The Overhead Wire

Letters from Southeast Asia

2012-01-23T21:18:00.000-08:00

Our good friend and sometimes guest blogger Ed recently came back from Southeast Asia. As they often do, our foreign correspondents take wonderful transit pictures abroad. Enjoy these beauties.

OT: I Am the Mile - All 1609 Meters

2012-01-20T01:25:00.000-08:00

Who out there in transit land watches track and field on television? I'm guessing not many of you. But most of you know that there is a big football game this weekend I'm sure. Track and Field is waning to a certain extent but hopefully last month's struggle between the Athletes and USATF on sponsorship rules will turn the tide a little bit more.

What is not waning is the short sightedness of those inside of the sport. I was deeply disappointed to hear that after Pat Henry of Texas A&M (Yes an Aggie!) suggested that the NCAA change the 1500 meters to the Mile (1609 meters), it was rejected out of hand by distance coaches around the country. Not only are these coaches short sighted about how to gain interest in the sport, they are also spiking the dreams of all kids who have ever read Once a Runner (Only the best book about distance running of all time!) and searched for their own route to Sub 4, just like Quenton Cassidy. For runners, the mile is now the measuring stick of history. To not have more opportunities at running one of the most fabled races of the last century, is to me somewhat criminal.

From Once a Runner: That quarter mile oval may be one of the few places in the world where the bastards can’t screw you over, Quenton. That’s because there’s no place to hide out there. No way to fake it or charm your way through, no deals to be made. You know all that stuff. You’ve talked about it. It’s why you became a miler. The question is whether you are prepared to live by it or whether it was just a bunch of words.

This would also be a big opportunity to refresh the sport. As someone who has moved on from track into another world and another industry, it's harder and harder for me to come back and watch. Especially when watching with friends who weren't runners. But everyone knows what mile times are, everyone. And if you tell them someone is trying to break 4, they'll stop and watch.

Every time people learn that I was a runner and a miler they ask my time. It can get really annoying to go through the whole description of what a 1500 is and even I still don't quite understand why we ran it other than it's the official Olympic distance and that's what they run in Europe. Usually I rattle off three different answers to explain myself. 3:41 for 1500(3:58 converted), 3:56 in the Austin Congress Avenue Mile (downhill), and 4:03 indoors. So I never broke 4 minutes "officially" to get on the national sub four list. It's one of my biggest regrets but since one could only run the mile indoors and a few select outdoor meets, it was pretty hard to see how fast you could run when you were fit. I've always told myself that I could start training and just get out there and do it. But after 9 years of not training, it's getting harder and harder to believe.

I'm sure there are others like me that never quite made it except in theory, but could have if given a few more races to try. And perhaps there are a few kids out there that when they get into the perfect race they close out with enough speed to dip under. My buddy Darren broke 4, just like his pops, the first father/son sub 4 tandem ever. But he had to have the race, which happened to be the only one that spring. And without this mile, there isn't this powerful connection.

Watch more video of 2008 Texas Relays on flotrack.org

Watch more video of Darren Brown on flotrack.org

Everyone who runs the 1500 or 1600 should have more opportunities to instead run 1609, which in my opinion would certainly make track in this country more exciting and put everyone on the same list together against their peers. In order to support the movement to bring back the mile, folks have set up a website and twitter to push this over the top. I fully support the effort and perhaps those of you who are interested will support it as well. We shouldn't have to do conversions. I am the mile.

High Speed Rail, For THIS Generation

2012-01-07T15:11:00.000-08:00

I recently read a Burlingame Patch article where a local officials said this:

“What I would like to see…is for us to take a position saying not just that we think the current plan does not make sense…but to say what we do need for transportation,” said Councilmember Terry Nagel. “If we could start a plan to have the money reallocated…that would make more sense.”

and

"However, Baylock countered that as long as high-speed rail exists, all transit money will go towards it, and a ballot measure would be necessary to unfund the project and redirect funds towards local transit."

There have also been other places where really strong transit supporters such as Huffington Post writer Joel Epstein have suggested that the money be reallocated to local transit as well and that HSR should be killed on spot.

After reading the Patch article and remembering the Epstein post I wrote the following tweet:

"Sorry, but defunding HSR won’t make local agencies $10b richer."

My thinking behind this was that while local folks and advocates might feel that killing HSR will benefit local transportation funding, the truth is that the money will just disappear. There won't be a $10B bond measure for local expansion and even if there were it wouldn't come back to the voters for at least another 5 years to a decade, or perhaps even a generation. At 31 I'm becoming acutely aware of the fact that if I live to be as old as my 99 year old Gramma, I'm a third done with my life and would like to spend the next third building things that I will use in my final third.

But in response to my tweet, blogger Market Urbanism tweeted "But it might start a long-overdo convo on costs" and wrote a post on Forbes about how my thinking was wrong because if we lower the costs and fix the construction we can actually build the line faster. In my opinion this ignores political realities about these types of large projects and a little how California is operating at this time. This probably gets us more into the technicals vs politicals discussion that Alon Levy brought up a few months ago, but I feel like we can still have the cost or design discussion without killing the project outright or thinking we can redistribute the funding to local projects. Stephen goes on to admit that the first segment is likely well designed but that folks are rightly spooked about the somewhat vague project funding realities and future possibilities of value engineering. I don't think we should be too worried since these projects have a way of moving along as they should and people like Stephen are always going to be pushing those buttons.

