May 2010 Archives

Interesting study (the downsides of accessibility):

How do Roads Spread AIDS in Africa? A Critique of the Received Policy Wisdom Date: 2009-11 By: Djemaï, Elodie URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tse:wpaper:22243&r=ure This paper empirically analyzes the influence of road proximity on HIV-infection using geographical data on road infrastructure and the Demographic and Health Surveys collected in six African countries. Firstly we show that living in proximity to a major road increases the individual risk of infection. This observed relationship is found to be sensitive to the use of the road and to be robust after correcting for potential selection bias related to the non random placement of people. Secondly, our findings reveal that road infrastructure improves the level of HIV/AIDS-knowledge and facilitates access to condoms, providing no support to the hypothesis that HIV-infection is purely due to ignorance and misfortune. Thirdly, we find that the increased risk of infection is driven by a higher likelihood of engaging in casual sexual partnerships that more than offsets the effect of the increased use of condoms. Keywords: HIV/AIDS epidemic, spatial inequalities, risk taking JEL: I10

Via David Brin, Popular Science has an Archive Gallery: Cities of the Future which shows the future of cities through the eyes of the techno-optimists of Popular Science magazine. While none have come to pass exactly, in a sense, they are almost all here, examples below. This reinforces the William Gibson quote "The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed. " ...

Image 1: Exurbia
Image 2: Paris: La Defense
Image 3: Urban Highways
Image 4: Underground City Montreal
Image 5: Elevated Urban Highways (again)
Image 6: Brasilia
Image 7: International Space Station
Image 8: Biosphere (okay, we don't really have domed cities)
Image 9: Mars (okay, we don't really have a Mars colony yet)
Image 10: Masdar

From earth2tech: Electric Car Bills on the Hill: 10 Things You Should Know

The Electric Drive Vehicle Deployment Act of 2010, introduced in Congress this week, has a simple goal to electrify half of all cars and trucks on U.S. roads by 2030, and a basic strategy: focus the might of the federal government on a small number of pilot communities around the country, subsidizing the buildout of charging infrastructure and purchase of electric vehicles.

Generally, electrification is a good idea (as opposed to fossil fuels) as it is easier to control the environmental effects of energy production if they are at single points. It also enables more easily switching between fuels without having to modify 200 m vehicles, that is it is a more general technology. However, half the cars by 2030 seems singularly unambitious, how about half of all new cars by 2020 being electric, fuel cell, or hybrid, and almost all new cars by 2030?

Battery innovators: The Senate version proposes $1.5 billion for research aimed at delivering a battery that can go 500 miles on a single charge. The Senate also proposes establishing a $10 million prize for whoever delivers a commercially viable battery with those specs.

Somehow I think the $10 million prize will have a greater return on investment than the $1.5 billion in federal research. How about upping the prize (or establishing many prizes) and let the market fund the research with the hope of payoff.

From Global Times in China (via XC) High-speed rail saves time, but price gives pause

"High-speed rails are actually making losses right now," said Sun Zhang, a professor with the Urban Rail & Railway Engineering Department of Shanghai-based Tongji University. "The high ticket price is surely a reason for the loss. At present, most Chinese people want to save money rather than save time."

High-speed railway should learn from airlines and offer discounts during periods of lower ridership and to those who place early orders, said Mao Shoulong , a professor at Renmin University of China.

Tom Vanderbilt in Slate Magazine writes about The quest to design a better stop sign.

[T]rying to improve driver behavior through better signage is as futile as fighting illiteracy with better fonts.

Engineers really need to learn about risk compensation.

Not all safety improvements are futile, but there is a response, so drivers who are protected use some of the safety improvement to behave in a riskier way, as in the video below. This does not imply they necessarily die.

The NY Times says: Traffic Paint Shortage Threatens Roadwork

The scarcity stems in large part from the shortage of an obscure chemical compound called methyl methacrylate, one of the key ingredients in roadworthy paint, which must be sturdy, long-lasting and reflective. A major producer of the compound, Dow Construction Chemicals, had production problems this year at a plant in Deer Park, Tex.

I hope this does not set back the plans of FTA ... Peter Rogoff, who recently said

Supporters of public transit must be willing to share some simple truths that folks don't want to hear. One is this -- Paint is cheap, rails systems are extremely expensive.

