Search Results for: plan bay area

More Than 10 Billion Served

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Congratulations to the American transit industry for managing to carry more than 10 billion transit trips in 2006, the first year it has done so since 1957.* Naturally, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) considers this to be proof that we need to funnel even more subsidies into transit.

“This significant ridership milestone is part of a multi-year trend as more and more Americans ride public transit,” says APTA’s president. “This milestone represents 10 billion reasons to increase local and federal investment in public transportation.”

Rapid growth? Click the chart to download a spreadsheet with the actual numbers, which are from APTA Transit Factbooks.

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Junk Science Week: #2 – Density & Congestion

By | | News commentary, Regional planning, Transportation, Why Planning Fails
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I’ve previously discussed the myth that density relieves congestion, yet it persists. Most recently, planners in Fairfax County, Virginia say they want to put thousands of high-rise apartments in Tysons Corner in an effort to increase the density and relieve congestion around proposed rail stations.

Planners claim that Ballston, a rail station on the DC Orange line, proves that this strategy is successful. The opening of the Ballston station in 1979 led to a lot of transit-oriented development, and today many people in the area walk or take transit to work.

However, planners fail to mention that a major freeway, I-66, opened at about the same time, and it probably did more to stimulate development than the rail line. At least, other stations that were not close to new freeway interchanges failed to develop as planners hoped.

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Where Is Your Adaptive Management Now?

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters, Transportation
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A supplemental environmental impact report (SEIR) has just been issued for the extension of BART to San Jose. Planners say the 16.1-mile extension will cost a whopping $4.7 billion, yet they project that it will increase local transit ridership by only 2 percent.

By coincidence, $4.7 billion just happens to be the cost of Denver’s FasTracks plan, which is supposed to build about 119 new miles of rail lines plus busways for 18 miles of bus-rapid transit. San Jose taxpayers are obviously not getting much for their money.

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Density Increases Congestion

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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In an earlier post, I mentioned that density increases congestion and was chastised for failing to prove it. So here is the evidence.

Start with data from the 2000 census that compares the percentage of commuters who drive to work with the population density of nearly 400 urbanized areas (areas with more than 50,000 people). If density reduced congestion, then increased densities would greatly reduce auto commuting.

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Region-by-Region Review of Rail Transit

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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About twenty-five urban areas had rail transit in 2005. Transit systems in five of these lost market share to the automobile, they gained in eight, and in eleven they held their own (when measured to the nearest tenth of a percent). Data for the twenty-fifth, New Orleans, are not available.

“Holding their own” may sound good for transit systems in our auto-oriented society. But it is a disappointment when so much more has been promised for the expensive rail lines being built in so many cities. This is especially true when all but seven of these transit systems — rail and bus — carry under 2 percent of total passenger travel in the regions they serve.

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More on Modeling: Cities Are Queerer Than We Can Imagine

By | | Regional planning, Why Planning Fails
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Some planners and economists once built a model of their city. They assumed all the jobs were downtown and people wanted to minimize the combined cost of housing and commuting. How far, on average, would people live from work?

The model said, “One mile.” But census data showed that people actually lived an average of seven miles from work.

The planners and economists had totally opposite responses to this answer. The economists assumed there was something wrong with the model, and set about refining it. Instead of a monocentric model in which all jobs were downtown, they created a polycentric model that spread jobs across several different job centers. The revised model said people would live a little more than two miles from work.

“Naturally we don’t expect the real world to fit the model perfectly,” wrote the economists, “but being off by a factor of seven or even three is hard to swallow.” The economists concluded that the model needed much more refining.

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