I feel that there are a lot of things that could be fixed or fleshed out about the project. People who know more about these types of issues than me (ie Clem). But also, if we kill the project now, it's dead for a generation. I'm a huge fan of fixing the issues of hand rather than putting them off for a later date.

Now full disclosure, I have a personal stake in this project. My sister and her family live in Bakersfield. I live in San Francisco. I also hate driving I-5. So this project would directly benefit me by getting me there faster and likely more often. Some people think this project is just about San Francisco and LA and that the Central Valley is nowhere. I beg to differ and this is why.

The Two Sides of Punishment

2012-01-04T21:14:00.000-08:00

There are two sides to the phrase "my sport is your sports punishment". On one hand the 80 - 90 miles a week I ran in college are enough to make people gasp when I tell them. "You ran more than I drove my car" is the response that I often got from folks. I guess you could say I had really high PMT (personal miles traveled).

But at the same time I cringe when sports coaches use running laps as a punishment. This does not teach the joys of running or the personal accomplishment and fulfillment that occurs when you finish a marathon or a long run. Rather it instills a hatred of running, often life long, that in my opinion steals away something that could be beneficial and dare I say, enjoyable if someone at least gave it an honest try.

So you can imagine how I feel when a humble mode of transportation is used as punishment. Had you heard this one? The one where the Virginia Tech football coach decided to send his kicker home on a Greyhound Bus from the Sugar Bowl because he had stayed out past curfew. I'm not against punishment for violating team rules, but does it have to be a mode of transportation? Does it have to further stigmatize the only option that some Americans have? This seems to me to be more windshield perspective from the wider world.

It was even the cover of the playbook. "The Greyhound Experience" and ESPN proudly showed it during one of its talk breaks during the game. Perhaps I have it wrong though. Is this the free market at work? Maybe it is proof of how bad our transportation system is that it takes a whole day of travel and three transfers to get between two US cities when according to Google Maps, which is generally extra time, the trip should only take 13 hours in a car, or half the time of the bus trip. In other words, we've handicapped trips on alternative modes so much that anyone going by bus would have to be crazy. Or poor. Or punished. And we wonder why we can't convince people that there's a better way.

Thin Slicing Major Transit Planning

2011-12-10T00:39:00.001-08:00

While I haven't been posting much I still think about all of these issues every day. It doesn't matter whether it's a book I'm reading for fun or even for work when thoughts flood into my head that I would love to write about. I just wish I had more time, and was better at getting my points across.

This last weekend I went to Denver to hang out with some friends over the weekend and on the plane I decided that I would read a book that's been sitting on my shelf for a while. I should probably do that more often as the shelf is filling with books faster than I can read them. Sorry Peter Calthorpe, Ed Glaeser and Ryan Avent. I have the books, just not the time. This time it was a book that I had picked up cheap a few years ago. Many of you have likely read Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker or picked up one of his quick read books The Tipping Point or Blink. They drive me a little crazy with their internal repetition but ultimately it makes you think a bit more about certain subjects than you would without the 'priming'.

So I started reading Blink and read the chapter about John Gottman and his love lab. By looking sitting down a couple to have a conversation about something relatively important for two hours, he claims to predict with 90% confidence whether that marriage will last. What did it boil down to? In the end he felt that the most important predictor was contempt. Out of all those emotions and interactions and issues that couples go through, is it really just one or two that predict accurately whether they will stay together? If Gottman's theory is true then yes.

Gladwell goes on to discuss the idea of Thin Slicing, or taking pieces of experience to develop a quick hunch or theory. The first example given in the book is museum curators who spotted a fake statue right away by just looking at it even though all the testing would seem to say that it was an actual antique. And when people have gut reactions to things and end up being correct, making them explain why if they are untrained to do so often muddles the initial right answer. Perhaps a common case of over-thinking.

But going back to transit and transportation as I do, a thought immediately shot into my head. Let's call it my gut reaction. Transportation planners are looking for infinite ways to gain higher ridership and fill seats. Transportation modeling in the United States is a huge industry with tons of engineers working to figure out how to predict travel behavior. So much so that they are always trying out new inputs that might account for every single situation that could possibly happen. I know some are probably thinking about how the brick paving affects walkability to the station. Now as a disclaimer I'm not super knowledgeable in travel demand modeling, and only have cursory knowledge about how the tables work and issues with origins and destinations, but I feel as many people do that its mostly a black box.

But as much as people around the country are often outside of the wonks when it comes to transit planning and designs, it seems to me that they are often right on the money when it comes to thinking about transit and transportation policy. The phrase "it doesn't go anywhere" is probably the most overused in the lexicon of citizens thinking about transit planning. But we do know from research that when a line does go somewhere it actually has riders, lots of them.

