Recently in Public transit Category

In a recent Streets.MN post David King and I argued that transit is usually best thought of as a club good, and the relevant club-members should be its users and potential users. We wrote:

Users should be financially incentivized to get season or annual passes (paid monthly with bank debits) and become “members” of the transit system rather than pay-as-you-go “riders”, which will encourage more usage, and many users to get subscriptions so they have the easy option of taking transit. As with many museums and zoos and other clubs, membership should be reciprocal, so joining the Twin Cities Transit System gets me “free rides” in Chicago or New York. This will increase the perceived ownership that passengers have for the service.

Many people pay for transit on a per use basis, either by cash or with a stored-value card. Others (in the Twin Cities 9.5 million rides of a total of ~71 million (which depends on what numbers you use) on Metro Transit) use a season pass for "unlimited" use ("unlimited" use still has limits, for instance in the Twin Cities you still need to pay for services > $3 per ride, i.e. Northstar). For instance, a Metropass is $76 per month (if you belong to an organization with 10 or more subscribers), and allows unlimited service. A U-Pass (for University of Minnesota students) is only $97 per (4 month) semester, with subsidy from the University. There are many options.

For the individual traveler, $76 per month is worthwhile at current fares if you make at least 34 peak trips (17 days per month) or 43 off-peak trips (22 days per month), i.e. if you are essentially a daily user for commute trips, or use it for a lot of non-commute trips as well.

Several (perhaps obvious) points:

1. There are probably a lot of existing riders who would benefit from a Metropass who don't get one (this would cost Metro Transit money);
2. Possessing a Metropass would induce me to make more trips by transit (since the marginal cost of use would now be zero);
3. At a relatively lower price, more people would get a Metropass. This may or may not increase Metro Transit's revenue. This can be achieved either by lowering the price of the Metropass or increasing the price of non-Metropass use;
4. We would expect more people to have passes than use the passes on the system every day (not every pass-holder need be a daily rider). People pay for the option of not having to think about price.

What benefits do clubs offer? Let's look at the examples of other public institutions that use the club model: museums, zoos, public radio for some ideas:

• Unlimited transit rides in your home city
• Reciprocal unlimited transit rides in other cities
• Free entry to the Minnesota Transportation Museum
• Discounts from participating merchants and at events (sports games, shows, concerts e.g.)
• A tote bag or mug
• A newsletter or magazine
• Two free taxi rides per quarter
• Free parking! (At park and ride lots? In downtown?)
• Eligibility to vote on governance (e.g. a Member's Board which has input into real decision making)

I am sure the tote bag will be popular, but there are limits to the ancillary benefits of membership in an organization, the main thing has to be admission to the service that organization provides.

The more important aspect of membership is that it changes the perspective from being a customer to being a member if not owner of the system. As a member of a club, I want there to be more members, as it helps spread the costs and raises money for the services provided. I become an advocate for the organizations I join. I feel part of a "larger social whole." I help maintain it, since it is my "property". A lot of this is "reframing" but the psychology is important here, people act differently based on whether they feel they have real input into decisions and real effect on outcomes.

Some cities have Bus Riders Unions, but they are often at odds with the transit agency. Almost everywhere has an Automobile Association (Minneapolis and St. Paul each have one), about which I have warm feelings since they help start my car when the battery is dead, or change a tire, or tow it when something else breaks. Transit workers are members of their union. Even transit agencies are members of APTA trade association. I cannot find an example of a transit system that organizes and treats its riders as members.

Why shouldn't riders be members of the non-profit organization that provides them transportation services on a regular basis? And why shouldn't they help govern that organization?

 David King and I argue The case for (and against) public subsidy for public transport at Streets.MN:

"In most of the United States and much of the world, public transport is publicly subsidized. Everyone in an area pays for transit whether or not they use it. This was not always the case, and need not everywhere be the case. Once mass transportation was provided to the public for profit (in Minneapolis and St. Paul as well as most other US cities) from the late 1800s through the first half of the 1900s. While rights-of-way were often publicly provided, the companies operating transit paid for the maintenance of those rights-of-way above and beyond what was required for transit."

From an anonymous source:

The Ramsey Star bus service had 115 park-and-ride users in fall 2012, two months before the Ramsey Station opened.

2012 ANNUAL REGIONAL PARK-AND-RIDE SYSTEM REPORT

Meaning of course that most commuter rail riders are not new, so your
denominator perhaps should only be 15 new riders or $880,000 per rider!

Drew Kerr at Working on the railroad reports:

"A new $13.2 million station in Ramsey also opened in early November, and is seeing an average of 130 weekday boardings."

So we have the capital cost of a commuter rail station at $100,000 per passenger. Note this is more than a car or even a simple house. The park and ride ramp ("ramp" is midwestern for "garage") has 800 free parking spaces.

Of course if they had the anticipated 800 daily passengers (assuming 1 passenger per vehicle, since this is Amerucah, and one vehicle per space, since why build excess), then the capital cost would be a mere $16,500 per passenger. How much do we spend per bus passenger at most bus stops? Is it even $1?

We have an entry in the Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge, which asks "How might we improve the way citizens and governments interact?". Ours is OpenScheduleTracker. Please go there to read the details and "applaud".

OpenScheduleTracker archives public transit schedules and provides an easy-to-use interface for understanding how schedules change over time, comparing different schedule versions, and identifying what areas are most affected by schedule changes.

 

What’s The Problem?

