slightlyslack

Date: 9/5/2005 6:50:54 PM Author: ILL Tonkso Actually as less then 50% of it is underground its considered a light railway. Plus a Subway is a light rail, its very rare to have Heavy Rail subways (allthough Londons Crossrail will be) quote> I'm not so sure about that--isn't one of the definitions of light rail that it draws power from catenaries instead of a third rail? Most American subways and elevated rail systems (most notably New York and Chicago) draw from a third rail. Some light rail systems (e.g. the San Francisco MUNI, the Los Angeles Metro Blue Line) go underground and draw power from overhead.

lakeyboy: Looking at those before-and-after pics, one wonders why so many divided roads in the United States don't have light rail lines or at least dedicated bus lanes running down the middle of them. In a lot of places, the density is certainly there. On the other hand, Australia probably doesn't have hardcore libertarians who think that any transport other than private cars is Communist.

I think I've seen one of those Philadelphia trolleys before--in San Francisco! On the Embarcadero streetcar line, there are replicas of vintage streetcars from several major cities.

I'm not sure if commuter rail would be at all cost-effective in Detroit, given that a much smaller percentage of workers in the Detroit-Ann Arbor MSA commutes to downtown than is the case in less automobile-oriented urban areas like Chicago and New York. Even if you include New Center, I doubt it's much more than 15% of workers going to central Detroit every day, versus 50% of commuters in New York going to Manhattan and something like 30% of Chicago-area commuters going to the Loop or the adjacent River North area. Detroit has really hollowed out in the last 40 years and has not had any sort of large-scale commercial development in its downtown (other than the preposterous Renaissance Center) for decades; nor does it have a metro or an especially efficient bus system to carry passengers from a central rail station to areas outside of downtown. Even assuming a massive change in land use policy, the Detroit metropolitan area isn't going to grow much at all in the next several decades (and may well shrink), raising serious questions about whether a sufficiently large ridership could ever exist to make a commuter rail system viable. I'm taking a transportation policy class this semester and one of the things I'm learning from the small amount of reading I've done in it so far is that commuter rail, in particular, requires a very specific set of circumstances to be anything approaching financially viable. I also remember vividly a professor at UC Irvine's Institute for Transportation Studies telling me a year or so back that if the federal government wanted to maximize the efficiency of its transit expenditures, it would put virtually all of its money into New York, leave a little for Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and D.C., and eliminate subsidies for every other transit system in the country.

Well, I had my orientation meeting for the USC planning PhD program today, and I met a couple of faculty members whose studies on transportation planning and economic development are right up my alley. I will keep y'all informed--who knows, maybe I one day can become Dean of the University of Simtropolis!

Santa Monica Boulevard in western Los Angeles between the Beverly Hills city limit and the San Diego Freeway (I-405). It's only been going on since 2003, but nobody has any idea what the hell is actually being done on it. Supposedly it's being turned into a transit parkway with a landscaped median and bus-only inner lanes, or somesuch, but the project also includes a complete rebuild of the roadbed, so it's going to go on probably for at least another year or two. They re-stripe the lanes every day, it seems, so you never know exactly where the road is! I think the winter and construction thing applies anywhere in the Upper Midwest and the Great Lakes region. I'm originally from the Chicago area and thanks to blisteringly cold winters and heavy spring and autumn rains, pavement--whether asphalt or concrete--just doesn't last very long. If a segment of expressway can go ten years between complete rebuilds, it's a miracle. (By contrast, many of the roads and freeways in Los Angeles that were built for a 25-year lifetime have managed to make it 35-40 years without breaking down too badly; the aforementioned I-710, alas, is not one of these, although it gets the crap beaten out of it by freight haulers on a daily basis.)