My main motivation moving along this train of thought (i see what you did there) is to think about how we can open up those black boxes that are travel demand models such that people who's first thought is "where does it go" understand why they should or shouldn't support a line. Perhaps it would make the FTA's life easier as well when they have some city thinking about spending money on a line that, well, doesn't go anywhere.

And this is where my thinking might be starting to change on this subject. Perhaps instead of a million different factors like connections to households, zoning changes, whether there is a station canopy, brick sidewalks or small block sizes, we ask where does the line go. My metric of choice would probably be jobs or even intensity (workers+residents). If you connect places with high intensity, you can't lose. Connecting places with low intensity, you do lose. No one rides.

Ultimately what this comes to is a thin slicing of transit planning. Everyone knows what the answer should be yet many times 1+1 is not 2. We often get sidetracked by politics, or the idea of creating new development, a million different factors in the model, or even lack of enthusiasm because the last line failed. But if we just focused on getting a large portion of people where they wanted to go, then perhaps we wouldn't always be fighting about funding or political will or even citizen support. Because no one can dispute the facts if a line gets riders. If people are using the system, everyone knows and don't need to have someone tell them if its a failure or not.

I know this is a bit of an oversimplification. But we focus so much on the smaller details that we end up not coming out ahead in the end. So many places want transit so bad but they think the only way to do it is to build a super cheap line on an existing freight corridor and call it a day. Deep down people know that's wrong, and many places will end up paying because they didn't do what first came to mind.

Go where the people go.

On to Vik

2011-12-06T00:56:00.001-08:00

I don't really want this blog to turn into my travel log and I promise that I'll write some things soon over Christmas break when I get a bit of time but I did want to share some videos that I took on my trip to Scandinavia. The clip below is North of Bergen on Highway 13 on the way to the Stave Church in Vik (See images in posts below). This was the only day we rented a car but it was a pretty amazing drive and well worth it for the waterfalls alone.

2011 Transportation Election Results

2011-11-08T20:51:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again!! I know I haven't been blogging lately but this is one of my favorite things win or lose. Here is 2008 and 2010 in case you want to hit the wayback machine. So let's get to it!

There are a number of interesting ones out there tonight. Because we're on the West Coast some of them might be over. But we'll follow anyways. As usual you can find the total transportation election contests at CFTE.

~~~
Cincinnati Charter Amendment: - WIN

No Rail Planning for 10 Years Issue 48 A No Vote Means Streetcar a Go

99% Votes In:
No 51.47%
Yes 48.53%

~~~

Durham County North Carolina Sales Tax for Transit - WIN

97% Votes In:

60% For
40% Against

~~~

Lorain County Ohio General Sales Tax. - LOSS

Bus service will be cut in half if No vote on Issue 22

100% Votes in:

67% No
33% Yes

~~~

Trumbull County Ohio Transit Sales Tax - LOSS

Transit system will cease to exist as of January 1st with No vote

100% Votes in:

35% Yes
65% No

~~
Clark County Washington - WIN

.2% Sales Tax for Transit - Proposition 1

100% Votes in:

54% Approved
46% Rejected

~~~

Seattle Vehicle License Fee - LOSS

100% Votes in:

60% Against
40% For

~~~
Washington Tolling Initiative 1125

No Vote Would be Win

Washington State Results

9:50pm PT 49% Yes 51% No
9:55pm PT 49.07% Yes 50.93% No
5:39pm PT 11.9.2011 - 48.56% No 51.44%

Go Underground Young Man!

2011-10-19T15:09:00.000-07:00

Each time I go to a Rail~Volution conference I feel a bit revitalized. For some reason just seeing people doing all the great work that they do really gets me excited about the future, even though it's always hard when recent politics dictates one step forward and two steps back. I personally want to take 5 steps forward but we know that isn't how it works.

Some of the best parts of the conference come from the stats and stories that people tell in the sessions and in the hallways. Today I learned what "Festival Parking" in development projects was from Art Lomenick and yesterday learned about a CDC program that invests in communities looking to improve health outcomes.

But one of my favorite comments came from one of my favorite public officials. Harriet Tregoning mentioned in her session (and it was repeated in Streetsblog and STB posts) that subway tracking heavy rail is the best way to go when it comes to surface development. While there are a few examples of it working around the country, I think the clean slate it affords developers and pedestrians is a huge bonus over the long term.

“In the short term, under-grounding can be very expensive, but in the long term it saves a lot of money,” Zimmerman said. The development that occurs above the station easily pays for the tunnel, and there’s significant savings on maintenance when rails are protected from the elements. But perhaps more important, there’s little difference between a transit line and an Interstate when it comes to fracturing the fabric of the urban environment. “A railroad takes up a lot of space and creates a barrier — something you can’t get across, like a highway,” he said.

This also brings up another thing I would like to see in regions around the country. Usually we get into the chicken and egg question whether the transit or density needs to come first but ultimately I think transportation investment drives development investment and putting these lines underground allows us to think about these as a long term investment, even though people these days don't think that way.