OpenScheduleTracker addresses three primary weaknesses in the way that transit system changes are currently reported and discussed:

1. Small changes are ignored

Public transit schedules evolve constantly, but we often focus only on big changes — new routes, new stations, line closures — and ignore small changes like schedule adjustments, frequency changes, and transfer synchronization. These small changes are not glamorous, but they can have a big impact on the way that a transit system meets or misses the needs of local communities.

 

2. Big changes are misunderstood

When a new bus route is added or a new rail station opens, the public discussion tends to focus on effects near the new facility: people want to know what’s happening “in my backyard.” These effects are important, but they are only part of the whole picture. Changes to transit systems have network effects which extend through the entire system: a new station in one neighborhood provides access to local opportunities for all users of the system.

 

3. Old schedules aren’t available for comparison

Analyzing schedule changes over time is often frustrated by the inconsistent availability of previous transit schedule versions. Transit operators’ policies for archiving historical schedule data varies widely, and even when schedules are archived the public often has access only to the current version. Public transit system schedules are significant investments of time, money, and expertise; when they are lost or inaccessible, the public loses the value of that investment.

To legally ride the LRT in Minneapolis, you need to buy a ticket, or tap in with your Go-To card. I recently made a trip to DC via LRT (at Franklin Avenue) (and a bus, and an airport shuttle, and an airplane, and a Metrorail train, and of course, on foot), and was anticipating having to tap the Go-To card reader at the middle of the station where it had been since 2004. Lo and behold, when I arrived, the reader was at the station entrance, where it should be, and not in the middle where it had been, where I might spend an extra 15 seconds walking and miss the train. I don't know when this change took place, but it is the kind of attention to operational detail and consideration of the customer's time that is important. So thank you unnamed persons at MetroTransit who ordered the Go-To card reader moved, or added another one.

PZ sends me to The Washington Post which discusses the WMATA/Metro strategic plan

Source document here: Momentum: Metro strategic plan 2013-2025

Several comments from a preliminary reading:

1. Metro benefits are presented in terms of reduced car use (p.10). This is the wrong way of looking at the benefits. The main benefits of Metro are the service to riders (more trips, faster trips, higher quality trips), not the reduction in congestion for non-riders. Who knows how many auto trips there would be instead? If Metro were closed for a day, everyone would work from home. If it were a month, people would carpool. If it were a few years, jobs would relocate. The ridiculous assumption that everyone would drive instead, and need to park in garages filling all of the central area are self-negating.

2. The region expect to keep growing, to 8.6 million people in 2040 (including an outer ring that includes many of Baltimore's suburbs). If it continues to grow, it will need more service. Will it continue to grow? I would much prefer a scenarios approach (e.g. high growth/low growth/decline) and consideration of alternative strategies for alternative futures. I bet if we looked at Detroit's plans from 1950 or 1960 or 1970 or 1980, they anticipated growth too (amusingly Google classifies that link as "fiction", unfortunately it is not downloadable, so I can only speculate). Maybe DC will become the east coast's primate city, displacing New York, analogous to London or Paris or Tokyo.

3. It looks like Fleet expansion solves most problems (Table 4), begging the question of why there needs to be new tunnels. (Not that there need not be tunnels, but high crowding is the price to be paid for dense cities, and Washingtonians should become better acquainted with their neighbors, just like Londoners and Tokyo residents). Further, why can't more streets just be converted to bus-only transitways to satisfy the demand? This should require some paint and little else at the margin. (And of course can be as expensive as you want to make it).

4. p. 11 "The Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) added 275,000 households and 295,000 jobs between 2004 and 2010. Of that growth, 6.4 percent of new households and 13.8 percent of new jobs located within one-half mile of suburban and one quarter-mile of urban Metro stations. The land area around these Metro stations comprised only 0.5 percent of the MSA land area, which suggests that Metro-adjacent locations are capturing far more than a simple share of growth" (6.4% of HH is only 17,600 HH, or 2514 per year over 7 years. Metro should do better than that. And a half mile is a pretty long area, most people within 1/2 mile in suburban Washington will not be using transit)

5. p. 12 "The land around Metrorail stations generates $3.1 billion annually in property tax revenues to the jurisdictions. Of these revenues, $224 million of incremental property value is from land near Metrorail stations – extra value that would not exist without Metro. " $224 million in incremental property value revenues (I assume this means taxes) is great. This should be captured to pay for the system improvements. Over 30 years this is $6.6 billion in additional revenue (assuming no additional development and 0% interest rates). Ballpark, this is oneway of capitalizing the value of the system. A value capture district around all the stations would be a good idea.

6. Figure 6 shows that Washington has more vehicle-miles per capita of transit service, and it is claimed this means more competitiveness. I am unconvinced of the causality here:

Do Agglomerating benefitting industries create density and demand public transit,

Or does transit create population density attracting agglomeration-benefitting industries?

I am all for mutual co-location as a theory and explanation, but there are reasons some industries (government and its courtiers, e.g.) likes to agglomerate, which are independent of transportation. Transportation serves and reinforces (and maybe attracts) that industry of course. A city without government (or finance, or one of the few other strongly agglomerating sectors) would see far less demand for central city development and commensurate transit. Since Washington has this industry, it should have more transit than a fast-growing metropolis without such industries (e.g. Phoenix)

More Vehicle-miles per capita without accompanying mode share indicates an inefficient land use pattern. I would think if people were closer together, fewer vehicle-miles of transit needed to be provided to serve the same trips. (The data I think comes from this 2004 study, which perhaps surprisingly has Minneapolis in third place for Economic Competitiveness, Figure 7, despite its relatively poor public transit showing).

