Streetcar!

This will not in any way, shape, or form help economic development in Cincinnati.

Much to the dismay of city people everywhere, Cincinnat was brilliantly designed for the driving crowd. With an overabundance of dirt cheap parking, extremely convenient access to and from the highways all over the place, and very little to do after dark, the downtown has become a place where eeryone can drive a short distance to work each day and never have to spend time near where they work because everything there is to do is out in the suburbs.

Now like I said, a lot of people hate this. Mostly people from other cities that don't ever come here. But for the residents of Cincinnati it's fantastic. That's why time after time light rail, public trans systems, and other forms of mass transit are shot down mightily. The people who actually live in the greater Cincinnati area love that it is so convenient.

It's everyone else that seems to always want to fix things in Cincinnati.

 

I think that if America has any sense, public transit will be heavily invested in the next 25 years.

With rising gasoline prices, global warming, and traffic congestion, it simply makes sense to heavily invest in railways (buses simply don't do the job well enough - because they get clogged in aforementioned traffic and can't carry as many people). Light rail, commuter rail, subways, all must place high on the public agenda.

 

Propose all the investment you want in "public transit" because it's a waste of time that addresses only the symptom, not the disease.

 

Do you mean a waste of time in general or a waste of time if not linked to transit oriented developments?

In Dallas, they seem to be doing a decent job of building living/retail spaces near the DART stations and the city has an entire department doing TIF work around the new lines they are planning. Now the question is whether they can incorporate low cost housing in those developments, which I haven't seen.

 

More the latter, shifting towards the former. There are only about 2 dozen MSA's where public transit has the necessary density to be designed as a multimodal system that can pay for itself. Otherwise, it just ends up being a public funding sinkhole.

They are, however it's going to take a fundamental shift in land use planning, public policy and more importantly land use law to allow cities like D/FW, and most other cities west of the Mississippi to stop the way they have been developing for the last 80-100 years and change to a more diverse style of development that doesn't punish the low/moderate income household.

That's the 800 lb gorilla that no one in the New Urbanista realm wants to talk about. The all show off their pretty islands of mixed use developments that are still highly dependent on multi lane pavement.

 

Absolutely, and it's hard to see it happening soon, given how "new housing starts" remains such a key economic indicator and given that federal underwriting of homeownership and new home construction has been such a huge entitlement program. In Dallas, the DART (which I ride daily) certainly hasn't slowed fringe home construction at all. In some ways, in enables it. The City of Dallas is working hard at promoting infill development (disclosure: my wife works for the city on transit-oriented TIF development) but in many ways they're swimming against the tide.

The DART board, also doesn't seem interested in creating a transit system that pays for itself. My transit pass (funded I assume partially through the university where I work) costs me $5 ... a year . The buses overwhelmingly remain a transit option populated nearly exclusively by poor and non-white folks, and the bus service reflects that. Far worse than the DART.

Which is funny because New Urbanism began with an emphasis on addressing spatial and social problems (sprawl and class segmentation). They've totally abandoned the latter in an attempt to offer a pseudo solution to the former. What it's done, seemingly, is to create urban playgrounds for young professionals while largely forcing working class folks into the new housing periphery.

 

Public funding sinkhole? Sort of like paved roads for automobiles?

 

Too true. Here in Baltimore we have a huge amount of quality vacant housing stock within the city lines (I think we could probably accommodate another 250k people without building too many new buildings), but because of a lack of regional planning and resource allotment it's difficult for the city to make itself an attractive place for anyone but empty nesters and young (childless) professionals. We need to find a way to make the new housing periphery face inward rather than outward.

 

Yes. Public Transit doesn't come anywhere near paying for it's own infrastructure or operations with user generated fees or tax revenue created by it's use.

When was the last time a bus delivered the bi weekly order of groceries to the grocery store or 500 TV's to WAL-MART?

There may be one or two transit systems that come close to breaking even on operations on ridership, but the staggering cost of infrastructure demands that this be paid for with subsidy from state/federal fuel taxes.