What I would like to see is a program for building at least three line subway lines in each major city in the United States. Now I'm not talking about these hybrid systems we get in the United States like BART but true central city Metros with transfer centers at the end that might stretch 3 miles from the center. What this would do is push cities to make urban development legal. The demand for development along major corridors stretches from the market generated around the gravity of central employment district. The benefit is that if you can get further from the center in ten minutes by putting the line underground, you will be able to build higher and create more walkable, sustainable development than you would have with just the bus. We see what a ten minute trip from downtown on a streetcar can do, we just need to get multiple modes going and augment with the subway.

I know its dreaming because it can't really happen given the current environment, but its really what I believe should happen. This model is there with the DC Metro, we just need to make it happen somehow.

Norway in a Nutshell

2011-09-25T20:29:00.000-07:00

That's the title of the great suggested tour that leads from Oslo to Bergen. I discussed Copenhagen and Stockholm in my earlier post, and now its time to cover Norway. Such an amazingly beautiful place and unfortunately the camera really can't do it any justice. But it'll have to do for now.

Our adventure starts with water and lots of it. It's definitely not something they'll have to worry about anytime soon. At least it seems that way. If you like waterfalls, you'll love Norway.

Also, the train ride between Oslo and Bergen is beautiful, but if you must get off the train, I recommend highway 13. It's got more tunnels than I knew existed in the world and some beautiful bus shelters.

The water is pretty still as well.

And the ski resorts have grass roofs

At the end of highway 13 is the town of Vik.

And in Vik is Hopperstad Stave Church, built in the 1100s, this church has been renovated to a certain extent but the inside is still in tact and an amazing specimen. It is said to be the oldest surviving church of its kind.

On the train from Oslo to Bergen, the train ride is full of farmhouses and deep canyons. And we rode in the car that allows pets.

At the Finse Glacier is the highest train station in Northern Europe. Only at about 4,000 feet the tree line doesn't go as high as it does in California or the Rockies because it gets so much colder. We found out later as well that this was where they filmed the Hoth scenes for Empire Strikes Back.

On the other side of the Train ride is the beautiful Fjords with more waterfalls. This one was from a train that has some serious elevation changes.

On the way back, we were in a commuter type bus going down this switchback, which was quite amazing that the driver could pull it off

And Bergen is a beautiful city

The Hanseatic quarter burnt down in the 1700s and the debris was pushed into the bay and built upon. But that was a bad idea as the buildings are shifting so much that some of them don't match up.

Back in Oslo, Frogner Park is a must see and here's the obligatory tram shot. The photo below is a really cool water feature that the trams run directly over.

And the urbanism is pretty great as well

Finally though, I thought I would share our prison abroad, the US Embassy in Norway. That's what I thought it was at least the first time I saw it. It's too bad we create so many enemies and have folks that don't like us that we need to even do this. At least there is a tram line.

Seafarers of Scandinavia

2011-09-11T18:37:00.000-07:00

Well maybe not, but we got rained on. Every two years I try to go somewhere interesting for a vacation. Over the last few years I've been to Eastern Europe and Italy with my parents and sister and decided to go a bit further north in Europe to Scandinavia this time. I try to share some photos and stories so here is my latest adventure!

First we flew into Stockholm, some of the highlights included the awesome train from the airport that took 20 minutes to downtown at 205 km/hr. That's one fast ride. Over the course of two weeks, we flew, took intercity rail, tram, bus, commuter bus, metro, ferry, large ferry, taxi, and yes rental car. It rained a lot so no bikes. But its not all about transportation. Here are some shots from Sweden and Denmark. I'll get to Norway in another post.

Scandinavia is famous for bikes, but I was impressed also with the subways and trams. I would be remiss if I didn't start with the Trams. This lane is shared by Trams and buses and the vehicle is a Bombardier Flexity.

Here's Rush hour in Stockholm:

And one of the worst traffic nightmares in the city (Slussen Locks) protects cyclists with some colorful barriers

But even more fun in these cities is the old central city. In Stockholm, this area is known as Gamla Stan. The Central Square known as the Stortorget has a fountain that is the center of the country. Distances in different parts of the country are measured to it and it has been the location for some famous historical events. It is said that the white stones on the red building in the photo represent each of the Swedish nobles that were beheaded in the square by the King of Denmark.

Back in the narrow passageways behind the Stortorget you can see small Phoenix's over windows representing who had paid their fees for the fire department to save the house.

Across the lake from Gamla Stan is the 1700s Warship Vasa that sunk only a few minutes after launch and was only found again at the bottom of the lake in the 1950s. It is probably one of the most amazing things you'll see in the city.

On to Copenhagen, home of the bikes! It's a great city but I thought it felt a little less clean than Oslo, Bergen, or Stockholm.

In the Assistens Kirkegaard, half park/half cemetary, noted Danes including Hans Christian Anderson and Neils Bohr are buried. It's a beautiful place.

Off the main shopping street, a small back ally called the Pistolstrade will bring you to some Half Timbered buildings that are fun and brightly colored.

Back into the City, the City Hall is defended by a pair of fearsome looking Walruses (Walri?)

