Tag Archives: Rail transit

Monday…Krugman on California’s crisis, Design/Deception criticisms, hidden cost of parking, biofuel issues, UH cuts, and a quite Kaaawa moment

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Don’t miss Paul Krugman’s column in today’s NY Times, which takes a closer look at California’s fiscal crisis and its national implications.

He writes:

…Proposition 13 made it extremely hard to raise taxes, even in emergencies: no state tax rate may be increased without a two-thirds majority in both houses of the State Legislature. And this provision has interacted disastrously with state political trends.

For California, where the Republicans began their transformation from the party of Eisenhower to the party of Reagan, is also the place where they began their next transformation, into the party of Rush Limbaugh. As the political tide has turned against California Republicans, the party’s remaining members have become ever more extreme, ever less interested in the actual business of governing.

And while the party’s growing extremism condemns it to seemingly permanent minority status — Mr. Schwarzenegger was and is sui generis — the Republican rump retains enough seats in the Legislature to block any responsible action in the face of the fiscal crisis.

I need to acknowledge that the article referenced here yesterday (“Design by Deception”) is not without its critics, as noted in an article at Stateline.org when it was first published. It notes:

Indeed, when I checked the conclusions with Thomas M. Downs, former Amtrak CEO, New Jersey commissioner of transportation and now president of the Eno Transportation Foundation, he condemned both Flyvbjerg’s study methods and conclusions.

Most of the U.S. rail projects included in the study, Downs noted, are yesteryear’s news, dating back to the 1970s and early ’80s. By contrast, he said, ridership on several more recent projects – Houston, Denver, St. Louis and Minneapolis, for example – have actually exceeded projections.

Plus, said Downs, cutting the ribbon for a rail project is different from a new highway (that cars just drive onto). First-year rail ridership is often low because only starter segments are included and it takes a while to iron bugs out of new rail cars and control systems.

And Stateline.org points to another article worth reading, “The High Cost of Free Parking“.

The implicit point here, I think, is that while transit is expensive, we’re already paying high but hidden costs for other things that we take for granted, such as parking.

The article is summarized by Stateline.org:

The parking we think is “free” really isn’t – it’s built into the cost of every house or apartment we buy our rent, every purchase we make in a store, every restaurant meal or movie. Why? Because of rigid off-street parking requirements, mostly copied blindly in codes from city to city, or based on national surveys of peak demand at suburban sites devoid of public transit or pedestrian amenities.

What’s more, parking is built into taxes we pay because cities and towns provide vast amounts of totally “free” parking, or metered parking at a fraction of market rates in commercial garages.

And everyone ends up paying all the inflated costs and taxes – whether they drive or not. Plus: parking gobbles up space and makes walking perilous or impractical, feeding sprawl. Buffalo and Albuquerque, for example, devote more downtown land to parking than all other land uses combined. Overall, America is not far short of 1 billion parking spots.

The cure? Shoup would remove all zoning requirements for off-street parking – let the market dictate choices.

Second, he would increase curb-parking fees to fair market prices, thus discouraging the cruising for parking spaces that fouls the air and helps congest city traffic.

And finally, he’d minimize the predictable political backlash by earmarking the dramatically increased street parking fees to clean and light streets, repair sidewalks, remove graffiti, plant trees, preserve historic buildings and put utility wires underground.

Stateline.org also had an interesting article describing the approach to transportation and urban design in Amsterdam. It’s definite food for thought.

For some time, Life of the Land’s Henry Curtis has been the party pooper at the biofuels celebration, cautioning about threatened negative impacts in developing countries.

Then last week I saw this recent report from Colombia by Christian Peacemaker Teams about a specific example that underscores Henry’s concerns.

Recommended UH program cuts were described here back on May 16. The Star-Bulletin caught up today with a story by Craig Gima based on the same document. Such is the news food chain.

[Note: The first time around, those last two links were unfortunately the same. I think I’ve got them correct on this second pass. Thanks to the reader who gently nudged me about the error!]

[text]Enough of all that. Time to enjoy a little moment of silence on this Memorial Day 2009. Here a couple and their two dogs enjoy an early morning dip in Kaaawa. Does it get much better than this?

Enjoy your holiday.

Friday…We can’t afford green buses, but press ahead with most costly rail plan, plus Friday Felines

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Earlier this month, the Advertiser reported that the city is about to abandon its shift to hybrid fuel-efficient buses because the promised 60% savings have not materialized and, basically, we can’t afford the price of this “green” technology.

Unfortunately, the Advertiser story doesn’t link to the report it quotes, so it’s difficult to evaluate what’s reported about fuel savings.

Hybrid articulated buses cost nearly $1 million each, compared to about $380,000 for a typical 40-foot diesel bus. Previously, the city has said those higher costs may be recouped by long-term fuel efficiency gains. However, the buses are not cost- effective unless fuel costs increase at a rate of 20 percent each year for 15 years, according to the report.