Roads/Bridges are paid for by user fees and are quite simply, irreplacable to our economy. Sales taxes at the local level, fuel tax/tolls at the state level and fuel tax at the federal level (Interstates & US Highways) Like it or not, roads pay for themselves, as well as the majority of the funding that allows for the construction of public transit and ongoing operations thereof.

 

So, the argument is whether it's worth it to put public money into it. That's fair. Having lived in a city with a great public transit system (Boston) and one without (Baltimore), I'd say it is, on balance. The difference between these cities can be blamed on a lot of things (a shameful history of segregation, the collapse of the industrial economy), but one major factor in Baltimore's struggles since the 1950s has been a lack of functional public transportation. The current recovery of large swaths of the city is a bit of a miracle, but what's not surprising is that the neighborhoods around the train stations that serve the DC/Baltimore corridor are currently the hottest in town.

Fuel taxes pay for road construction and maintenence, dollar for dollar? Do you have numbers to back that up? Not that I doubt you, I'd just love to see them.

 

When I worked for the CDBG program in Norman, the Regional CoG had floated the idea of a loop for the OKC metro to appease the local congressmen/senators, but internally, they really wanted that plan to fail and let enough of the planning departments in the region feed people just enough "scareformation" to bring alot of resistance to the idea.

Currently, they are planning routes for a proposed light rail system that would run from Norman to Edmond, Yukon to MWC, converging downtown and heading out to the other two major daytime traffic generators.

OKC is also hoping to double it's core area density within the next decade, with the renovation of the Skirvin and other hotels into apartments and the construction of much denser housing, replacing blighted single family homes, abandoned industry and bare spots that were created by interstate construction.

That's the problem. It has to somewhat pay for itself, otherwise, as we hopefully move to hybrid and more fuel efficient vehicles over the next decade, the fuel tax pool where those systems get their construction funding and most of their O&M, will simply begin to dry up.

That was less so when I lived in Boston because the abject lack of parking, associated with the extreme cost of it, coupled with the fanatical parking enforcement that would make the Taliban's religious police blush. It simply made sense for people to use the red line or green line or orange line to get to a certain area, then either walk or take the bus if the walk was too long.

Anyone that thinks busses can't be a part of the transit solution is an idiot. The have to be. The systems have to be multi-modal in order facilitate people's needs. Cities outside the NE corridor and Chicago and perhaps LA/SF, just don't have the required density yet to force the abandonment of cars, nor is there sufficient land use legislation to allow larger cities to prevent suburban/exurban development.

New Urbanism is just New Town Planning from the 40's repackaged for affluent white people to give them the sense that they're not a part of the problem.

 

Somehow I suspect that that has alot to do with Boston being a far denser city than Baltimore as well as being far denser, far earlier and longer.

Actually, the argument is whether it's financially feasible to alter enough land uses to allow transit not to be a sucking chest wound that we're applying band aids to. Land Use is the key.

See above. We're currently in a period of reurbanization. Partially because of the cost of transportation and the shift away from industrial production.

Not sure if anything is published online, but that came from the Federal Highway Admin about 5 years ago before I switched jobs. Nearly all new highway (interstate/US highway/State Highway) construction is financed at 80 federal/20 state from the federal highway trust and various state highway trusts which are wholly financed by Fed/State fuel taxes and most of them are running a large surplus. Local (municipal/urban) construction is typically funded with either bonds or dedicated sales taxes at around 40% or less, with the remainder coming out of state/federal grants from the highway trusts.

The lions share of all road funding is ongoing construction/maintenance expenditures and the largest amount of that continues to be for the Interstate/US/State highways system because of the nature of construction and the size of the system. State Highway Departments take care of all of the highways and typically receive 75/85% of their maintenance funding from the Federal Highway Trust, the rest from state generated fuel taxes. Local maintenance and repair is funded more by general sales tax revenue with some state refund for work down on state highway corridors in urban areas. People can ditch cars all they want and pretend that using transit is affecting the system, but it's really not true because things have to be delivered from railyards or distributed from warehouses and people have to be moved to and from the lightrail points by either bus, cab or foot, so unless your one of the extremely rare people who happens to be able to not use any type of rubber tire in your daily commute, all we're doing is shifting to a marginally more efficent model where land use allows.