Across town at the Rosenborg Slot (Castle), the crown has been showing off the Jewels and living quarters of Danish Kings since the end of the 19th Century. These are some of the toy soldiers kept in the basement vault.

Christian IV was the major part of the progress of the Danes and there are a number of monuments to his movement to Lutheranism around the city including this history statue. The guy was pretty hardcore. At his castle Rosenborg, there is a room with his shirt bloodied after a battle and the shrapnel pulled from his eye that he made into ear rigns and gave to his mistress. That's love right there. Or something...

The first day we also took a train to Roskilde, home to a major music festival and the Viking Ship museum. I highly recommend it if you have kids, or even if you don't. The cool thing is that they show how the ships are built and how they used the wood to build them. This photo shows what parts of the tree they used for certain parts of the boat. Also, they've uncovered a number of viking ships including merchant vessels and warboats. Very cool.

I've got a lot from Norway as well. I'll post those later this week. Until then you can see them all on my Flickr page.

The Seats are Gross

2011-08-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

BART is getting a bit old. It's not New York Subway old or heck Budapest Subway old, but the train cars in the BART system are the oldest out of any in the country. So forgive me if I get annoyed when Linton Johnson, the PR person for BART says that replacing cars is sexy while routers and other background operational stuff is not.

"Things like routers and train control systems aren't as sexy as new rail cars," Johnson said, "but you can't run trains without those systems."

You know what else you can't run trains without? Paying customers! Those BART seats in many of the cars are so gross looking and sagging that I refuse to sit down on many of them. If anyone wants a tip, generally the last car on the Pittsburgh Bay Point train is refurbished with rubber floors and new seats. Amazing what that can do to make me feel better about sitting down where a million people have been.

Also, if new rail cars are so sexy, how come we didn't want sexy time faster than 40 years of the system? And as Ben at Second Avenue Sagas says, make em plastic. I'm not saying don't fix the bugs in the system. Being on time also keeps customers. But don't pit one improvement over another. You need both. Get it done already.

Anti-Sprawl Transit Chief?

2011-08-11T01:45:00.000-07:00

Former Charlotte transit chief Keith Parker has pushed San Antonio towards Streetcar and BRT faster than anywhere else I've seen in the last few years. He had just moved in to that position back in 2009. According to the Express News, he hopes to have lines under construction by January of 2012.

The best part isn't the streetcar push though, it's that they are taking funding to spend on urban projects that would have been spent in unincorporated parts of the county.

“Removing $55 million from the county,” he [opponent] said, “diminishes our ability to provide infrastructure services in unincorporated areas of the county.”

For those of you not familiar with Texas land use issues, unincorporated areas generally have no zoning restrictions and very little subdivision restrictions. Regions like Houston have areas outside the city limits that form Municipal Utility Districts (MUDs) to provide water and sewer infrastructure but ultimately they end up sucking a lot of transportation funding away from cities given their peripheral nature. To be fair, I grew up in a place that was once a MUD and then annexed by Houston. It was well planned for a burb but most of them are not master planned communities that end up with 65,000 people.

In planning school one year we had class t-shirts that said "In the ETJ, no one can hear you scream". The extra territorial jurisdiction is a part of the county which the city can't zone but can annex, meaning you're going to get the worst sprawl you've ever seen from those parts of the region. So with this quote I was quite happy to hear that the county wasn't going to get sprawl generating funds and that it quite possibly could be used for a streetcar.

OT: 120 Minutes on MTV

2011-08-07T02:52:00.000-07:00

Before I was a transit geek I was a runner. After my freshman year in high school, I became a real runner and actually trained for it, logging around 45 miles a week then and working my way up to a few 90-100 mile weeks in college. During that time in the summer when you were on your own to train, I would run late at night. During the day I was a lifeguard at the local pool but at night it was my job to run. But at times it could get lonely on the streets under the lights at about 10-11pm at night and a few times I was followed home by police officers who thought I would break midnight curfew.

Via

Because it was such a solemn undertaking, I often brought along my walkman sports. Because running was bouncy, I made mix tapes using my stereo from CDs at home and had a few favorites at the time. It varied based on my tastes but this was officially the time when I started to make music a part of my life. Many of the songs that I have in my itunes now were from that era, and I can often remember the part of the run when Depeche Mode came on or Gravity Kills.

But when I would get home from my run at midnight or so it would be about 80 degrees out still and I needed some time to cool down. So after I had hosed off (yes I said hosed, one of the reasons why I can't stand humidity and live in San Francisco) I would come in the house, get a glass of water, and turn on the TV. More often than not, every day but Saturday was MTV which would play videos late at night or show Beavis and Butthead/Daria. Saturday nights was time for SNL if I could catch it. Those were the glory days with Chris Farley, Adam Sandler and Phil Hartman.

But Sunday nights were 120 minutes, which basically got me introduced to alternative music that I ended up liking much more than what everyone else seemed to be listening to at the time. Top 40 or country was prevalent and while I did like some Top 40, alternative was more my style. So when I heard 120 minutes was coming back I was elated.