Reconnecting America updates its Transit Space Race for 2013

There is no answer as to why it is a federal responsibility to fund local serving transit.

They provide a map of the US, with number of projects per CMSA. The Twin Cities comes in fourth (behind LA, Baltimore-Washington, and Chicago) in the number of proposed but unfunded projects. I am not sure whether to be proud or dismayed that we weren't first.

At any rate, it won't take long for the observant reader to identify some double (or I think triple) counting or alternatives under different guises both of which would likely never be built (streetcar and rapid bus in the same corridor, e.g.). Nevertheless, as a first cut summary, this is useful for the fantasy transit planner in all of us.

They also have categories of BRT (bus rapid transit) and Rapid bus. This is confusing to professionals, much less the public. We need better terms of art for one or both of these things. There are lots of terms floating around, but I think the aim is to obfuscate as much as communicate.

Update, Jan 22, 15:55. Reconnecting America writes in:

Prior to the advent of the steam railway, London was a metropolis of just over 1 million people. It was well served by both canals and turnpikes connecting to other parts of Great Britain. Internally, there were omnibus services. The London & Greenwich Railway was the first of many railways to reach London, with the first section opening in 1836 and being completed in 1838, making it possible to reach Greenwich in twelve minutes instead of the hour required by horse-drawn omnibus or steamboat. Famously built on a viaduct, the route was initially paralleled by a tree-lined boulevard that operated as a toll road, serving those unwilling to pay rail fares. However, the toll road was disbanded when the viaduct was widened to enable more frequent services to the densely populated urban core, ultimately growing from two tracks to eleven.

Soon many other railways sought to connect to London. To avoid disruption in the core, a Royal Commission on Railway Termini, appointed in 1846, drew a box around central London and decreed no line shall enter the cordon. [This box resembles the congestion charging zone adopted in the early 21st century, which aimed to reduce cars, rather than prohibit trains]. The result was railway terminals locating on the edges of the central region. London, like many cities, has no unified railway station, as the North, South, East, and West lines have no common intersection. The problem is worse though in London, as even lines from the north run by different organizations would be build adjacent (St. Pancras/ Kings Cross), or nearly adjacent (Euston), stations without convenient interchange. Later (between 1858-60) some penetrations of the box were permitted by Parliament, but most of the City of London (the original walled city where the financial district still lies) remained untouched. While preventing railways from severing the most densely populated part of the city, which would have been expensive for both the railways and the city, it created a need for a connection between the termini to allow transfers. The Metropolitan Railway, a private concern like all railways of the era but with some support from the Corporation of the City of London, was approved by Parliament in 1854. It aimed to connect the northern termini (Paddington, Euston, St. Pancras, King's Cross, and Farringdon, which was later added to the plan) to ease movement for through travelers.

The trends in the City of London were quite different from the rest of London. The City of London has seen a long trend of depopulation from 1851 (prior to the first Underground line) and for many years saw increasing employment, lending support to the notion that the railways, especially the Underground, enabled decentralization of residences and concentration of employment.

The Metropolitan Railway opened in January 1863, and was extremely successful. Clearly the market was much larger than inter-line transfers. The firm paid dividends throughout its life. Accounting in the early years of the Metropolitan Railway, especially prior to the Regulation of Railways Act of 1868, was a bit dodgy, and dividends were reportedly paid out of capital. To quote Jackson (1986) p. 38, describing the era of 1865, ``It was . . . a house of cards, a precarious game in which the level of dividend was kept up at all costs, by finding money from somewhere, with no regard to sound accounting or financial rectitude.''. Emulation is the proof of success. Many new railway lines were proposed, the 219 London-area railway bills brought before Parliament during the period 1860-1869 totaled 1420 km (882 miles).

Some of those lines were proposed prior to the opening of the Metropolitan, indicating the smell of success was in the air, though the peak years were between 1863 and 1866, following closely on the heels of the Metropolitan's opening. The most important of these was the Metropolitan District Railway (later called the District line), which ran just north of the River Thames, but south of the Metropolitan, connecting a number of the southern railway termini (Victoria, Charing Cross, Blackfriars, Cannon Street). Proposals for what became the Circle Line service linking the Metropolitan and District (roughly inscribing the box described above) were quickly proposed, but the two lines were not connected on both ends until 1884. Both the Metropolitan and District lines were constructed using cut and cover techniques. Later lines, from the City and South London Railway (first section opened in 1890) onwards, generally used deep-level tunneling techniques to avoid disruption of city streets, existing railway lines, and public utilities when they needed to be below grade. Outside the Circle Line however, the railways could emerge above ground and competed fiercely in some markets, while operating unfettered in others, to provide suburban services. In some cases this involved building new lines, in others it involved acquiring running rights on (or ownership of) existing lines. The development of suburbs was a way to develop traffic for lines that in the city, though profitable, were operating below maximum capacity, and thus maximum profitability.

Adapted from

• Levinson, David (2008) The Orderliness Hypothesis: Does Population Density Explain the Sequence of Rail Station Opening in London? Journal of Transport History 29(1) March 2008 pp.98-114.
  

Also see:

• Levinson, David (2008) Density and Dispersion: The Co-Development of Land use and Rail in London. Journal of Economic Geography 8(1) 55-57.

Drew Kerr of Finance and Commerce describes the new changes that are occurring in the Federal Transit Funding process in his article Funding changes may speed transit projects, which is found, unfortunately, behind a paywall. I get quoted:

David Levinson, a transportation engineer with the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies, said studying alternatives is valuable but that preferred outcomes aren’t typically impacted by such studies. “If you already know what you’re going to do, than the analysis is needless and there really is no point in doing it,” he said.