But when fuel costs spiked last year, costs doubled, doubled again, and kept rising in just a few months. Diesel fuel doubled in price and has stayed at those elevated levels, something I’m well aware of as a VW diesel owner.

So while current oil prices make our old fleet less costly to run, we may be risking being caught again by the next run-up in prices. But we can’t tell because that key part of the story wasn’t reported more fully.

The good part of the story was that the city was able to look at a previous decision and admit that it needed to be reevaluated in light of new financial information.

Isn’t it time to admit that the same is true of rail? And in the case of rail, we’re nowhere near as fully committed as in the case of buses that are already on the street.

I was reading the Star-Bulletin’s story earlier in the week concerning the city transit project, and a couple of items caught my eye.

First, a quote from Bill Brennan:

But a Hannemann administration spokesman, Bill Brennan, said that in its review of a route through Honolulu in 2006, the City Council decided to select a system that includes an elevated rail.

But then there are no specific provided. As readers, were left with a “trust us, take it or leave it” proposition. We already know that there’s disagreement over this point. It would have been useful to know which specific decisions are being pointed to as locking us into the fully elevated rail option.

Then there’s the council’s transportation chair, Gary Okino:

Council Transportation Chairman Gary Okino agrees that is the best alternative. “I wouldn’t have voted for it if it was an at-grade system,” Okino said. “It absolutely doesn’t make any sense to put the system on the ground. … There’s a huge difference in terms of efficiency, speed, capacity and operating cost.”

Okino said he agrees the elevated rail will affect the views, but believes it is a “trade-off.”

One has to wonder about the facts underlying Okino’s statement. Perhaps he has another definition of “efficiency”, but apparently most cities across the country have selected the more flexible technology that allows a mix of at-grade and elevated to be most efficient, as that’s been the technology of choice for two decades.

I can’t help feeling that this is a hangover of the city’s first serious plunge into the world of rail which came just as the Vancouver system was getting up and running. At that time, more than 20 years ago, Vancouver was “state of the art”, and anyone whose came of age professionally during that short period might be forgiven for harkening back to that assessment. And those are the folks in the city now calling the shots on rail and its design.

But, as several people have pointed out to me, the consultants hired to evaluate and design our system were given strict specifications that already included the elevated design. They weren’t asked to start with a clean slate and design the best system for Honolulu. They were given a preconceived solution and told to design it. And with consultants, as with other professionals, if the client demands it, that’s what the client gets. In the case of the rail consultants, the same companies are designing flexible light rail systems in other places at the same time that they’re giving Honolulu its fully elevated and more expensive design.

So what if what Okino understands as a “trade-off” in efficiency, speed, capacity and operating cost is no longer the case given the changes in state of the art transit technology? At least some very experienced transit planners point to technology choices that allow a mix of elevated and street-level travel capable of carrying the same passenger load with a more pleasant ride, fewer negative effects on the surrounding neighborhoods, and with little loss of time.

Speed? Honolulu’s design relies on a measure of “average speed” along its 20-mile route. That’s only achieved by the trains going faster where the stations are farther apart. Once getting close to downtown, where the stations are closer together, the train won’t be able to go much faster than one running at street level. And for the individual passenger, the time and effort of having to climb stairs (because like with escalators at the airport, escalators at heavily used train stations are going to be out of service a lot, trust me) balances out the few minutes diference in transit time.

My sense is that this new assessment of the trade-offs is what is motivating members of the AIA to make their push to substitute the latest flexible technology for the city’s pre-selected train.

It’s the Friday before a long weekend. Time to wind down, perhaps?

[text]This is Mr. Silverman leaving few doubts about his intentions for the holiday weekend. I have a theory that cameras trigger yawns in cats, because I seem to be collecting an inordinate number of yawning cat photos. It’s certainly greater can be accounted for by random chance. Any theories floating around out there?

Last comment. Trouble sleeping? Blog early. Problem cured.

Tuesday…Cooking the specs, or how to control the design of transit with behind-the-scenes decisions

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If the city budget scheduled to be passed next month includes the more than $1 Billion requested to fund the first large contracts for transit cars and initial construction of the elevated guideway and stations, it will be a major political coup for Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann achieved as much through political trickery as political muscle.

The trick is simple and often relied on when manipulating policies and contracts: You don’t have to “fix” the final decisions if you quietly control and set the specifications. Tailor making the specs to “fit” a particular bidder or technology is often a way to throw business to a favored party in what otherwise appears to be competitive bidding.

It’s hard to tell whether that’s what’s happening with Honolulu’s transit system, but it is clear that the Mayor Hannemann’s administration has defined the system through specs shoved into the design requirements. While distracting the public with the debate over “steel wheel on steel rail”, a category which actually includes a range of different transit technologies, Hannemann has slipped in a small number of key specifications which predetermined the specific choice of perhaps the most expensive type of steel-on-steel system running on an intrusive elevated guideway, essentially a mini-freeway of concrete and steel, from one end of the island to the other, interrupted periodically by stations the size of football stadiums in the sky.

