Today the Antiplanner is making a quick round trip to Boise to speak at an Idaho Freedom Foundation luncheon about streetcars. The event will take place at the Old Spaghetti Factory at 610 W. Idaho Street.
The location is a bit ironic as Spaghetti Factories all feature a streetcar as one of their built-in antiques, although in Boise’s case it is a replica. It is doubly ironic as the first paid job the Antiplanner ever had was helping to restore the streetcar that would be put in the very first Spaghetti Factory, which opened in Portland in 1969. That job resulted from the fact that I had been volunteering for the Oregon Electric Railway Historical Society, which at that time operated in a little town in the Oregon Coast Range called Glenwood. (It has since moved to Brooks, just off I-5 north of Salem.)
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In any case, if you are in Boise, I hope to see you at the luncheon.
It’s hard to imagine a streetcar being viable lightly populated, spread out Boise. But then again, I wouldn’t have thought Albuquerque would have found a way to build commuter rail.
http://boisestreetcar.org/
A streetcar is an electric transit vehicle that runs with traffic on fixed rails embedded in the roadway, providing the public a convenient way to move around a downtown area on foot. A streetcar would boost economic development in Boise’s downtown core, increase the “livability†of downtown, relieve traffic congestion and reduce the city’s collective carbon footprint. More than 10 U.S. cities already have streetcar systems, and more than 70 communities are in the stages of expanding operations or planning a new streetcar system.
Although I’ve heard it dismissed somewhat disdainfully as somehow not authentic, I like the Old Spaghetti Factory. You get a complete meal, salad, main course and a scoop of ice cream for one fair price. It even includes coffee, tea, ice tea or milk although other drinks are extra. And the one in Sacramento is in the former Western Pacific train station, next to a still active UP freight line.
According to numbers I’ve seen, downtown Boise and the immediately surrounding areas have 50,000+ jobs. Plus 20,000+/- students quite nearby at Boise State.
As a percentage of regional employment in Ada, Canyon and Payette Counties (a bit more than 450k population in 2000, and I’m guessing a bit more than 500k now), downtown Boise is probably at least 20% of the total regional employment. And 50K+ is not much smaller than downtown Salt Lake City (60k+/-), where LRT currently carries around 40k-45k per day on two lines.
To top it all off, Boise only has 1 1/2 freeways, I-84 and the short I-84 spur into downtown.
It remains to be seen if Idaho transit opponents remain potato-heads and stick with rhetorical arguments such as “too spread out” and ignore downtown Boise’s concentrated destinations and other favorable factors.
Salt Lake has decisively proven that very conservative Mormons will use transit under the right circumstances, and once they get some, they want a lot more; will equally conservative Idahoians (?) in an area where there is really only one heavy duty travel corridor, e.g., Caldwell, Nampa, Meridian, to West Boise, and downtown Boise paralleling I-84 and I-184. This corridor is likely to have more downtown trips than the Sandy-downtown Salt Lake LRT line, if only because more trips are concentrated to far fewer destinations than in Utah.
Would the passengers ride the system if it was Replica street cars in the existing road ways and with the savings of not building the system ride for free???
Antiplanner,
I’m geographically challenged today, so help me out. Glenwood, which is the unincorporated land lying between Eugene and Springfield, is at least 20 miles from Oregon’s Coast Range. Deadwood is in the Coast Range, but I can find no evidence (on the web) that Deadwood was ever home to the OERHS. Please help resolve this historic/geographic incongruity. Was the OERHS in Deadwood or is there another “Glenwood” in Oregon?
msetty,
If the numbers are as favorable as you say, then why doesn’t transit in Boise present a potentially profitable enough proposition for the private sector to come in and do it themselves? Oh, right: transit is virtually never profitable, and is instead a way to line the pockets of left-wing interest groups at the expense of the taxpaying public.
Mike:
So let’s see the profit and loss statement for the road system. Oh wait, donor states like California pay for loss-making roads in rural states like Idaho, where most rural roadways and low volume Interstates are big losers financially–if that’s your only metric.
My guess is that I-90 across Montana and many other low volume rural roads currently lose a similar amount per passenger mile as the projected subsidies for the proposed Southern Montana Amtrak train.
If you knew anything about the history of transportation, you’d know that the original private sector transit developers of a century ago made most of their profits from land development, not the transit operation itself.
This is why such systems were quickly abandoned when the gumm’it took upon itself road construction and creation of a system with massive structural subsidies to auto travel built-in, e.g., parking mandates and low density sprawl zoning.
You probably will be surprised to learn that I am strongly in favor of pricing the public road system to cover as much of its costs as possible. This would relieve taxpayers from having to shell out much of the hidden gumm’it spending that supports the auto/highway system, and also would increase transit load factors sufficiently to allow many services to cover their operating costs (but not all; “welfare” type systems carrying old ladies and persons with disabilities are still likely to lose lots of money, so are properly classified as social services, not transportation per se.)
