort Meade and Baltimore.

Combine those ideas with the notion of both expanding regional and intercity rail service, and such routing options could increase the effective capacity of Union Station’s lower level through-tracks, as well as probably create demand for expanded facilities in the DC region.  The potential for inter city from points south (Richmond, Charlotte, Atlanta) terminating at an Arlington station is an interesting idea, creating a situation akin to Boston’s North and South Station – but with the needed track connector between them.  Likewise, Philadelphia’s through-routing regional rail shows the potential advantages of such a system.

This new terminal could easily fit on the land between National Airport and Crystal City.  The potential for connections between rail and air service is also interesting.  The location would provide an adjacent ‘downtown’ with Crystal City, but also a very short trip into Downtown DC via the Yellow line.

Both of these concepts – through routing and provisions for a new major terminal in Arlington – should be included in any future plans.