Date: 8/17/2005 10:34:40 PM Author: SC4BOY personally I think a bus system designed to the individual .. maybe with lots of minivans..... rather than (or perhaps in concert with) rail etc has any chance of working in the bigger USA.. Paratransit, which is what you're describing, is extraordinarily expensive if individuals want any sort of flexibility. It's a decent solution for the elderly and the disabled in low-density areas, but they're generally willing to deal with week-long waiting lists for a ride somewhere. Gas isn't going to get any cheaper than it is right now; the refineries are running full tilt, adding refining capacity is virtually impossible (and most of the refiners don't want to do so, since they got caught with their pants down in the oil price collapse of 20 years ago and aren't about to saddle themselves with debt), and crude oil prices are well on their way to record highs in real terms. Most of the sprawl development that has taken place in the last 10-15 years has catered to the lower middle classes; these are the people who are getting killed the most by high fuel prices, and they're going to have to resign themselves to the fact that exurban living is not viable in a $3-gasoline environment. There won't be an abrupt bitchslap upside the head gasoline price shock of the sort that New Urbanists like James Kunstler have predicted, but there will be a considerable movement toward densification in cities and inner-ring suburbs. Look for it to start on the coasts and gradually move its way inland.

Date: 8/17/2005 10:50:13 PM Author: mikeseith And for my 2 cents. I also think rail and light rail in many cases are too expensive. Busses are much more efficient than trains and on a per person basis polute less (the power for electric trains has to be generated somewhere). Many modern busses can be very comfortable also. In many cases the better (cheaper) solution to trains is a bus line on a dedicated bus only road.  The infrastucture is much less money and much more flexible than rails. You'd be surprised. Bus-only roads have the same problem of ROW acquisition as do rail lines. Moreover, because of their acceleration behavior, buses are slow, much slower than trains overall even if the peak speeds are the same. Whereas an electric train can basically explode out of the station and is limited only by the passengers' G-tolerance, it takes buses a long time to accelerate from a dead stop to cruising speed; this is even more so the case if the bus runs on natural gas combustion, like most clean air buses. (Of course, one could go with diesel buses to get better acceleration, but then one gets diesel smoke--and smog.) A city could do like San Francisco does and string catenaries everywhere and run electric buses, but by the time they've installed that infrastructure, it's cheaper to lay down rail instead of asphalt! San Francisco only had the catenaries sitting around because they never completely tore out their streetcar system, the way most American cities did. Los Angeles is building a busway through the San Fernando Valley, the Orange Line, that will have an average speed of 20 mph. Even at the worst rush hour, that's considerably slower than driving on the 101 freeway, which runs about a mile south of the busway. Considering that it doesn't run through any major commercial corridors, I can guarantee that the Orange Line will be a bigger flop than, say, a light rail line (let alone a subway) down Ventura Boulevard might have been. As far as operating costs go, it's actually a wash between buses and light rail. Diesel is damn expensive, and so is natural gas, but in most places electricity is pretty cheap. Trains don't have to kneel to accommodate the handicapped, and they don't go over potholes, so they don't require nearly as many suspension repairs as do buses. (Even a bus-only road is going to develop potholes--it's not like it doesn't rain or snow on busways.) Light rail is a stupid idea for small cities and a lot of medium-sized ones because of the capital costs, but it can be a much better deal than buses for mid-sized and large cities that are willing to spend the political effort to built LRT lines along corridors with sufficient density to generate ridership. The fact that cities like Curitiba and Ottawa, whose bus rapid transit systems are lauded by rail skeptics, are quietly building rail systems (a full-on subway, in Curitiba's case) is a testament to the limitations of BRT.

In re light rail in Manhattan: The issue of grade separation at intersections is of great importance. The 42nd Street light rail line that I've seen proposed won't be all that much faster than the M42 (which is supposedly the slowest bus line in the United States, and is a good bit slower than walking) if it has to wait at the red lights at Broadway and the avenues. Using signal priority circuitry is absolutely out of the question because it would conflict with the signal priority circuits being used by MTA buses on the avenues, and would have a catastrophic ripple effect on traffic throughout Midtown anyway. It would make much more sense to build an elevated rail line, but the property owners along the way would howl, I'm sure. I think another subway tube might be in order...maybe one that goes all the way under the Hudson and into Weehawken. Street-level light rail doesn't work in a city as dense as Manhattan.