Yes, transit riders often want to go by rail. But it turns out you can entice even diehard rail riders onto a bus, if you call it a "special" bus and just paint it a different color than the rest of the fleet.

Once you've got special buses, it turns out that busways are cheap. Take that paint can and paint a designated bus lane on the street system. Throw in signal preemption, and you can move a lot of people at very little cost compared to rail.

London as a grid from Strange Maps

.

This is so cool, London streets as if orderly.

From Slashdot: IBM's Patent-Pending Traffic Lights Stop Car Engines

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't let your engine idle. The USPTO has just published IBM's patent application for a 'System and Method for Controlling Vehicle Engine Running State at Busy Intersections for Increased Fuel Consumption Efficiency.' Here's how Big Blue explains the invention: 'The present disclosure is directed to a method for managing engines in response to a traffic signal. The method may comprise establishing communications with participating vehicles; responding to a stop status indicated by the traffic signal, further comprising: receiving a position data from each participating vehicles; determining a queue of participating vehicles stopped at the traffic signal; determining a remaining duration of the stop status; sending a stop-engine notification to the list of participating vehicles stopped at the traffic signal when the remaining duration is greater than a threshold of time; responding to a proceed status indicated by the traffic signal, further comprising: sending a start-engine notification to a first vehicle in the queue; calculating an optimal time for an engine of a second vehicle in the queue to start; and sending the start-engine notification to the second vehicle at the optimal time.' IBM notes that 'traffic signals may include, but are not limited to, traffic lights at intersections, railway crossing signals, or other devices for indicating correct moments to stop and to proceed.'"

As the first commenter says "What could possibly go wrong".

When will people realize serious Vehicle Infrastructure Integration is essentially doomed from the start? There is no deployment path. We can have smart cars on dumb roads (or as in rail, dumb trains on smart tracks), but trying to do both is asking for failure, the coordination problems are just too deep. The environment could perhaps be more informative, but unless it is informative almost everywhere, it will not be of much use.

I will go on a limb and suggest that in the long run, at all but the most congested intersections we'd be better off with smart cars and no electronic intersection controls (i.e even dumber roads), cars which just detected their environment and navigated appropriately. This can be achieved with roundabouts and similar devices.

In August, 31 of last year I wrote:

As part of the NSF-funded STREET project, we have been putting together ''Fundamentals of Transportation'', a wikibook. I intend to use this next semester as the main text for my Introduction to Transportation Engineering course (CE 3201). We welcome comments and, since this is a wikibook, additions and edits. (Please login using your real name).

This book is aimed at undergraduate civil engineering students, though the material may provide a useful review for practitioners and graduate students in transportation. Typically, this would be for an Introduction to Transportation course, which might be taken by most students in their sophomore or junior year. Often this is the first engineering course students take, which requires a switch in thinking from simply solving given problems to formulating the problem mathematically before solving it, i.e. from straight-forward calculation often found in undergraduate Calculus to vaguer word problems more reflective of the real world.

Well, we are pleased to announce that Fundamentals of Transportation has now been recognized as a "Featured Book" on Wikibooks*. The book is by no means "complete"; but it is I think workable for its purpose, and again any constructive contributions (sections, chapters, new topics, new examples, new problems, better explanations) would still be welcome.

For those of you not familiar with Wikibooks, they operate using the same software and syntax as Wikipedia, and are editable by anyone, though only approved edits are visible. The nature of the project is the creation of textbooks and other references, rather than an encyclopedia, so each project retains its own point-of-view.

* other recent promotions include The Muggles Guide to Harry Potter and Small Numbers

Our long awaited research report Access to Destinations, Phase 3: Measuring Accessibility by Automobile
is now available.