When looking up the old 120 minutes show archive, I was amazed at how much the show did actually shape my tastes. Going through the videos played during each of those shows was like going back in time. I don't have all of them on my ipod but I do know that I liked most of them. Just going through 1995 made me smile. Bands like Catherine Wheel, the Toadies, Jeff Buckley, Blur, and the Rentals just to name a few were on the list. If you're a lover of alternative music from the early to late 90s, check out the archive just for the names alone. Instant memory flashback.

I don't have cable these days but I am going to watch the show online and hopefully Matt Pinfield will bring back its former glory and introduce me to the music like I remember, with back stories, associations, and random information. That's something you can't get from Pandora or other music sharing systems and it's one thing I think that has made finding new music much less enjoyable over time.

So even though MTV doesn't play videos and got lame, if you love music, check out the first episode.

Bad Employment Location Decisions

2011-07-19T00:28:00.000-07:00

Annoying me to no end are decisions to locate major new employment opportunities in areas that have no access to regional rapid transit. The most recent of these is the idea that Berkeley Labs would take the Golden Gate Fields horse racing track and redevelop it to bring all the employees together that were once in different places.

This is a laudable goal however it's right next to a major freeway and will basically add more transportation costs to the University, AC Transit district while also increasing auto traffic (A mention of 2,500 cars). I'm sure my taxes will have to pay for that stupidity. Apparently downtown Oakland isn't good enough.

I think Auto Row might be a good location for this campus, right next to Pill Hill and Kaiser hospital. There's plenty of space for a few tall buildings, its ripe for redevelopment because of all the parking lots, and its on a major transit route, and fairly close to BART. Another good place would be downtown Oakland. There's plenty of space if they really took a look. People seem to be lazy and look for what amounts to an urban greenfield. They really need to get an imagination.

The Headline Doesn't Match the Story

2011-07-11T23:16:00.000-07:00

Ok, can someone tell me if I'm going crazy here? First the misleading PI headline:

Study: Surface-transit would clog regional traffic

Then the FIRST paragraph:

The state's plans for a tolled deep-bore tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct would bring slightly more traffic congestion to downtown Seattle than a surface-transit concept favored by Mayor Mike McGinn, according to an analysis in the tunnel project's Final Environmental Impact Statement

So the tunnel would bring more traffic to the surface streets right? Then later on:

With no place for all 110,000 vehicles to go, speeds would decrease and fewer drivers would travel through Seattle's city center, resulting in less traffic, according to an analysis in the environmental assessment.

The idea is that surface transit would make through traffic harder, and people would be annoyed and say I'm not going to make that trip. That is a great result! But that headline suggests that it would clog traffic all together when that is not the case. I'm guessing some headline writer at the PI thought it would be good, but it totally shows some serious windshield perspective.

Going Car Free in San Francisco

2011-07-11T00:17:00.000-07:00

Funny story, I just had a little freak out about whether my car was parked on the right side of the street or not for street sweeping in the morning. If you don't move it, you get a ticket. But the freak out was unfounded because then I realized that I don't have a car anymore.

I sold my beloved Volkswagen Jetta I nicknamed "The Green Goblin" on Saturday. There have been many good times in that car that I've had for 12 years. It's been across the country a few times, was put in a classified ad as a part of a prank war in college that had people calling and asking if my brand new Jetta was for sale for just $2,000 and been splashed by cattle poo flying from a cattle car in Colorado. Its also served as sleeping quarters outside the four corners and been across the great state of Nevada on Highway 50 at speeds I probably shouldn't mention.

I've lived in San Francisco with the Green Goblin for 5 years and it served me well. I was able to take people around the city that came for a visit and go on day trips around the region and city to places I couldn't easily get without it and generally on a whim. There are many benefits to owning a car, generally the mobility they provide is excellent and because i'm a city planner I like to know my surroundings, including random streets and quirky places that you might not know about otherwise.

But moving my car because of street sweeping was a pain and I racked up a lot of tickets. In fact i'm sure that I more than paid for better Muni service that every citizen in San Francisco actually deserves rather than what they get. If everyone paid as much as I did every year we could build a real subway network in this town and everyone could go car free, but I digress. The only time of the week I used the car was going to visit my Gramma in the east bay on Wednesdays. I've been walking and biking there from BART the last few weeks and its been some really good exercise as well as an exercise in patience when dealing with BART's rules about bikes during rush hours.

Ultimately though, the clutch went bad and it was time for me to practice something I talk about at work all the time, living a car free lifestyle. I've never really advocated it before but seeing all those affordability index charts must have gotten to me. To see what its actually like to go car free, and be able to see the actual costs of driving when I use a zipcar will be refreshing but certainly a little scary. But for now, its just my legs, my bike, my Clipper Card and my Zipcard...and perhaps a taxi after a night at Polk Gulch. I really wish someone would survey me for the census now with the long form...

Comings and Goings

2011-06-27T02:16:00.000-07:00

I went out for a bike ride on Sunday. Here's some fun stuff that I saw. I streetcar turnaround up Market street and the value of a bike lane on the Embarcadero...