I am not integrally involved this process (fortunately), I only know what I read in the papers (and on blogs)). A key point to me seemed to be that they made it optional to consider alternative modes (e.g. LRT vs. BRT). Benefit/Cost Analysis is not required (nor was it before).

Travel time improvements would still be considered in that time savings would drive the number of passengers using the line. Similarly for quality improvements in principle.

Some debate on this is at the Wall Street Journal and Reconnecting America.

The rule itself is quite long, the press release is readable. The key points below, my comments in italics.

• FTA is adopting a simpler, more straightforward approach for measuring a proposed project’s cost-effectiveness. FTA will no longer require communities to compare a proposed project’s travel time savings against a hypothetical alternative project. Instead, FTA will look at the estimated cost to construct the project communities intend to build compared against a rigorously analyzed estimate for the number of passengers the project will serve.

  It looks like they are using cost-per-trip as their metric, but of course, not all trips are equal, and this new rule would seem to favor projects serving more short trips rather than fewer long trips (not necessarily a bad thing, but a thing).

• FTA is expanding the range of environmental benefits used to evaluate proposed projects. In addition to taking into account the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional air quality designations, FTA will also look at the dollar value of the anticipated benefits to human health, energy use, air quality (such as changes in total greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants) and safety (such as reductions in accidents and fatalities).

  This seems a good thing

• FTA is adding new economic development factors to its ratings process. FTA currently looks at local plans and policies already in place to encourage economic development and how well they’re working in a given area. Going forward, a broader set of economic impacts will be included, such as whether local plans and policies maintain or increase affordable housing.

  I am in general skeptical of our ability to accurately measure, much less forecast, economic development benefits . I do not understand why the decisions of non-transportation agencies (like affordable housing programs) have any bearing on whether to construct a mobility improvement whose main effect if any will be to locally increase the price of land (as accessibility benefits are captured by real estate). I am sure this has to do with the administration's Livability Initiative. However the point should be riders.

• FTA is streamlining the project evaluation process by reducing regulations and red tape. FTA will allow project sponsors to forgo a detailed analysis of benefits that are unnecessary to justify a project. For example, projects that receive a sufficient rating on benefits calculations will not be required to do an analysis to forecast benefits out to some future year. Similarly, FTA is developing methods that can be used to estimate benefits using simple approaches.

  Reducing regulations that were designed to mimic an idealized rational planning process but in the end were just make-work for agency staff and consultants in politically driven processes will save money, but is a defeat for rationalism.

The rule appears to weight all objectives equally, so cost-effectiveness is only one of several criteria here. Another point, assuming FTA objectively applies its rules (i.e. there is no political interference), then this ranking may produce different outcomes than the old ranking system. Projects "on the bubble" before, might not make it here, and near misses before might make it with this system.

Nevertheless, the whole system is still affected by federal subsidies for capital (not operating) costs, pushing local governments to capital intensive projects. See Chen, Wenling (2007) Analysis of Rail Transit Project Selection Bias With an Incentive Approach Planning Theory March 2007 vol. 6 no. 1 69-94.

There is also not a good rationale for federal funding in the first place, since the projects are each individually locally geared (there won't be much interstate travel on the Central Corridor LRT, e.g.), but federalism is a much larger topic, and given the game, the policy change is probably an improvement.

Happy Sesquicentennial to the London Underground. In its honor, I relink to a movie of London's growth from 1801.

More movies and higher resolution here.

Question to Regional Transit Planners:

Why does the Red Line Freeway BRT along Cedar Avenue/Mn 77 not continue beyond Mall of America on 77 and 62 to interline with the Orange Line on I-35W to downtown Minneapolis? [Yes I know, there will still be Express Buses services from 77 to 35, but you weaken the brand, no? All the other colored lines go to downtown, and red is a primary color.]

Why is it better to make people transfer at Mall of America to Hiawatha (Blue Line) and stop 16 times rather than go on the Freeway BRT and stop 2 times before reaching downtown? [Yes I know, it is not for people going downtown, but then, are we really expecting this to carry lots of people justifying high frequency.]

Are you afraid picking up passengers at Mall of America to downtown will reduce your LRT ridership? [Or am I too cynical?]

A poor implementation here will harm the future of Highway BRT just as the poor plan of Northstar is hurting Commuter Rail. The UrbanMSP thread is here, but I haven't seen these questions addressed.

A year ago, my mom gave me her SmarTrip card to use on the DC Metro system. SmarTrip, like GoTo, Oyster, and others is a smart card.

I used it on a recent trip to DC to go from the airport to downtown. I then met my mom for "tea". On my way back to the airport, the card no longer worked. The station agent kindly gave me a get of jail free pass, and I made it to the airport. When I asked SmarTrip what happened, they said the card was cancelled. Having not cancelled it myself, I asked who did this (My speculation was on bots harvesting unregistered cards, registering them, canceling, and transfering balances somewhere.). They said they couldn't tell me, but "ask a relative".

My mom, forgetting she gave me the card a year ago, thought she lost it, so cancelled it that morning, since that was the morning she was going to use Metro to meet me in DC, and wanted to transfer the balance to her new card. Lesson, the card is most likely to be cancelled when it is most needed.

She was kind enough to send me a new card in the mail, which I just registered under my own name.