Abstract

This study describes the development and application of a set of accessibility measures for the Twin Cities region that measure accessibility by the automobile mode over the period from 1995 to 2005. In contrast to previous attempts to measure accessibility this study uses travel time estimates derived, to the extent possible, from actual observations of network performance by time of day. A set of cumulative opportunity measures are computed with transportation analysis zones (TAZs) as the unit of analysis for the years 1995, 2000 and 2005. Analysis of the changes in accessibility by location over the period of study reveals that, for the majority of locations in the region, accessibility increased between 1995 and 2005, though the increases were not uniform. A "flattening" or convergence of levels of accessibility across locations was observed over time, with faster-growing suburban locations gaining the most in terms of employment accessibility. An effort to decompose the causes of changes in accessibility into components related to transportation network structure and land use (opportunity location) reveal that both causes make a contribution to increasing accessibility, though the effects of changes to the transportation network tend to be more location-specific. Overall, the results of the study demonstrate the feasibility and relevance of using accessibility as a key performance measure to describe the regional transportation system.

Other reports in the series can also be downloaded here

From the Kansas City Star: Mission considers road fee that would link properties, street use

Mission, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, is looking at implementing a Transportation Utility Fee to raise revenue.

(I get interviewed briefly).

From NY Times: American Airlines Struggles as Rivals Merge

American is one of only three major carriers that have never filed for bankruptcy, along with Southwest Airlines and Alaska Airlines. As a result, the company is hobbled with much higher costs than its competitors, most of which have used bankruptcy proceedings to rewrite their labor contracts and airplane leases, terminate pensions and health benefits, and restructure their debt. If it had contracts similar to Delta's or Continental's, the company estimates its expenses would be $600 million lower each year.

In other words, the airline is in trouble because it has *not* gone through bankruptcy (to break contracts and turn debt to equity).

From the WaPo Commercial property owners may be asked to pay for part of streetcar costs

Commercial property owners along 37 miles of planned routes for a D.C. streetcar system may be asked to foot the bill for a quarter or more of the $1.5 billion system proposed by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty.

DC is looking at Business Improvement Districts among others.

From BBC

London's New Routemaster design unveiled

It has 2 staircases, 3 doors, and is hybrid-electric. It will be crawling the streets of London by 2012.

Capitalism is endorsing a future of Electric Vehicles, the startup Closes Massive $350M Round of funding from venture capitalists.

I think this is a great thing to be built (with someone else's money). However as an expensive first generation network infrastructure, I would not be surprised to see the company go bankrupt, unable to pay back fixed costs, wiping out these capitalists, (or at least the bondholders getting nearly 100% equity at the expense of the original shareholders) and someone else pick up the pieces the company and make a go of it.

The other risk is that batteries get good enough they don't need to be swapped out as frequently and can be recharged more quickly at home and workplaces, again obviating the need for this expensive network of stations.

From Toll Road News Virginia applies to Feds for OK to toll I-95 near NC border

Taxing foreigners living abroad looks like it is being implemented.

From New Scientist
Modern cars vulnerable to malicious hacks

The idea of hackers breaking into your personal computer is alarming enough. But what if they could seize control of your car's control systems while you are driving? Using a laptop and custom-written software, security researchers have hacked into the control systems of a family car, disable the brakes and turn off the engine while the vehicle was moving.

From reader DK:

Jay Walder is thinking about switching the New York City MTA's approach to subway repairs. They would go to full closure to repair and reconstruct rather than trying to keep the line open during construction, apparently drawing from Walder's London experience, the Daily News reports

New MTA plan would shut each subway line until it's fixed

In my view, London doesn't do this enough. This saves money, and in the long run may even save user time. (Big delay for short time may or may not be less than a short delay for long time, it just depends). There needs to be some planning for travelers who would switch to alternatives. Further it avoids all the construction set up and take down time resulting from trying to do work only at night.

London has just posted the Mayor's Transport Strategy . This is an exceedingly well done (and aesthetically pleasing) plan, even if you don't agree with every specific.

From The Independent

For decades women in gold lycra bikinis have patrolled the streets of Surfers Paradise, the popular resort on Queensland's Gold Coast, feeding meters to save motorists from parking fines. .... The maids first appeared in 1965, the brainchild of a Surfers entrepreneur, Bernie Elsey, who wanted to highlight the opposition of local businesses to the introduction of parking meters. Since then, they have become an institution on the Gold Coast, a 21-mile strip of beaches backed by nightclubs, souvenir shops and fast-food outlets.

This is essentially advertiser sponsored parking.