F Line Turnaround

Embarcadero Free Ride

Transportation Bill Downfall Parody

2011-06-19T13:27:00.000-07:00

It was only time before this happened. Anyone else tired of waiting for a transpo bill?

If you haven't seen a downfall parody before, you can find some really good ones here. This one, Hitler finds out about the downfall parodies, is quite hilarious as well.

Caution, harsh language.

The Need for Speed

2011-06-19T03:27:00.000-07:00

I enjoy my trips on BART to my Grammas house. Especially when Highway 24 is moving slow but I'm moving soooo fast.

Livermore Again

2011-06-15T20:27:00.000-07:00

I keep writing about Livermore because it annoys me. Do these opposition people not realize how bad it looks to fund a line in the middle of a freeway that will cost a billion dollars and only get about 5k to 10k riders? (I don't believe the happy ridership estimates they give in the alternatives analysis) If you spend $500m on the 30th street BART station you'd get 15k riders and greater VMT reductions. Not that the locally preferred alternative is that much better, at least it goes to the center of Livermore, giving the city an opportunity to build up around it.

This brings about the point that there needs to be a serious discussion about how many riders our investments are getting for the money. I know it's a bit more complicated than just riders and funding, but ultimately Livermore shows that we need more education on why connecting actual places is so important. It gets riders, and allows a place decide its future.

Off the Line in Houston

2011-06-15T00:23:00.000-07:00

Houston has been studying constructing a commuter line down the 249 corridor but if it plays out as usual, it's going to skip a number of employment centers because the freight right of way just skirts them. Currently the study done by the HGAC states that its not one of the main corridors and that ridership will only be about 5,000 riders. This is a miniscule amount but the reasoning is simple, it doesn't connect the center of the most important trip destination on the North End, the former headquarters of Compaq computer.

Via Houston Business Journal

Since these buildings are going to be the central piece of a redevelopment strategy for the area, it would also be good to start thinking about how to develop the rail line to connect this place.

But how would that even be possible? They are so close yet so far apart. This is part of the problem with focusing on commuter rail in existing freight rights of way. In this instance, is a freeway alignment better than the freight? It sure looks like it, because it then becomes at least a little walkable, meaning more workers would use the line. I'm not holding out hope that this will actually happen though.

Loop Roads or Bust

2011-05-25T01:34:00.000-07:00

It's been open season on long term capital improvements for fixed guideway transit. First there's Minnesota Republicans looking to hack into transit by stealing operating money. Then you get the fun times in North Carolina where Republicans are trying to cut out funding for the North Corridor light rail line. But I found the article a bit funny, especially when they were saying, we don't have enough money for transit but more than enough for a completely un-needed beltway.

...it would kill Gaston County's proposed Garden Parkway toll road, using money from that project for urban loop roads, perhaps including Interstate 485.

You know, that loop road that developers really want for their sprawl. And then...

"We wanted to target more dollars to maintaining the system we have - as opposed to building new roads, new bridges, new parts of the system," said Senate Leader Phil Berger, a Rockingham County Republican.

How the reporters didn't see this and do a double take on the building loops and not spending on new roads is beyond me.

How to Free the Market and Reduce VMT - Austin's West Campus

2011-05-23T01:00:00.000-07:00

When I lived in Austin I ate dinner and lunch every day at a place called the University Towers. Rather than paying $10 a meal at the athletes dining hall my teammates and I could get a meal plan at the private dorms for about $4.50 a meal. For athletes that ate a lot this was an amazing deal and also good time for teammate bonding. It was such a great deal that I ate there with my old teammates all the way through grad school. I had the choice so why not take it?

To get there I had to walk through West Campus every day. I often thought that it was underdeveloped and a bit ragged and would dream about how things could change with a little development on my ride home either on the #1 or the #5. That dream seems to have come true, perhaps a bit more than even I thought possible.

In Austin if you heard West Campus in the first half of the 2000s, you might automatically think of the dense neighborhood West of the University full of frats, sororities, and kids with extra money to spend in order to live closer. If you had less cash, you lived North, South, or on Riverside. By the time I left, the city had finally upzoned the neighborhood, much to the chagrin of some neighbors that lived in the area, to allow redevelopment of properties that had fairly poor upkeep due to the captive audience of students and the very limiting height restrictions against heavy demand. I found that a post by the Old Urbanist was very informative on this point and I didn't realize it matched that until today.

Basically, the rent was high but much of the quality was horribly low. When looking for an apartment one time I remember this one place called the Sandpiper. It was one of those old motel looking complexes. For $850 a month you could get the worst two bed room in West Campus. And that was back in 2002.

As Chris Bradford at the Austin Contrarian shows, there was a lot of development that took place and the census shows that the area had really high growth rates. So high in fact that recently there have been rumblings as to whether the infrastructure could handle all the development. Well after the rezoning it seemed like there was a new crane in the sky each month. This led to around 3,700 new residents according to Chris' calculations.

At that same time, Riverside which was a popular area for students when I was in school seemed to be declining in population as a whole losing over 2,000 residents. Additionally, ridership on the West Campus bus has gone up while overall Riverside ridership has dropped.