Los Angeles has three distinct light rail lines: the Blue Line, the Green Line, and the Gold Line. The Blue Line runs along a former Pacific Electric Red Car right-of-way from downtown Los Angeles to downtown Long Beach. Except in the last few hundred meters of its route in downtown Los Angeles, it is entirely at grade level. Known as the Ghetto Blue because it goes through some of the poorest and most violent areas in greater Los Angeles (Watts, Compton, North Long Beach), it isn't especially fast--45 minutes from Long Beach to Los Angeles is typical, which is about the same speed as driving at rush hour--but it's extremely heavily used. If I'm not mistaken, with something like 70,000 daily boardings, it's the busiest single light rail line in the United States. It opened in the late '80s and was a success from day one. The Green Line, on the other hand, is a prime example of why political expediency should not be the principal criterion in transportation planning. When it was planned in the '80s, it was decided that it should run in the median of the Century Freeway that was then under construction, from Norwalk in the east to El Segundo in the west, then turn south until the border of Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach. The idea was that folks who lived in Norwalk, Bellflower, and other such working-class suburbs could ride the train to the aerospace factories in the area south of LAX. Unfortunately, by the time the Green Line went through, the aerospace industry had pretty much gone bust, and not many residents of southeastern Los Angeles County worked in the aircraft plants anyway. Most of the Century Freeway's route is not especially densely populated, and so the Green Line has largely been a flop: initial ridership estimates from its opening in the mid-1990s weren't exceeded until last year. It passes within a mile of Los Angeles International Airport, but does not directly serve the airport (you have to take a shuttle instead); this is because of opposition from the city's taxi drivers, who didn't want a train line serving the airport. Future MTA plans include a spur from the Green Line that will serve LAX, then continue north along Sepulveda or Lincoln Boulevards through Westchester and Marina Del Rey, and perhaps all the way to Venice Beach. It would be nice if this spur linked up with the Exposition Line about to break ground (q.v.) The Gold Line goes from eastern Pasadena to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, through the old neighborhoods of northeastern LA and the Old Town area of Pasadena. It was built by the city of Pasadena, not by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, but is operated by the MTA. It is at grade level, and in many cases is too close to the street, so it is very slow and takes well over 45 minutes on a route that, even at rush hour, rarely takes over 30 by car. It opened in 2003, and has been moderately successful; ridership will likely increase if northeastern LA continues to gentrify. For some insane reason, the MTA thinks it would be a good idea to extend it along the old Pacific Electric ROW it owns all the way to Montclair, in San Bernardino County, even though the potential ridership densities in these areas simply don't exist. Currently, a second leg of the Gold Line is under construction. It will go east from Union Station through the predominantly Mexican neighborhoods of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles, and will be a subway through most of Boyle Heights. This route will probably get more ridership than the original Gold Line because many residents of East LA work in downtown. After several decades of legal wrangling, a line along Exposition Boulevard from the 7th/Flower station downtown to Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica will probably break ground either next year or the year after. It will run primarily at grade level. The first phase will go from 7th/Flower to the eastern border of Culver City, most notably passing by USC and Exposition Park (the site of the L.A. Coliseum, which will probably be the new home of whatever team the NFL chooses to move to Los Angeles). The next phase, for which funding is always up in the air, will go down the median of Venice Boulevard through my neighborhood, Palms, then cut north along Sepulveda Boulevard before turning west at Sepulveda and Pico and continue all the way to downtown Santa Monica along former Pacific Electric ROW. Santa Monica has already started setting aside land for stations, and it may well be that the line gets built by an authority created by the cities of Santa Monica and Culver City.

Slowhand: the Houston Metro is actually a light rail system. Commuter rail refers to the use of trains on tracks that can accommodate both passenger and freight traffic, e.g. Metra (Chicago), Metrolink (Los Angeles), etc. I hear the Houston light rail is pretty sexy, though. I find it pretty pitiful that Los Angeles can't have a system that extensive, but then again, psychotic left-wing pressure groups like our Bus Riders Union probably don't have very much pull in Texas.