Christian Wolmar, author of the excellent history "Down the Tube" says

" One could hardly write the script as fiction. On the very day that Gordon Brown is teetering on the edge of oblivion and the House of Lords, one of his cherished projects, the London Underground PPP is breathing its last. The news that Transport for London is going to be taking over Tube Lines and running the contracts to maintain the Tube leaked out on the very day that voters were going to the polls. Since Metronet has already gone to join Railtrack, various franchises and the Strategic Rail Authority in the big dustbin of failed organisations, the demise of Tube Lines effectively means that the PPP joins this infamous group."

link: http://www.christianwolmar.co.uk/2010/05/the-ppp-is-the-scandal-no-one-noticed

It is often said as a truism, "if you build it, they will come", but supply does not always create its own demand. Some links via David King

Plenty of new airports but few passengers in China (LA Times)

The Empty CIty of Ordos (Time)

This is more reason to discount the arguments that just because China is spending a gazillion yuan for high speed rail or highways, the US should, (there are many other reasons they are fallacious comparisons, not the least of which is the stage of development and return on investment, the US network is mature, China's is not).

From the Hoover Institution Policy Review The Trouble with High-Speed Rail. A nice summary of some of the issues.

Congratulations to Dr. Nebiyou Tilahun who was hooded yesterday in graduation ceremonies at the University of Minnesota. Nebiyou's dissertation Matching Home and Work: Job Search, Contacts, and Travel was successfully defended earlier this year. An abstract follows

Transportation is closely tied to choices: those that have to do with location - where to live, work and play; temporal choices - when to engage in certain activities; the choice of mode - how to get to those activities and so on. The choice of home and work locations is especially important since these are relatively long term fixtures and can significantly influence everyday travel decisions. Often a person’s day starts at home and ends at home. For many workers, other daily activities are constrained by the time they spend at their employment locations. Decisions related to home-work travel can also influence other choices such as short term activity locations. Understanding the link between home and work is therefore an important part of policy making to manage or accommodate travel demand.

Traditionally, the approach taken by transportation professionals to match home and work locations has been to use trip distribution models, the most commonly used of which has been the gravity model. These models, which use aggregate zonal variables to match home and work, are still widely used by many planning organizations. This framework, while very useful in predicting aggregate trip distribution, overlooks much of what happens as the connection between people’s home and work are established.

This dissertation poses the link between home and work as an outcome of a search process for employment, where both searchers (workers) and employers try to match one another through advertising, search, screening, offers and decision making. It pro- poses a framework for matching home and work at a disaggregate level that follows the
job search process. Empirical sections pay close attention to search methods as these can inform the geographic scope of opportunities searchers know of. Distinctions be- tween different search methods and the related commute outcomes are illustrated using data collected for this study. The role of contacts in general, and neighborhood level contacts in particular, in matching home and work is also investigated using different data sources. An agent based model of job-worker matching based on the proposed framework is also developed and tested using data from Minnesota.

While the overall emphasis is on a disaggregate approach and moves away from geographic (zonal) aggregation of decision makers, the study of contacts and their role serves to illustrate that travel and destination decisions by and large are not independent of those around us. Focusing on the individual decision maker and following the process of job-worker matching can allow for models that are much more sensitive to changes in policy variables as they can accommodate the variability of tastes and responses among individual decision makers. On the other hand, the consideration of contacts, including those that may be neighbors, leaves the door open for consideration of behavior that may arise from interactions with others.

Hoisted from the comments. Jarrett at Human Transit writes

You write: The idea of profitability is nonsense. If this were to be private, following the history of most transportation infrastructure investments, the first generation of investors are likely to be wiped out in bankruptcy.

If this is indeed the history of transport infrastructure investments (and recent fiascos here in Australia bear you out) why do these projects continue to find investors?

That is an interesting question. I cannot explain the irrationality of markets, but I would refer you to some excellent papers by my friend and colleague (and mathematican and transport and internet historian) Andrew Odlyzko

• Collective hallucinations and inefficient markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s
• This time is different: An example of a giant, wildly speculative, and successful investment mania

Discussion of High Speed Rail, David Levinson's comments at the CTS Research Conference April 27, 2010.