London Reconnections: In Pictures: London Underground Stamps & £2 Coin :

"Earlier this year, the Post Office confirmed that they would be issuing a number of stamps to commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the opening of the Underground. The designs for these stamps have now been made public, and are featured below. The set features two second class stamps, which focus specifically on the Metropolitan Railway, and four first class stamps taking a broader look at the Underground. In addition, there are four long-format commemorative stamps each of which features a variety of Underground posters."

Friday saw two reports drop:

Minnesota Transportation Finance Advisory Committee
Summary Report and Recommendations

In short, what transportation will cost

and

The Itasca Project's Regional Transit System: Return on Investment Assessment (Executive Summary)

What spending money on new transit infrastructure in the Metro area will get us.

[I was on the Technical Advisory Committee of the latter report, which constitutes neither endorsement nor lack thereof. The final technical report has not dropped as far as I can tell.]

Alex @ Getting Around Minneapolis responds to my request for a map of the "Regional Fixed Guideway Study" in The best laid plans . He went to the library and scanned maps. Really.

He ends saying:

With that, I’ll close the vault for now. If you liked these and want more, don’t worry – I spend a lot of time at the library, and unlike our transit system, the archive of old transit studies is almost limitless.

If you are interested in Twin Cities post-Streetcar Transit Planning history, read it.

From the archives, we see that proposals for LRT in Hennepin County are not new, This 1988 document (PDF) has maps of the : Comprehensive LRT System Plan for Hennepin County

I am still looking for a digital version of 1970s "Regional Fixed Guideway Study" proposing a 37 mile transit system for Twin Cities. Anyone have scan/map?

(Other cool documents here). Also AJ Froggie's site.

I get quoted in this Minnesota Daily article about the Central Corridor. Some of the students are quoted talking about the "wrong people". I respond "“I don’t think the [personal] safety issues are any worse than with bus,”" Light-rail project 74% complete.

I assume the "wrong people" being referred to in the article are criminals, as opposed to ordinary townies.

The data on does transit bring crime is not well organized or complete. A 2011 study "THE EFFECTS OF THE ANNOUNCEMENT AND OPENING OF LIGHT RAIL TRANSIT STATIONS ON NEIGHBORHOOD CRIME", STEPHEN B. BILLINGS, SUZANNE LELAND, DAVID SWINDELL says:

The debate over crime and rail transit focuses on whether such investments “breed” criminal activities with new targets of opportunity or transport crime from the inner city to the suburbs. Yet, little empirical evidence exists on whether new rail transit actually does lead to increased crime rates around stations. In order to study this question, we test the relationship between crime and rail transit with the 2007 opening of the Charlotte light rail line. We use Geographical Information Systems software and micro-level data on reported crimes to generate measures of criminal activity in and around light rail transit (LRT) stations. We then implement a quasi-experimental before-and-after methodology using two alternate transit corridors to control for differences between neighborhoods that contain LRT stations and other neighborhoods. We find light rail does not actually increase crime around stations. Instead, we see a decrease in property crimes once the station locations are announced, which remains relatively stable after the light rail begins operating.

In the light of the recent closure of the New York Subway, some history on how it opened. From the forthcoming The Transportation Experience, 2nd Edition:

The London Underground opened in 1863. By 1870 other cities tried to copy. In New York, the publisher of Scientific American, Alfred Beach constructed, in secret, a short pneumatic tube railroad under Broadway. That it was constructed in secret (at night) is surprising to modern eyes, and was done because Beach did not have the approval of the Boss Tweed ring then governing New York City. Ultimately Tweed killed this nascent technological path though his influence over the Governor, who instead approved charters for elevated railroads. Though Beach tried to lower costs by switching from shield-tunneling to cut-and-cover, and Tweed soon went to jail, he could never get enough financial support to proceed. New York was condemned to elevated railroads rather than subways for the next 34 years when a new, non-secret, subway was opened.

Elevated Railways (Els) were constructed in Manhattan beginning in 1870. The initial foray using cable technology was soon replaced with steam engines, basically a railroad in miniature (though the gauge was standard). Els were eventually found on 9th, 6th, 3rd, and 2nd Avenues, and the latter two of these routes were ultimately extended to the Bronx. Manhattan Railways, their operator, was controlled by famed rail financier Jay Gould along with partner Russell Sage. These were electrified between 1900 and 1903 adopting the Multiple Unit Control system developed Frank Sprague, which was also applied to streetcars.

Despite New York's vastly greater population, Boston preceded New York in operating a successful subway line, opening in 1897 with trolley cars operating in a subway adjacent to Boston Common. Electricity enabled deep-bore subways (which steam made infeasible for anything but cut-and-cover technology). For instance, the Pennsylvania Railroad, which previously served New York City via Ferry from New Jersey, now could tunnel under the Hudson and open up a station on the island of Manhattan.

In 1894 municipal voters under the leadership of New York Mayor Abram Hewitt approved the Rapid Transit Act, authorizing a new Rapid Transit Commission to contract with a private firm to construct and operate for 50 years a subway line. The Rapid Transit Construction Company (later the Interborough Rapid Transit Company) was formed to bid on this contract, led by John B. McDonald and August Belmont. After being awarded the contract, it acquired the Manhattan Railway company, operator of the Els, so that it could offer integrated service. Fares were capped at a nickel. The initial route was dubbed Contract One, and its extension Contract Two.

Advantages of shallow excavation (cut-and-cover) over deep bore tunneling included easier access to the tunnel from the ground, and once operating shorter distances for travelers, so that elevators would not be required. The major downside was the expense of utility relocation and shoring existing buildings.

The new cars were eventually built of steel rather than wood. Though there was some concern about the greater difficulty of rescue given a crash with steel construction (axes have a hard time breaking through steel), the greater protection in event of crash proved to be a more important consideration.

