Monday, July 6, 2009

And So It Begins

Utility relocation along the Central Corridor has begun.

LaHood on the Silly Juice?

Those poor drivers and suburban apologists (or sprawlagists), they've been neglected for so long...

"We cannot let the cynicism of old ideas get in the way of what people really want," LaHood said about his vision of Americans on foot, on bikes and in trains and buses. How about letting the facts on the ground get in the way of a well-intentioned pipe dream?

They just can't quite understand why people might want alternatives to thier suffocating cancer/asthma causing habits. But transit and biking is only 2.5% of trips they say. There's no wonder people can't take transit or walk, because it isn't offered in a competitive fashion to the automobile trip. When it is, people take it. According to the CTOD database, over 40% of people living near Metro Stations in DC walk, bike, or take transit.

These people all need to wake up and stop throwing around these stupid statistics they don't understand. The newspaper industry and it's "Entitled Driving Journalist Syndrome" is dying a slow death because they don't understand there is a whole other world out there people are craving. I for one am glad that Ray is finally speaking for the other half after being ignored for half a century.

Beijing Subway Shots

Overhead Wire correspondent @nspicer (who doesn't know he has been conscripted until now) is in Beijing and took a few shots of the subway there. Have a look.



I like how you can obviously tell what is going on without having to know a language.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Inaugural Trams

So the Super Furry Animals have come up with this catchy ditty. Here's part of the song:
Inaugural Trams. It’s the first day of the integrated transport hub. Let us celebrate this monumental progress. We have reduced emissions by 75%. It’s a magical day and it will be even better tomorrow. Let us make the best of a difficult situation.



Nice! We need more songs!

Via Treehugger

Friday, July 3, 2009

Independence Day Notes

Links and ink:

I really like the idea of setting a baseline for ridership and road usage so you can use it for performance measures later. I hope that is what they are looking at. It might also be illuminating to see regions compared to each other. I hope they would take pedestrian and bike counts as well.
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The draft streetcar network plan is out in Portland. Looks pretty extensive.
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New Jersey is expanding the transit hub tax credit to include industrial areas that use rail access.
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Smart Growth is killing cities!!! Or rather, it's more NIMBYs. Not that I can't blame them, we don't really need more high end housing in this region do we? Considering almost all of it is high end. And looking at it from a tax perspective, building four houses that are 250,000 versus a million dollar single house brings in the same taxes in property, but greater taxes in local services such as restaurants and groceries. Has anyone ever looked at those numbers?
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This is cool. Making subways rainproof FTW.
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This could bring transit sexy back.
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Colorado Railcar reincarnated?
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More NIMBY articles! This time on the peninsula HSR version. My favorite quote:

Whatever option is chosen, peninsula residents simply want a transparent process that considers their opinions, said Nadia Naik of Palo Alto, who helped form a citizens' group, Californians Advocating for Responsible Rail Design. "That would give us tremendous peace of mind," Naik said. "Nobody's done that. We get a lot of, 'Oh, you're just 50 people who complain.'"

Is it really 50?

BART Reliability

As much as people complain about the old cars and the noise in the tunnel and the sometimes surly folk that ride BART, I feel that being on time and reliability is the strength that BART has going for it. Because it has its own right of way, it's pretty easy for BART to keep a schedule, and for that reason, a lot of people can rely on them to be on time. So I sort of cringe when people give one of the reasons for not liking BART is that it's not reliable.
It's not exactly the most reliable ride either but we deal with it because it is the lesser of two evils.
As someone who takes BART almost every day, I have to say that over the last 4 years there have been sooo many delays I can count them on two hands. That's a lot right?? As compared to traffic and services that run in traffic such as say, the Municipal Railway. I understand the gripes about the strike. BART workers get very generous pay and benefits, higher than most agencies in the country, but to say that it's not reliable is just plain wrong. If anything, that is the main reason why people continue to ride BART.

It will be a shame if BART workers go on strike because they want even more, but the real shame will be the loss of a reliable transit service that allows people to get to work at the same time every day, so when people do get back to work and more are driving, you don't have to worry about your travel time or paying attention to the road. And if there are people who use talking on the phone as an excuse for not taking BART and driving instead, I'm glad to be underground and out of your way.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

More Regressive Progressives

You know the type, those who think that having a hybrid car alone will help their environmental credentials but don't do much else. They are also the ones that push against new development just because they don't like how it looks or feels, and they'll cry traffic! Those are the folks that got called out in the aptly named article: You're Not an Environmentalist if You're a NIMBY. So true. The hardest part is taking folks seriously who want to stop growth on high capacity transit corridors or in the core cities themselves. Yet with the climate that we have, San Francisco and Oakland are the best suited for emissions reducing development.

Just Hop On Already

Is it really so hard to just hop on?
Rather than taking BART from the Fruitvale station to the Oakland Coliseum station, which is the next southbound stop on the Fremont Line, LaHood was driven by staff in a black Cadillac Escalade sport utility vehicle.
Not cool dude. Perhaps he had enough money before fare hikes went into effect.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

A Public Health Issue

There is a lesson here for pregnant mothers. Stay away from freeways.
A team from the University of California, Irvine, has shown that pregnant women living within 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) of a major roadway in Los Angeles are 128% more at risk of giving birth prematurely.
Giving people options is a public health issue. Don't let people tell you otherwise.

Excuses

Notice they don't say that it's not what they want or need, they just say that they can't figure out how to pay for it since the FTA process is so F'd up.
Montgomery County planners have recommended that a bus rapid transit system be built along the Interstate 270 corridor, saying that the other choice, a light rail line, would be too expensive to win federal funding.
This is a bullshit excuse. We spend billions on roads and interchanges to nowhere and get screwed on transit we need. Have fun I-270 dwellers. Guess what, there's more than enough money to widen the freeway.
The Montgomery Planning Board staff also called for I-270 to be widened with express lanes for carpools and toll-payers.
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State transit officials have said that a 14-mile bus rapid transit system would cost about $450 million to build and that light rail would cost $778 million. The highway widening is estimated to cost $3.8 billion.
Anyone smell the stench of global death?