But unlike you, I suppose, I think U.S. politics precludes much of the road pricing/cost recovery agenda (including private toll roads). For one thing, our increasingly dominant corporate culture and mass media, and the gigantic economic entities behind it, depends on convincing Americans to consume as much as they can, even if they don’t have the money.
I’m afraid even with the current downturn, the U.S. corporate-created and dominated culture and mass media of “something for nothing” still prevails, along with it strong entrenched opposition to the required level of gasoline taxes and other vehicle charges needed to cover actual costs.
msetty, interesting speculation on the situation. Just keep in mind that even if Boise’s population doubles during the next 25 years, it’ll still be half of SLC. Downtown Boise has @30k-35k jobs today. It’s not projected to grow to 50k until 2025. And keep in mind that the MSA will include Napa and Caldwell, both of which have historically been relatively separate from Boise and are expected to soak up a lot of job growth in themselves.
Now I don’t think that means that a LRT or BRT corridor wouldn’t work. Personally I’m skeptical since the vast majority of jobs and future job growth are outside of downtown. More so, according to COMPASS, there are @175k commuters today that drive to work alone. @30k carpool and only about 5k bike / walk / take transit. Even with future growth, it would require a huge shift in metro Boises habits to reach 25k trips per weekday on an LRT line let along 40k.
But the issue at hand today is spending $30 million to build a small street car circulator downtown with no idea if it could ever be expanded to serve BSU (technically not in downtown; just to the south of it). I fail to see how enough traffic would occur to justify this circulator. But that’s just a guess on my part because they don’t seem to be tossing the expected number of trips out there which makes me suspect it’s a pretty low number.
Keep in mind this is $30 million that could be used for something else. Personally considering how serious they are about a long term rail alignment paralelling Franklin and I84, why not use this money to for BRT-lite on Franklin? Let future developers know you’re seriously about the corridor and they can build today to take advantage of the improved service and proximity to I84. The more they do now to attract growth ont he corridor instead of up on US20 or state street or Kuna or Caldwell, the better chance of securing a larger project in the future and more of a chance of it’s success. In fact I’m not so sure getting this small downtown street car circulator won’t serve to shoot themselves in the foot. There’s not a lot going on in downtown and currently hardly anyone lives there. I’m afraid for them this won’t generate a lot of ridership and 3 years from now the Stateman will have a picture of yet another empty train at 2pm downtown along with an article suggesting that it was a failure and there’s no use in building anything more.
“You probably will be surprised to learn that I am strongly in favor of pricing the public road system to cover as much of its costs as possible.” – msetty
I think you’ve mentioned this before or at least made some comments eluding to it. Personally I’m not surprised. And I’d love to see it happen. Personally I’d prefer raising the gas tax since it has a built in reward for better gas mileage. But at least something so there’s a tangible cost difference to driving 40 miles instead of 15.
msetty,
Ah, but not all roads are created equal.
Interstate highways are required for effective operation of a military homeland defense, and military protection is a general welfare enjoyed by all. Municipal roads are required for effective deployment of a police force, and police protection is a general welfare enjoyed by all. In either case, support of those roadways (even at 100% loss) by tax dollars is not a violation of individual rights. If user fees can recoup some amount of that, well, that’s icing on the cake.
Commuter highways and commercial arterials, meanwhile, the roads of types most comparable to rail in that they have no legitimate government function, should be privatized, and are the type most likely to be profitable. As soon as governments start letting that happen, watch as the industrialist vultures swoop in to buy them up in quantity. You say you support user fees for roads? Fantastic. For once, you have me in your corner. But why enjoy only half the benefit (cost recovery without cost containment)? Let’s open up the flood gates and let the market sort it out.
I would disagree with you as to conveyance of non-military and non-police entities as a social service, of course, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, so I would look the other way at first on those issues if the underlying problem of public maintenance of transportation (other than interstate highways and municipal roads) was resolved by privatization. That privatization is a small line item compared to the much more essential issue of privatization of education, but all those smaller line items add up.
No argument that the government and media overencourage consumption. There really is no answer for this in the public policy realm, as this behavior is an aspect of the fact that man is fallible and mortal and can be induced to forfeit long-term well-being for a short-term pleasure in some instances. The real solution to this is economic progress, which lowers costs in both money and time for all goods, necessary or otherwise. Economic progress provides consumers with more time to educate themselves to avoid the consumerist racket and more money to have a softer landing during those early episodes in life when the consumerist racket scores its initial victories. Economic progress, of course, would happen much more effectively with unfettered capitalism.
Mike said: Interstate highways are required for effective operation of a military homeland defense, and military protection is a general welfare enjoyed by all.
THWM: No they’re not, the military was just used as a political guise to get freeways built.