In the first year, the New York Subway attracted 106 million passengers.

Advertising on the subway platforms was an early issue. The franchisee for advertising was Artemas Ward (descended from the eponymous US Revolutionary War general). Opponents were not happy that advertising obscured the then new and nice tilework in the subway stations. Proponents argued that advertising provided useful information for potential customers. This tension would last for decades. The Washington Metro famously limited in-station advertising, while other systems (less graced by federal largesse) embrace it more widely.

Belmont's IRT ultimately took over the Metropolitan Street Railway Company, consolidating control over transit. However the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (operator of the Els in Brooklyn) was given authority to build subway lines into Manhattan. The BRT entered Manhattan in 1908 taking its elevated trains across the Williamsburg Bridge into a Manhattan subway.

The control of transit became one of many fronts in local newspaper rivalries. The New York Times supported Belmont and continued private control of the subway, suggesting the test of a subway was a ``reasonable certainty of profit.'' while William Randolph Hearst's newspapers supported municipalization.

The 1908 Elsberg Law shortened the length of contracts, which made it more difficult for potential competitors to enter the subway market (as they would have less time to amortized fixed capital facilities like power stations), and was passed over the opposition of the Rapid Transit Commission.

The Dual System was established in 1913, locking in the BRT and the IRT as the dual private subway providers. The Dual System established the network for each, providing competition in Manhattan, while the IRT dominated the Bronx and BRT was the primary provider in Brooklyn and Queens. Initially IRT and BRT supported the five cent fare because it provided a minimum floor that could not be violated. It later turned into a difficult ceiling for them.

BRT went into receivership in 1918 (after a strike and the resulting tragic Malbone Street Wreck, among other events). It was reorganized as the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit Company (BMT). The IRT narrowly averted the same fate.

In 1924, a new Independent City Owned System (IND) was established (opening in 1932) to compete with the private BMT and IRT, with a line from the Bronx through Manhattan to Brooklyn. While fares were fixed, competition was hoped to improve quality of service and the new line would add needed capacity on a system now handling over 700 million riders per year.

The capacity on the different services varied, as they were constructed at different times and used slightly different technologies. At the time of the IND opening, the IND could move 90,160 persons per hour per track, the BMT 73,680, and the IRT 59,400. Later technological improvements in signaling improved capacity on BMT and IRT. Turnstiles also were innovated to improve flow entering congested stations and the accuracy of revenue collection.

The downturn in the US economy was felt in New York. The IRT went into receivership in 1932, like the BRT before it. The private lines were municipalized in a process called Unification that was complete in 1940. Only $19 million from the IRT (and none from the BMT) was recovered to repay the funds laid out by the city as part of the Dual Contracts.

References:

B.J. Cudahy. Under the Sidewalks of New York: The story of the Greatest Subway System in the World. Fordham University Press, 1995.

C. Hood. 722 miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

D. King. Developing Densely: Estimating the Effect of Subway Growth on
New York City Land Uses. Journal of Transport and Land Use, 4(2), 2011.

Getting Around Minneapolis: Traffic Control Device for Non-Vehicular Traffic Vehicles : ""

Alex nails it. Application of motor vehicle traffic control devices to pedestrians is wrong.

I don't know how I missed this, Via CA, Patch reports on a "Pedestrian Seductive" project in Hopkins:

"Planners envision Eighth Avenue as a ‘pedestrian seductive’ corridor that will entice riders into the downtown from the light rail station planned for Excelsior Boulevard. This artist's rendering offers one vision of the proposed light rail station and the Eighth Avenue gateway to downtown. Credit City of Hopkins"

Let me just say, watercolors of trees and brick in the sidewalk are hot. However, steps from apartments onto sidewalks are merely amicable. Almost anything would be a higher and better use post-LRT than what is there now.

Wikipedia says the town used to be the Village of West Minneapolis, but took its name from the train station, named for the landowner (Harley H. Hopkins) on whose property the station was built.

The map is here.

A propose the previous post on bus stops, the University of Minnesota has a new set of campus shuttle and connector signs. The distinguishing feature is the use of QR codes. I am not sure how I feel about this, QR codes seem faddish. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to get statistics on how many relatively tech-savvy UMN students use the QR codes daily, compared with the number who text, call, or go to the website get information.

More info here, including real-time moving buses.

Metro Transit is undertaking a Sign Test on routes 54 and 74. (Top Figure)

"Use the “Stop Number” at the bottom of the sign to access predicted real-time departures via NexTrip at metrotransit.org/mobile and metrotransit.org. By summer 2012, you’ll also be able to access information by Bus Stop Number at 612-373-3333."

OK, better than not having the information (second figure), but the sign itself should convey information (third and fourth figures) about:

(1) which routes serve the stop,

(2) where they go,

(3) how often they run,

(4) what time of day they run.

I am not always looking at a smartphone, (I may not even have one). I don't want to have to look at a smartphone for basic information. The excuse I have heard is that it will be expensive to deploy the signs and make it more difficult to reschedule buses, since someone will have to go out and change the signs. Yes, of course that is true, but aren't these the same people who tell me the value of LRT is its permanence rather than a bus's flexibility? A small signal of permanence about bus routing might be warranted.

Mike Isaac - Social - AllThingsD: Mapping Silicon Valley's Own Private "iWay" :

"That’s why many engineers live in the much more hip San Francisco, relying on the private network of shuttle services provided by each of the major tech outfits, which have no issue carting their young, valuable staff back and forth through the 40-mile stretch between the Valley and the City by the Bay."

