Adrian Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Transit

Transit Transitions: A Call to Action

This election brought a lot of new progressive leadership to Cary (new mayor) and Raleigh (new progressive majority on council). The times they are a-changing.

There was one upset in Chapel Hill and pundits are still puzzling over how the “dark horse” candidate beat out the incumbent.  I don’t know, but I do note that he pledged to bike to all city council meetings and to be a “forceful advocate for cycling in Chapel Hill”.

In San Francisco, real estate developers introduced a proposition that would increase parking spaces—in direct contrast to the city’s “transit first” policy.  Local human-scale development activists organized the “Yes on A, No on H!“ campaigning to defeat H and promote the proposition to increase funding for transit and the transit agency’s authority over the streets.

Activists won.  “A” passed by a wide margin and “H” got totally trounced!

In Charlotte:

Mecklenburg County voters overwhelmingly backed the transit sales tax Tuesday, dismissing an aggressive grass-roots effort to repeal it and endorsing CATS’ ambitious plans to expand light rail and buses.

The margin of victory stunned even transit supporters…

The Charlotte Observer

Indeed.  It’s no time to rest on our laurels though; we need to make sure it’s built right—with NO RESTRICTIONS on bicycles-on-board. Transit needs cycling accommodations.  Each transit stop is estimated to serve a quarter-mile radius of pedestrian traffic, but can easily serve a five-mile radius of bicycle traffic. That’s four-hundred times larger, 40,000%.  Atlanta’s MARTA, for example, allows bicycles on trains at any time of the day or night.  All Santa Clara Valley light rail vehicles are equipped with interior bike racks.  Each Caltrain train can accommodate a maximum of 24 bicycles.  Designers too often overlook the need for bicycles on-board and have to retrofit to add bikes on-board later.  We don’t have to repeat that mistake, if we plan for bikes on board from the start.  Our lack of super-high density is a challenge for rail.  Bicycles are part of the answer to that challenge.

North Carolina Railroad is studying the possibility of passenger service from Goldsboro to Greensboro.  Passenger trains currently running between Greensboro and Raleigh either terminate in Raleigh (Amtrak Piedmont) or continue to DC/NYC via Rocky Mount, not Goldsboro, so this would be additional passenger rail in Raleigh and additional trains through (but not stopping) in Hillsborough (unless Hillsborough is successful in establishing a new depot).

We have two independent and completely separate pedicab operations in service in the Triangle.  Pedicabs are a beautiful way to extend and enhance transit.  We need our transit planning to include pedicab bike-commuter friendly designs.  The newest funding for airport facilities for the first time includes bicycle facilities.  We need to push RDU to apply for the funding and build the bike facilities—being located right on state bike route #2, and u.s. bike route #1, RDU should be a priority for bike facilities at airports.

The time is ripe for alternative transportation advocacy, and bicycling should be an integral part of all transportation planning.

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  • Dan R11/13 04:43 PM

    The commuter rail idea is boneheaded at best-running a train once a day from podunk to podunk is going to alleviate the Triangle’s traffic congestion around RTP? Once again, anything but regional rail is being sold by the backwater hicks that seem to run everything in this state. Word of advice to these planners-go to Europe to see how to run an efficient transit system with the key word being “efficient”.

  • adrian11/13 05:37 PM

    By “podunk to podunk” do you mean Goldsboro to Greensboro?  NCRR’s line runs from Morehead City close to US-70 through New Bern, Goldsboro, Selma, Garner, Raleigh, Cary, RTP, Durham, Hillsborough, Burlington to Greensboro.  So the Triangle and Triad would be well served by this service—both by trains within the region and trains connecting to the outlying areas along US-70.  There’s also existing track from Goldsboro south to Wilmington.

    I was last on European trains three months ago, in Belgium and France.  The commuter lines, and even the TGV, stopped in plenty of small towns and villages, enabling residents of those communities to work in the larger cities without needing a car.

    NCRR will need to get serious with about scheduling freight around passenger rail for this to work.  Amtrak shares track with freight throughout NC and the delays that freight imposes on Amtrak have been ridiculous.

    Maintaing tracks at a level suitable for passenger trains may also be a challenge where heavy freight is permitted to tear up the railbed.  In Europe the cross ties are concrete.

    NCRR by the way, is a state agency.  Those tracks belong to the citizens of North Carolina.  NCRR leases our tracks out to freight comapnies in deals that go far beyond “sweetheart”.

  • Steve Osborne11/28 12:09 PM

    Generally speaking, in the absence of super-high density, transportation planning needs to consider ways of integrating independent solutions offered by trains, bicycles, buses, car pooling, shuttles and taxis by way of the newest technology of communication.

    I personally believe that existing hardware like the iPhone and everything else that will surprise us next year is setting the path for another technological revolution where more emphasis will be put on the “I” part of “IT”. Information Technology will then offer ways to COLLECTIVELY utilize resources more intelligently through shared information and networked services.