Those limiting specifications inserted by the Hannemann administration include the call for a grade-separated system using “hot” 3rd-rail power.

These key specifications have been quietly inserted at key points by the administration and not by the council, and instead have constrained the council as it has tried to move forward with transit.

The council’s selection of a locally preferred alternative and a “fixed guideway” using a form of “steel rail on steel wheel” technology is consistent not only with the system pursued by Hannemann, which might have been state of the art in 1985, but also the light rail systems used most of the urban systems built since that time.

While the public, the council, and key constituencies were being told that the final choice of technology was still open, the choices were in fact being narrowed to one.

These differences are important. In private correspondence, one experienced transit planner described the differences in available transit technologies, very subtle from the public’s perspective but extremely important in terms of the profile of the resulting system.

Although the city describes its proposed system as “light rail”, he says this repeats “the classic mistake of confusing something else with light rail transit; it’s a common mistake but one that can lead the non-technical person to reach a misleading conclusion.”

This is in part, the result of a marketing decision made a couple of decades ago by Bombardier – a lead, if not favored competitor for the HHCTC Project – when light rail transit was emerging as a viable option for new start rail systems to call its fully-automated rail transit technology, which uses linear induction motors, “Advanced Light Rail Transit” or “ALRT.” [Who was the fictional character who said “It isn’t what it is; it is what I chose to call it.”]…

The technology that the City Administration proposed to use… is best described as an “automated light metro,” as is consistent with the definitions recorded in the attachment. It is its inability to operate on the surface in a right-of-way that is not secure, i.e. fenced-in, that makes it a light metro and not a light rail transit system. That is a result of two facts: 1) its operations will be fully-automated and 2) it will have an energized “hot” third rail for traction power distribution, in both cases throughout its 20.5 miles-long alignment, as well as 8.9 miles of proposed future extensions to West Kapolei, UH Manoa and Waikiki.

In contrast, “real” light rail transit – as defined in the attachment – has as its defining characteristic the ability to operate safely on the surface of city streets in mixed traffic lanes, in addition to in reserved transit-only lanes, transit malls with intersecting streets, roadway medians intersecting cross streets, on open or fenced-in railroad type rights-of-way with or without grade crossings, on elevated structures and in subways.

No other fixed guideway mode – heavy rail, light metro,commuter rail, magnetic leviation, monorail, personal rapid transit systems, etc., has this flexibility. At the same time, some LRT systems do have characteristics shared with other rail modes.

The “attachment” referred to can be found here.

Cynics say Hannemann has thrown his support behind the most expensive type of system in order to reap the harvest of campaign contributions from current or prospective contractors. Others only a bit less cynical say the system is Frank Fasi’s legacy, carried forward with few changes from the system Fasi proposed two decades ago and promoted within the administration by city engineers who worked on Fasi’s project and are now in leadership positions in the current transit project.

To be continued…

Monday (2)…Duke Bainum op-ed presses at-grade light rail option

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An op-ed column by Honolulu City Councilmember Duke Bainum appears in today’s Star-Bulletin.

He makes a very good point.

Say you needed a new car and you’re eyeing a beauty on the showroom floor, but your brother calls and says he can get you a car for half the price, that is more energy efficient, has the latest technology, can be delivered sooner and have significant lower operating and maintenance costs. Wouldn’t you at least return his call?

This is effectively the rail proposal the Honolulu Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA Honolulu) is offering. If the city would consider an at-grade rail system, particularly for downtown segments of the proposed route, we could have incredible cost savings on construction, significantly reduce the visual blight from pillars of concrete blocking our viewplanes, build the system more quickly, extend the system to areas like the University of Hawaii and Mililani sooner, better integrate the stops and stations into our neighborhoods, and save on future operating costs. The system would also provide better connectivity, flexibility and increased accessibility — and fit better into our neighborhoods.

Of course, Bainum’s position is contrary to the position staked out by Mayor Hannemann.

And the public may not yet fully appreciate the difference between the two types of rail. However, the engineering firms working for the city certainly do.

While the city remains committed to elevated heavy rail technology, it’s interesting to note that the web site, HonoluluTransit.org, created by the city’s contractor, Parsons Brinckerhoff, features news stories touting the benefits of light rail rather than the type of train being planned for Honolulu. Check their Rail News page for stories about the the new rail system in Phoenix (light rail, not what Mufi is building), the DART system in Dallas (again, light rail, not what Parsons is designing for Honolulu), and Denver (again, light rail that integrates into the environment and runs at street level through downtown Denver, not on huge elevated platforms seems committed to).

The fact of the matter appears to be that without news from the dozens of cities that have built light rail systems in the last two decades, there wouldn’t be much rail news for Parsons Brinckerhoff to report.