Original here.

Now @ streets.mn: Affordable housing is existing housing: ""

Mike Hicks @ streets.mn: Good transit needs good roads | streets.mn:

"Streets and highways that see lots of bus traffic should be prioritized for repair and repaving projects, and not just because it would help the bus glide along more smoothly. Much like the broken windows theory of crime, I feel that there’s a strong case for a similar “broken pavement theory” related to the quality of life in a neighborhood.

Minneapolis and Saint Paul have begun attacking some long-damaged streets in the past few years, and it’s often remarkable to see the road surface and sidewalks in a pristine state. Battered pavement is often a sign of bureaucratic paralysis brought on by budgetary belt-tightening over the course of years and decades. As freeways were built in the latter half of the 20th century, city streets were often left to rot.

While a lot of attention goes into designing and maintaining parks and plazas as public spaces, streets are the most basic type of public spaces I can think of. They should be treated with respect, and designed to facilitate many different modes of travel. Better surfaces don’t just help cars or buses—well-designed spaces make things more comfortable for cyclists and pedestrians, and improves the value of properties along the way.

Next time you feel that busted old street, think about the decisions that led to it becoming a low priority, and try to make sure it doesn’t happen again."

In a recent streets.mn post: Do or do not, there is no plan, (a Yoda reference for the Star Wars challenged, where "plan" is a verb rather than a noun) I complained about over redundant planning, speed of implementation, and paralysis by analysis for inevitable projects like the Midtown Greenway transit line. Google churns up 26,400 links for Midtown Greenway Streetcar Plans Minneapolis, so this is hardly a novel or under-considered concept. Pick one.

Is this a good project? Or how could it be a good project? I was not intentionally clear on that, since the point wasn't whether I liked it, but why spend so much money on planning for something you will do anyway (If I correctly read the powers-that-be).

However, if you wanted to design a transit corridor, something in the Midtown Greenway, already pre-grade separated exclusive right-of-way with no traffic lights, one block off a major activity link (Lake Street), connecting high-frequency LRT at either end, with major activity at Uptown, LynLake, Midtown Global Market, and the Kmart at Nicollet is about as good as you can ask for, along with all the crossing bus (or future streetcar services once Minneapolis gets its way). The only wish is that it were somehow wider to accommodate bicycles and two lanes/tracks of transportation service continuously with room for stations and more greenery. But constraints are what create great design.

This of course should, like almost everything in the Twin Cities, be bus rather than rail based. It should be real high-frequency bus rapid transit, with stations and payment before boarding, and with informational signs. It should have electrical vehicles to reduce local emissions (the exact technology I will leave to vehicle engineers, whether it be on-board or via cable or wireless). Nice looking BRT with grass down the middle (as in the attached picture [the vehicle of course could look nicer]) along most of it. It would more or less operate like the most successful transit system in the Twin Cities, the University of Minnesota's Campus Connector.

Why BRT and not rail? This was mostly explained here, but there is one further point: reducing transfers. Buses can enter and leave the greenway at either end (and with some additional ramp construction, somewhere in the middle) and then continue on to other destinations (e.g. the University of Minnesota, St. Paul to the East, The I-394 corridor to the west) which might not otherwise have direct rail service from the Midtown Greenway, or might not have it yet (e.g. the idea to tie the Midtown Greenway into St. Paul) since construction is not instantaneous.

One expects stations every half mile or so, at major crossings, but BRT would provide the possibility of express services on the corridor that skipped some stations.

Mode choice is not generally a marginal thing. For a given market (a market here is an origin-destination (OD) pair, by time of day. [We could further break this down by purpose of trip, or socio-economic class of the traveler, but we won't here.]), either almost everyone chooses one mode or another. Very few markets are competitive. To be competitive, the alternatives have to be perceived as having almost exactly the same travel time, frequency, reliability, and other characteristics, or the advantage in one characteristic has to be exactly offset by another. I am going to briefly describe transit use patterns.

Consider downtown Minneapolis. The table below, from Planning for Place and Plexus (chapter 5) shows estimates of work trip transit mode shares into downtown (the destination) from all origins. As can be seen, in some cases (peak hour), mode share in 2000 was 44 percent. If for all origins, the mode share was 44 percent, then for some origins it was much higher than 44 percent, and for others it was much lower than 44 percent.

Downtown is one kind of market, and larger cities than Minneapolis will even have higher transit mode shares. Non-downtown is a different kind of market, with a transit mode share much closer to zero. The regional mode share for all trips in Twin Cities is estimated at 5 percent for work trips. If the destination mode share is much higher than 5 percent for downtown Minneapolis (and downtown St. Paul, and the University), then it must be lower than 5 percent for other destinations. The US national number for mode share for all trips is under 2 percent, from the 2009 NHTS (though up from 2001). The 2000 Twin Cities TBI gives us an unweighted estimate of 1.4 percent of all trips by public bus. Soon the 2011 TBI will be out, and we can update.

Theory suggests there are two equilibria because transit is a positive feedback system (and the primary competing mode, automobiles, is a negative feedback system). The more transit riders, the more revenue, the higher the rate of buses (or trains) per hour (and the better the service, as with more riders, express and other services can be offered). At high levels of ridership (relatively high mode shares), losing a few riders because of small random exogenous shock, or even a bus-full will not be noticed in the travel times (schedule delays) of the remaining riders. At medium levels of ridership, losing just enough riders to result in service cutbacks will have a noticed effect on headways and thus schedule delays, driving transit ridership down further. This is the vicious circle that has destroyed transit in most of the US. As students of systems theory know, vicious circles are just virtuous circles in reverse. An exogenous shock increasing transit use should increase supply provided, reducing waits, and thus further increasing use. We imagine this might be a sharp sudden increase in the price of fuel. This only happens if the supply system is responsive, which typically happens with free markets, but not necessarily under government management.