According to numbers provided by Capital Metro, (thanks to JMVC) ridership in the fall, which has greater ridership than spring, has increased for the West Campus bus by ~1,200 students a day between 2006 and 2010 while the Riverside buses have lost about ~880. Obviously correlation is not causation but you can make a pretty good bet that there was some sort of shift happening. And it wasn't just coming from Riverside, but probably all areas of the city where students were living. Given the rise of 3,700 residents in West Campus, you would think there would be an even greater ridership bump on the West Campus Bus. But a lot of the new folks probably now just walk or bike.

But what else does the shift mean? Well for one thing I think that West Campus gives us a perfect example of how zoning close to Downtowns in major cities can stifle what the market actually wants to provide. Given the choice, I don't know of any college students that wouldn't love rolling out of bed five minutes before class (8am or otherwise) with the ability to get to class on time because they just had to walk or bike quickly. Additionally, there are a lot of people that want to live in proximity to great neighborhoods just outside of downtown in most cities.

But that's also another piece of the regional and national puzzle, if there was a shift from Riverside to West Campus of 800 former Riverside riders or so, that is likely a huge reduction in VMT. Mostly because if you live on Riverside, you own a car and have to drive everywhere. Though the grocery store is close to many of the apartments aimed at students, you couldn't just walk to the library on campus to study or go to parties in West Campus Friday nights. Driving was the only option. Not to mention that the bus passenger miles were much higher going to school.

Checking the Walkscore for Riverside and West Campus, you get an idea of what happens. As you can see below, the Walkscore for Riverside is 56 with the neighborhood the 40th best in Austin. That means lots of driving. Over in West Campus, the Walkscore is 86, second highest in the region. Imagine the VMT difference of those 3,700 new residents now living in West Campus who probably walk to Double Dave's for some pizza rolls rather than driving there.

And I didn't have a lot of time to look at it, but if those 3,700 residents moved out of housing in Riverside and other student areas, and the demographics of those areas changed. Does that mean that these areas became more affordable? Did the rents change? That would be interesting to look at as well.

Ultimately I think this is a lesson for other cities as well. Folks like Lydia DePillis in DC arguing against the height limit should not look to Austin's future plans, which looks like more skyscrapers on the way, but rather to what they've already done with changes in zoning that freed up the market in West Campus. Additionally, the Georgetown folks could learn from this as well.

Austin can learn from itself too, as Chris discussed in his post about the Suicide Pact. Not only is it about schools and kids, but its about quality of life for the region as a whole. Reductions in VMT will come when people are able to live where they want. There's a high demand for walkability and proximity to work and less time spent in cars. In that sense, people already want to do the right thing, we're just not letting them.

Capital Metro UT Shuttle Data Extra...

BART to Livermore a Horrible Idea

2011-05-03T04:19:00.000-07:00

There I said it, BART to Livermore is a bad idea. Even if we could make the line downtown less expensive, it would still get minimal riders unless Livermore decided that they were going to make a massive push to make downtown an employment center. We know that's not going to happen, so we shouldn't even be building a BART line there. It's just not worth it.

That's not to say you shouldn't build transit, but if you want to spend 3 billion dollars to get 30,000 riders, why not build infill stations at 30th street and San Antonio? I bet that would cost less than a billion dollars. Then take the extra two billion that you would spend and put it towards a regional Geary Subway and second tube that would end up getting 100,000 riders a day and perhaps allow commuter rail lines from around the region to get into San Francisco's Transbay Terminal. You know, make it more Transbay than just bridge buses.

But it looks like we might not need to even try to kill this line, because the NIMBYs who only want a freeway alignment will do it for us. The only way that a line would have worked out there is if it picked up the employment centers and dense housing in Pleasanton and Livermore.

50 Years for a System?

2011-05-01T15:42:00.001-07:00

The Twin Cities finally signed its full funding grant agreement(FFGA) with the FTA for the Central Corridor. This just 7 years after the completion of its first light rail line, the Hiawatha. In the meantime the Northstar Commuter Line was completed. Now they are planning for the Southwest Corridor and gearing up for that long haul fight as well. With any luck, that line will be signing its FFGA in less than a decade. But why does it take so long to build these transit lines and why are regions doing them one by one? Well, the answer as usual is money.

However of all places, Los Angeles has provided a discussion spark. The 30/10 program now nationally renamed America Fast Forward has pushed the Transit Space Race forward at least an inch, giving hope to regions tired of doing things one line at a time. Salt Lake City has proved expansion can be done on time and on budget and now other regions are starting to think, why not us? The Twin Cities is no different, with local leaders seeing the possibilities.

I'm hopeful that this will push the discussion along as to why it took ~40 years to build a network of national freeways but it seems like building out real transit networks in cities might take over 100 at the current pace. It's not like there aren't a lot of projects out there (complete excel sheet on the page). In fact, there are over 600 fixed guideway transit projects and that doesn't even count all of the frequent bus and trolley bus service that is being planned. That's not to say that all those lines are good lines, but they are out there.

I can only hope that we move past the one line a decade mentality and build lines that matter.