At dinner last night, our speaker (Eric Peterson, President of the American High Speed Rail Alliance) estimated that a complete national truly High Speed Rail system for the United States (on the order of 220 MPH peak speed), not simply an improved Amtrak system, would cost about $2 Trillion Dollars, give or take. This sounds about right. This is about the cost of 2000 Vikings Stadiums, and I think I agree with the speaker that a HSR network would be a better investment than 2000 Vikings Stadiums. This would also be the cost of 2000 Central Corridor LRTs, which would serve more people on a daily basis, and probably more passenger miles as well.

Is this a good thing for the United States or for Minnesota?

I think the answer differs. From a local perspective, someone else spending money here is a good thing, and spending our money somewhere else is not. A local benefit/cost analysis (which excluded non-local benefits and non-local costs) gives a different answer than a national B/C analysis. If someone picks up half the bill (which is typical for transit projects) or 90%, which was the case with the interstate, the local incentive for match is much greater than if the locality must pick up 100% of the cost.

The network, which was only briefly shown (and can be seen here) is essentially a hub-and-spoke system. Minnesota is at the end of the Chicago-based "Chicago Hub Network". Clearly this is more advantageous for Chicago than Minneapolis, Chicagoans can (going counter-clockwise) get to Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit, among others. Minneapolitans can go to Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago before the travel time becomes unreasonable. The access from Chicago is much greater, and thus their benefit is much greater. Chicago has a much greater interest in this than Minnesota.

E.g. If Wisconsin were to pay for the line from Milwaukee to LaCrosse, the extension to Saint Paul would be relatively short, and the political economics (local B/C) would be different than if Minnesota paid for half the line crossing Wisconsin.

The logic also varies based on whether the line can be used for commuter traffic in addition to HSR traffic. The history of transportation is rife with long-distance transportation infrastructure being adopted for short-distance travel. The interstate highway is only the most recent example (commuter railroads are another example).

The cost is not small. The nature of HSR is that Fixed Cost is much greater than other modes, and the Variable Cost (per trip) may be lower. If the demand is great enough, this trade-off is worthwhile, if demand is small, you have a white elephant and can never repay the initial fixed cost. Thus far, no HSR system pays its full Operating Costs, much less paying back its initial Capital Costs. Dick Soberman, a Civil Engineering Professor at the University of Toronto joked if we wanted to make symbolic statements about our community, we should build Pyramids rather than rail lines, since the operating costs were lower.

Some individual HSR lines may cover the cost of running trains, but not the cost of infrastructure. The idea of profitability is nonsense. If this were to be private, following the history of most transportation infrastructure investments, the first generation of investors are likely to be wiped out in bankruptcy. Governments do not typically go bankrupt, they just borrow from other sources, tax, or reduce spending elsewhere.

Some argue in favor subsidy, but the argument for a subsidy for a mode serving people undoubtedly of above average income (inter-city business travelers) has no basis in equity reasoning.

Reducing congestion also seems a spurious argument, since most congestion is urban, and that would possibly justify subsidies for non-highway urban transportation, but not for non-highway inter-city transportation. (Air transportation, the dominant mode of longer distance travel, is on the order of 1/10th the total Person Miles Traveled of highway travel, I don't know the breakdown of all intercity travel vs. all local travel (and it depends on definitions), let me know if you have a sourced reference). Even if inter-city travel were somewhat congested, that argues for pricing the congested mode more appropriately, not for subsidy. The environmental argument is also a straw-man, comparisons need to be made between auto and air transportation 20 years from now, not today's, and for must less than $2T, a lot could be done in those sectors. The source of electricity could be clean if we so chose, with adequate investments in new electric (e.g. nuclear, wind, solar) generation.

The cost people are not talking about is noise, the noise externality is much larger for rail than for other modes, as fast trains are loud and infrequent, and so don't generate the white noise that neighbors of highways can more readily adapt too. While my five-year old son may be happy living next to a rail line, with the ideal spot being the apartment in Chicago in The Blues Brothers, most people would not.

We also need to consider the opportunity cost of using tracks for passenger transportation. This means they cannot be used for freight. Europe moves a greater share of freight on trucks than the US, while the US employs more trains. If we want a HSR network, we will have to take freight traffic, thereby making the cost of rail-freight relatively more expensive (and if we do reduce congestion, the relative cost of highway travel less expensive) moving more freight onto trucks. While this benefits the trucking industry, I don't think there is evidence it benefits society at large.