 

Boston is more dense than Baltimore, but not by much. Baltimore has a huge urban forest that probably accounts for the difference. The populated areas of Baltimore are at least as dense as Boston. Baltimore was probably more dense than Boston before the population flight from 1960-2000 or so. Incidentally, Baltimore used to have a great streetcar system. The city never really became an auto friendly city, people never really got into the habit of using cars, and the disappearance of public transportation finished off some of the poorer, formerly segregated neighborhoods. An elevated expressway was also a huge disaster for East Baltimore.

That makes sense from a low density perspective, but many places already have the requisite land use. I agree with your idea that many places don't need non-auto transit, but I still think that it's a worthwhile investment in many cities.

How many more Portlanders frequent downtown because of the ease and affordability of the streetcar? How many businesses can survive downtown that otherwise would not? What do those businesses contribute in tax revenue and less tangible benefits to quality of life?

No doubt, FHWA has more money than they know what to do with. They can't give away a lot of their grant funding (Rails to Trails, Scenic Byways, Transportation Enhancement funds). I always figured they just had a powerful lobby in the budget process like the military does and that the largess came from income taxes and the like.

Those people are not too rare in dense urban areas. In Baltimore there would be many more of them if the infrastructure existed. People are buying vacant houses in the neighborhood adjacent to mine on speculation that a new public transit line will go through our area within the next 10 years.

You're right though- it's all about land use. I live in a neighborhood that has about 20,000 people per square mile. I would guess that the majority of us could go without cars (and the pollution, stress on infrastructure, and parking problems that they create) if we had a public transit option.

My point is that no, Jacksonville (800 people per sq. mile) should not get a full blown light rail system, but that Milwaukee (6,500 per sq.) would probably be a worthwhile investment.

 

There is an ugly side effect to cities having little in the way of public transit. Someone I know (I live in Omaha, NE) who recently moved from the older part of the city out to the 'burbs says he hates it out there, because he has to drive everywhere he goes. He wants to get groceries, he's got to drive. He wants to see a movie, he's got to drive. He's driving all over town just to have a life. Everything is so far apart from everything else because of all the massive parking lots in between. There's no place he can just walk to without getting quite a workout.

Older parts of cities tend to have houses closer together, because at the time they were built, they either had streetcars or they had to walk to the market, because a lot of people didn't own cars. You see your neighbors at lot more often that way, too.

Houses with garage doors at the front are ugly, too, and then the front door is not connected by path to the curb, but to the driveway instead, which gives the effect of being closed off to the neighborhood because occupants are being led straight to their car when they leave the house. It's not aesthetically pleasing. It seems houses these days are built purely for utilitarian purposes. At one time we had bungalows and victorians dotting neighborhoods, but now it's a mish-mash of all sorts of styles, the "McMansions" they're called, all with big fat garage doors commanding the viewer's attention away from the rest of the house.

I hate the suburbs, because they are nothing pretty to look at. Parking lots are so butt ugly. And they are more necessary, the less people rely on public transit, so you see them everywhere, and thus buildings are always farther apart. Thus there's no efficient use of the land, and you get the classic suburban sprawl. And you use up more gas to get from place to place, because nothing is close by.

And even my downtown has to build a parking garage for every new office building. I've never seen a parking garage that is nice to look at. For every block you build something nice, you need another one for the ugly garage.

Now I know that we (where I live) need parking lots and parking garages, because we have no other option but to own cars, if we want to have a life. But if I had the option of using public transit that ran on convenient schedules, I wouldn't have to worry about parking, and the trips would be much shorter.

 

Jesus Christ has a lot of aesthetically pleasing parking garages? Seriously, I know I should be able to figure this out, but what's JC?

The majority of them are terrible, but some aren't too bad. Here's one on St. Paul Place in Baltimore:



Actually there are two parking garages in that picture. The one in the foreground is pretty nice, but the one in the background (that forms the base of the office tower) looks eerily like part of the Maryland State Penitentiary that's less than a mile from St. Paul Place.

 

Oh! Jersey City! Nevermind