  • Adrian Hands12/02 10:59 AM

    Toronto-based Gray Line Systems, through it’s California based subsidiary, NextBus, has a GPS   Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) system with web interfaces for transit systems.  The NextBus system has been installed on busses in 18 states in the U.S., including North Carolina.  In NC, Chapel Hill has been up and running since September of 2006.

    View Chapel Hill’s buses in real time, with ETAs for free using either the NextBus Java applet:

    http://www.nextbus.com/predictor/publicMap.shtml?a=chapel-hill

    or using the GoogleMaps interface:

    http://www.nextbus.com/googleMap/googleMap.jsp?a=chapel-hill

    These tools are not so interesting on Sundays—the busses do not run on Sunday.

  • Adrian Hands12/02 11:16 AM

    I believe TTA and the other area transit systems are going to do the same in 2008.  Chapel Hill’s system cost almost $1 million, and they pay NextBus about $40K/yr for the service.  It is a proprietary system.  Wouldn’t it be great if the local Universities developed an open system?  If they don’t do it, maybe Google will…

  • David12/02 01:14 PM

    A student at NCSU actually developed something very similar for the college. Now he sells it to other Universities I believe. 

    http://ncsu.transloc-inc.com/

  • Russ Wollman12/12 12:18 AM

    How we get around is inextricably linked with the most basic concepts of life: how much we consume, how we make our living, how we get our food, and, of course, with the economic system in all its bewildering complexity and numerous injustices, and the forces and resources of nature which shape life everywhere on Earth.

    Its absolutely reasonable that people should be able to walk as a normal part of the daily routine. Many places in the world were built long before the motorcar took the lead. Those places have a human scale and dimension which modern US cities lack: Raleigh is a prime example of short-sighted thinking beholden to the imagined glamour of technology. Built as it is and continues to be, public transport in Raleigh is an enormously difficult thing to consider beyond simple buses. Fancier technology is not, I think, going to provide a solution, as it usually brings more complexity as well as the potential for catastrophic failure.

    It may be up to people to make new choices that get them out of the auto/oil box. It won’t be easy or possible for many to do that right away for all kinds of reasons, let alone the ridiculous cost of housing and the tendency for people of all classes to cluster in ghettos.

    The automobile, though, is probably the most destructive entity on the planet, destructive of air, water, land, human psychology; and the auto is positively inimical to community, isolating and private and quite selfish when used as it is today for every mobility need. Its days are numbered—especially if you want to live life in a human fashion. Think of the tremendous cost to life the car brings, the vast amounts of time and resources dedicated to keeping this machine-age system afloat; what the ever-expanding roads system does to land values and the cost of housing; the enormous sums of money spent on insurance, legal matters, medical care as a result of injury, and the simple fact that 50,000 people die in cars in the US each year. The emotional toll on life is staggering.

    My point is that new thinking, new modes of living and new ideas about life are badly needed, because what now exists is no longer truly serving human life. We are slaves to a broken system.

    I no longer commute to a job since I live where I work, but a car is still necessary for many things, though I walk or bike whenever I can. When I do drive, it’s fascinating to note how much driving takes place here, how casually people hop into cars for the least need, how the search for that prized parking spot eats away at the time available in life, which could be spent in so many other ways and for something much richer.

    It is time to re-think this mess. If what the US leadership has done to Iraq for the sake of oil gives you no fodder for thought, please think again. You owe it to yourself, your nation, and your world to deeply consider how you want to live and whether you want to perpetuate the mistakes of the past or move onto new territory. Government isn’t going to solve the problem for you, for government merely reflects the state of society. We have to make new choices ourselves, if only to start with driving less, consuming less, and walking more and living more simply.
    Everyone can do something, starting somewhere, and letting that fresh start influence your thinking. Watch what happens…

  • free parking12/12 03:04 PM

    Yes, all those things you said. Except for the part about the cars. They replaced horses, not walking. Replace all the cars in the world with horses, then decide which option is more land consumptive, which requires more resources to sustain, and which is cleaner and more efficient.

    Oh, and except for the part about the built environment. If that were the case, Europe would be a model for transit use. Except of course, that it’s not. Sure, they have lots and lots of mass transit in Europe. We can agree on that. But nobody rides it. Despite the high taxes, despite the expensive fuel and the little cars, we find that Europeans drive just as frequently, just as far, and that they build their cities in pretty much the same way we build ours in the US.

    If building dense, mass transit-oriented cities were really cheaper and more efficient, then why are places like Tokyo, London, Seoul, New York and Hong Kong the most expensive places in the world in which to live?

    Beginning a discussion of how we build cities in the future does not begin with revisionist notions of how the car came into being or why it is wildly popular around the world. You must first understand the car. Any new ideas must address the versatility, adaptability, and low cost that the private automobile offers.

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