In end we need to ask what is the best investment of $2T. Is it in transportation? If it is in transportation, urban or intercity? Freight or Passenger? Which corridors? Which modes best serve those corridors given the transportation network they are embedded in? If you had $2T what would you spend it on?

The presentation and my spoken comments (of which this is the "revised and extended version") can be seen here

Putting together the maps from four previous posts:

* Saint Paul Radial Lines
* Saint Paul Circle Line
* Minneapolis Orbital Line
* Minneapolis Circle Line

we have a composite Twin Cities urban transit network (excluding shared right-of-way buses and the largely non-urban commuter rail). Some stray lines have been cleaned up from previous maps, and alignments slightly more precisely drawn for the existing.

The color coding is as follows:
* Brown - Previously Planned or Already Built Light Rail Lines
* Purple - Proposed Minneapolis Streetcar Network
* Orange - Inner Circle
* Red - Outer Circle
* Green - Posited route alignment alternative
* Blue - Saint Paul Radial Lines

View Composite Twin Cities Transit Map in a larger map

Continuing a series on hypothetical future transit routes in the Twin Cities, it appears no one has drawn what such a dedicated right-of-way fixed route transit network would look like in Saint Paul. Individual lines have appeared in various documents, but I have yet to see anything assembled together. Hence a map of possible radial lines in Saint Paul. This network complements the Minneapolis Orbital and Saint Paul Circle Lines previously posited.

There are several radials. Clockwise from the SW we have the Fort Road/7th Street line, running from downtown to the airport (and continuing along the Hiawatha LRT line from there (sharing track also with the Minneapolis Orbital).

Next is the Grand Avenue line from downtown, up Summit Ave to Grand Ave out to St. Thomas University.

The Central Corridor remains (not shown)

There is a northwest line, following roughly a restored Como Avenue line from downtown to the University of Minnesota St. Paul campus in Falcon Heights. This would intersect the Snelling Avenue stretch of the Minneapolis Orbital.

A line runs north parallel to Rice Avenue and I-35E on existing Railroad RoW.

A line runs to the northeast along Arcade, switching to a railroad RoW (now the Bruce Vento Trail) to White Bear Lake. This passes St. Johns Hospital, but is a little off of Maplewood Mall (which is inconveniently located vis a vis existing RoW).

There is a line to the east toward Woodbury along Kellogg Boulevard and then 3rd Street, which passes through the 3M HQ campus and then along I-94 to Woodbury.

The Robert Street line runs south from downtown along Robert Street to I-494.

In downtown, the lines connect with the Saint Paul Inner Circle Service, and outside of downtown, all cross or share track with the Saint Paul Outer Circle Service.

View Saint Paul Radial Lines in a larger map

From ESPN TrueHoop Blog (via Shawn Haag) Getting the ball in the hoop is like commuting to work

The Price of Anarchy in Basketball ...

Brian Skinner, a University of Minnesota grad student (and not the NBA player by the same name), presented a paper at the 2010 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference about how a basketball offense is like a traffic network. And he used some of the theories that help cars get around cities more easily to understand how the ball can get around NBA offenses more easily.

(Worth noting is that in a pickup game on the Sunday morning after the conference, at least while I was guarding him, Brian's offense seemed pretty darned efficient.)

In any case, the University of Minnesota has wisely produced a little video in which Skinner explains the point of his research, the idea of which is that giving the ball to the best player every time is just not smart, just like having every car drive on the best road into the city makes everyone late to work. You have to spread the action around to make it most efficient for the most people.

Adobe, which makes Flash, is complaining about Apple Computer ensuring that only its own compilers be used for developing software on the iPhone OS,. This story from MarketWatch quotes an Adobe executive comparing Apple to the railroads (which strangely enough, I just did in the previous post in a completely different context.

Apple like railroads in 1800s: Adobe tech chief

"Apple's playing this strategy where they want to create a walled garden" around the Internet, Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch remarked at a tech conference in San Francisco. He then compared the company's moves to the deployment of railways with varying gauges in the 1800s, which precluded compatibility with the trains of rivals.