So in a world where people do have the ability to have an automobile, either many travelers (in a narrowly-defined market) almost always use transit, and the frequency is high (the case for selected to origins to well-served activity centers), or almost no one does (the case almost everywhere else).

This says to me, fixed-route transit investment should be highly, highly focused in markets (OD pairs) where it is, or can cost effectively and financially sustainably become, the dominant carrier.

The transit goal should be reframed.

Transit is not competing to double its regional mode share for all trips from 1.5 to 3 percent. It is competing to increase its mode share in specific markets from 40 percent to 60 percent to 80 percent, and to add markets where it can dominate. (Regional mode share might be a byproduct of that, but it is an improper goal). Otherwise, the service is spread out like peanut butter and does nothing well.

To be clear, we cannot put the genie back in the bottle. As a society, almost all new urban form since the 1920s has been climbing up Mt. Auto and down Mt. Transit. Every change we make to the network to make it more convenient for cars makes it less convenient for transit. Every change in land use adapted to the automobile is maladapted to an environment served by transit. It would probably take another century of concerted effort to reverse this, and there is no evidence that efforts are concerted.

Yet, there remain markets, mostly those that existed before the 1920s, where transit is competitive, and even dominant. Instead of chasing butterflies, transit systems should focus on its dominant and dominatable markets, and play to its strengths. Everyone can think of local butterflies that are diffusing rather than concentrating transit's attention.

If, where, and when the transit service is good, it will attract transit-oriented people to organize their lives around transit services, and may encourage new people to become transit riders. It might even encourage transit-oriented development to shelter those transit-oriented people, and transit-oriented stores and businesses to serve them. It cannot do this where the service remains poor.

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Notes:

1. Depending on how precise we want to be with our definitions of origins, we can figure this out from Census data (at the block group or tract level). But we can't know this from data at the block level. Unfortunately for analysts, there is a wide degree of variation within very small geographies, as people typically walk to transit, and walking is sensitive to relatively small distances and micro-scale factors. The Travel Behavior Inventory is too small a sample at the block level to compute block level mode shares directly, (as is the Census or American Community Survey). Models will give us estimates, and a regional planning model with 1200 transportation analysis zones and 24 time slices will estimate this number for 34,560,000 markets. In integers, most of those would be zero trip markets. In the planning model which uses real numbers, each of those markets has some probability of using transit.

2. There are insufficient observations for the Twin Cities from NHTS (apparently 11 unweighted transit users) to estimate transit mode share for the Twin Cities from the NHTS.

3. In my view, the purpose of transit is of course transportation, since other outcomes, like land development, follow from the utility of the network in providing real services.

4. In contrast to transit, where people are mostly a benefit in terms of service time, the more people who drive, the higher the travel time for all concerned (since capacity is hard to add in the short run). Driving is self-limiting (~2000 vehicles per hour per lane), transit services are limited at much higher levels of capacity (usually not reached except in the largest cities), and are usually instead limited by demand.

In response to Can Pay Stations for Parking be used as GoTo card readers for bus pre-boarding? Charles Carlson sends this along from Metro Transit:

We see definite application in arterial BRT/rapid bus corridors. We’ve been discussing this sporadically for a couple months and are actually prepared to release an RFI on this concept to gauge industry interest. New York City Select Bus service did use a repurposed parking meter, but it was more like the kind you find at Minneapolis Parks parking lots and only issued a paper receipt, with significant down time/reliability problems. And whether you used cash or a Metro card, you still needed a receipt for Select Bus only … not an elegant system. In subsequent applications NYC has used the more traditional TVM model. But they also have 50,000+ users/day on Select Bus corridors, so the comparable usage isn’t quite there to justify a big machine everywhere. Here are a couple pictures:

We’re looking at something closer to the new Minneapolis meters. These units are much more limited in functionality than full-scale TVMs, but offer a number of advantages (cost being a primary one, if these ended up at $5k-$10k vs $80k-$90k for big TVMs).

Our concept is that the meter would issue a pre-encoded paper “smart ticket” for validation and subsequent transfer. We anticipate parking machine limitations mean only 1-2 types of tickets would be possible to issue, so coordinating a consistent/predictable customer experience with broader regional fare policy may be challenging. Coordination meetings with Minneapolis Parking show some initial promise on the machines, but significant re-engineering is probably needed to issue compatible media to avoid duplicative or parallel infrastructure. We’d encourage coin/credit card users to obtain a GoTo card (or its successors) if they want a more advantageous pricing structure.

Charles

Minneapolis and other cities have been putting up pay stations so that people can pay for parking via credit card. It seems to me those same technologies could be used to have pre-boarding payment for buses. If the meters could read a GoTo Card or accept payment for transit, they could be easily used along major bus routes and speed boarding. The same meters could be used where there is also on-street pay parking, but at least the same technology could be used elsewhere if not the same device, which should have synergy.

Is there any example of parking payment systems accepting transit payment (like GoTo Cards)?

I doubt it because of the institutional issues, and the general lack of coordination between parking and transit agencies, but it seems a simple opportunity for transit pre-boarding payment to piggyback on an infrastructure for collecting and transmitting money, rather than constructing their own.

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Image from Bob Ingrassia