"If you look at what's going on right now, it's kind of like railroads in the 1800s," Lynch said.

Continuing on thoughts on high speed rail, we get to the question of rights-of-way. Acquiring rights-of-way for new HSR corridors is likely to be expensive. The owners of the best rights-of-way are freight railroads. Of course many of those lines are used for freight travel.

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway recently purchased BNSF for $28B.
http://stocks.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2010/Buffett-Rides-The-Rails-CP-NSC-UNP-CSX0504.aspx?partner=YahooSA">Buffett Rides The Rails

Current market capitalizations for major US railroads are (from yahoo finance:
CP $9.7B
UNP $38B
NSC $22B
CSX $21B
KSU $3.8B

So these six RRs (assuming BNSF at $28B) could be purchased for a mere $122.5B. (Which is apparently nothing in the modern world of Washington, and less than the market value of Apple, Inc.)

Then, the good passenger tracks for both HSR and urban transit could be stripped, and the remainder of the RRs re-privatized for some large (but not quite as large) sum of money.

I posit this would be cheaper than negotiating for lines on an individual basis. To illustrate, the cost of merely running rights for the Northstar Commuter line on BNSF track for about 40 miles, plus paying BNSF to operate the train was $107.5M. This is not grade separated, and even more importantly, has to share tracks with freight, prohibiting high-speed operation. This is well less than 1/1000 of the scope of a national HSR network (which has been estimated at $2T), (though perhaps more than 1/1000 of the distance).

At any rate, if HSR advocates are serious, they should contemplate nationalizing the freight RRs, and stripping them of RoW rather than negotiating piecemeal.

Mind you, I do not think this is a good idea.

I have now placed a copy of my presentation Transport, Land Use, and Value from April 30 at the UTRC based at CCNY online.

A PDF of the presentation is available at:

Transport, Land Use, and Value

The movies themselves can be downloaded here:
Movies

The webcast (including a Q&A session) is available here:
City College of New York University Transportation Research Center April 30, 2010 [webcast (Flash, 98 minutes)]

Thank you to UTRC for inviting me to New York, I enjoyed giving the talk and meeting everyone there.

Let me know if you have any questions about the presentation.

From NY Times
Driving Shifts Into Reverse

The Dean of Transportation Economics is quoted:

But the latest recession has caused some big changes. High unemployment meant that fewer people were driving to work, and a slump in consumer spending meant that less freight needed to be moved around the country. As gas prices soared in 2005, the number of miles driven - including commercial and personal - began to fall, and continued to drop after 2008 even as gasoline became cheaper.

"People were surprised by the very rapid rise in gas prices, and they changed their driving behavior," said Kenneth A. Small, a transportation economist at the University of California, Irvine. "But my suspicion is that it is temporary. As soon as unemployment gets back to pre-recession levels, we will see Americans doing a lot more driving again.

My own prediction is we have reached saturation, and we are approximately maxed out at annual per capita mileage until technology changes. We should expect about 10K per capita for a while, but should not see the long term increases we saw from the dawn of time until the present unless we get a new faster mode. This is because of underlying travel time budgets.

Continuing a series on circulatory transit routing, there is a difficulty providing services in the "suburb-to-suburb" market. The best markets will still be those with major attractions. This route connects a number of education, retail, and employment destinations, as well as connecting all of the radial transit routes emanating from Minneapolis (and some from St. Paul).

Starting on the east side, the line runs north to south from Rosedale Mall, down Snelling Avenue past HarMar, to the University of Minnesota St. Paul campus and State Fairgrounds, south to Energy Park, back to Snelling Avenue past Hamline University, intersecting the Central Corridor, down to Grand Avenue and Macalaster College, along Randolph to St. Kate's, down Fairview through Highland Park, down Edgcombe Avenue to 7th Street (intersecting, and sharing right-of-way with a 7th Street/Fort Road line), over to Hiawatha LRT, where it shares Right of Way under the Airport. Crossing the River will remain a costly proposition given the narrowness of the existing bridge.

On the south side, it leaves the Hiawatha LRT at Mall of America, and runs along American Boulevard south of I-494 in Bloomington. (the choice of above or below I-494 is tricky, but there seems to be more activity south of the beltway, and it better serves potential park-and-ride).

The line turns North at Edinborough Way and moves over to France Avenue, where it passes Southdale Mall and Fairview Hospital, serving Edina. It runs through the 50th and France district, and then cuts across to the Excelsior and Grand area, following 36th Street until it intersects with Wooddale Avenue, intersecting the Southwest LRT. It proceeds north on railroad RoW to the Cedar Lake trail. It turns north at Park Place Boulevard, with a stop at the new West End development. The line follows Xenia Avenue north to another railroad RoW, and crosses Theordore Wirth park. It runs along Plymouth Avenue until Penn Avenue (where it intersects the Inner Circle ), and turns north on Penn until Lowry Avenue.

The Orbital Line follows Lowry Avenue across the Mississippi River, turns south at RR RoW, and then east through Northeast Park and along Ridgway Parkway. It then follows frontage roads of I-35W until it reaches Rosedale Mall.

As with any hypothesized or "fantasy" transit line, all routings are first order approximations and many tens of millions of dollars in design will need to be spent to establish final alignments. There are an infinite number of possibilities (and a very large number of realistic possibilities), this seems from a cursory inspection to be some reasonable routes that have a shot at doing relatively well on an efficiency metric (benefits > costs), though I can make no guarantees of either absolute efficiency or optimality.

View Minneapolis Orbital Transit Line in a larger map

The Iron Law of the Twin Cities is that if Minneapolis has something, Saint Paul gets one too (and vice versa). The examples are numerous (arenas, campuses of the University of Minnesota, branches of I-35, chapters of the American Automobile Association, and so on).

In a previous post I posited a Minneapolis Circle Line . Of course Saint Paul would want to get in on the action.

I have drawn two possible fixed route, exclusive(ish) right-of-way transit lines (an Inner Circle and an Outer Circle), along with the already planned Central Corridor. I have not shown other possible lines, presumably radial, that would extend from Saint Paul (one imagines one on 7th Street/Fort Road to the southwest, a streetcar along Grand Avenue, something along Robert Street to the South, something to the west, northeast, and northwest.

The Inner Circle follows the Central Corridor line beginning at Marion Street but continues on University past the Capitol, past Regions Hospitalacross I-35E to Lafayette Road, goes south down Lafayette Road across I-94, and runs behind the proposed St. Paul Saints stadium through Lowertown, meets the Central Corridor again at Union Depot, and then jogs over to Kellogg Boulevard to run past RiverCentre, Xcel Energy Center, the Science Museum, the History Center, near the Cathedral, and up Marion Street back to University Avenue. It would serve re-developable areas near Lafayette road and Marion Street, and major attractions in the city.

The Outer Circle I have broken into two sections for convenience: North and South.

The Outer Circle (north) begins at the Dale Street station on the Central Corridor, runs north to the Pierce Butler route corridor, and goes east parallel the existing railroad tracks, behind the Minnesota Transportation Museum, across I-35E, and then south to University Avenue where it meets the Inner Circle alignment. It serves

The Outer Circle (south) also begins at the Dale Street station, runs south to Summit Avenue (I assume it would share right-of-way with the "Grand Avenue" streetcar should such a thing exist), proceed down Summit Avenue, to Ramsey Street, past United Hospital, serving the West Seventh area. It would turn south on Smith Avenue, cross the Mississippi River, to George Street, serving the West Side. It would proceed East on George Street to Cesar Chavez Street, and then Ada Street. It would cross the Lafayette Freeway and run along the edge of the St. Paul Airport. Here is the expensive part: a new river crossing would need to be constructed to get from the south to the north banks of the Mississippi River. The line would climb up Mounds Boulevard, serving Dayton's Bluff and Metropolitan State University, and then run southeast along 7th Street/Fort Road, to the Inner Circle.

Rings make the most sense in the context of existing (or future) radials, allowing cross-traffic in cities and shortening travel times for those not going downtown. Given that St. Paul CBD has about 3% of the region's employment (~40,000 jobs) (1990 statistics), new systems should not focus exclusively on such a small market, but should better help travelers reach diverse destinations across the city.

View Saint Paul Circle Lines in a larger map