M1EK's Bake-Sale of Bile

Rapid Bus ain't BRT

2010-02-03T16:53:44Z

A collection of comments made elsewhere.

First, on KUT today, you can hear yours truly with the following supporting arguments left out due to time, but brought over here from skyscraperpage:

1. Travel time savings quoted are versus the local (#1), not the existing express (#101). They're still only 20%; pretty lame.
2. The signal-holding doodad won't be much help in the most congested part of the corridor - anybody who spends any time between, say, south of 15th and 30th going northbound on an afternoon knows that the backup you're in is from the next 10 lights, not just the one in front of you that the bus could modify.

Things commonly considered part of BRT which are missing completely from this plan: reserved lanes, queue-jumping lanes, off-board payment. Were it not for the signal-holding doodad (which won't work anyways in most of this corridor), this would just be like normal bus service with new vehicles (they have articulated buses running normal and express routes in cities all over the country; the difference is that we apparently fooled the Feds into buying us new rolling stock on the justification this would be a BRT route instead of just a really marginal case of 'better bus').

Second, on Capital Metro's self-congratulatory post:

Very misleading. The 20% travel time reduction is compared to the existing LOCAL service (#1), not to the existing express service (#101).
Y'all may have fooled the Feds into buying you new rolling stock under the guise of BRT, but some of us aren't buying it. The signal-holding device won't be worth anything in the afternoon congestion on Guadalupe (it's not the light in front of the bus holding it up; it's the light six blocks down and the cars in front).

About all this service WILL do is finally put a nail in the coffin of rail on Guadalupe - where, in any sane city, rail would be delivered first, as it's where all the jobs and all the other activity centers are - not anywhere near the Red Line; not, even, over on San Jacinto.

]]> Third, my letter to our city councilmembers who serve on Cap Metro's board:

Councilmembers,
I hope you two will have the courage to once again forcibly steer Capital Metro off the path of Rapid Bus on Guadalupe, as your predecessors on the board did a few years back. Implementing Rapid Bus on the corridor that most needs rail transit in our city will be a decision we will be paying for 50 years from now, if not longer; and it will be politically impossible to move those buses off that high-density corridor once they've started running. In other words, even though we don't have the political will right now to run trains on this corridor (even though everybody knows it's the best place for them), we don't want to preclude the option to do so later on; but Rapid Bus will, in fact, make it effectively impossible to do that later on.

Nothing in the plan has changed since the first time we decided we didn't want to preclude rail on our highest density jobs/attractor corridor; there are no new proposals for anything more 'rapid'; it's still just going to be the Feds paying for most of a bunch of new rolling stock, with some signal-holding devices that won't be able to provide any speed or reliability improvements in the most congested part of the corridor (since the vehicles today are usually stuck in backups from traffic lights many intersections ahead - not just the one directly in front). Capital Metro is misrepresenting this service as a 20% speed improvement - comparing to the #1 instead of to the existing #101; and any speed or reliability improvements over the #101 are likely to be so minimal that they won't get a single person to leave their car at home and ride the bus instead.

Short link here: http://mdahmus.monkeysystems.com/blog/archives/000629.html

Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to help you in this matter. We can't afford to get this wrong.

Regards,
Mike Dahmus
City of Austin Urban Transportation Commission 2000-2005

Capital Metro flips city the bird

2010-01-28T14:32:24Z

or, in short, Ben Wear was right.

I don't have time to do anything but excerpt and link; incredibly busy at work and elsewhere.

Full Statesman article and relevant quote:

The city is due the money, say the two people caught in the middle: Austin City Council Members Chris Riley and Mike Martinez , who also serve on the Capital Metro board — Martinez as chairman.
"Capital Metro's obligations to the city are legally enforceable," Riley said at an board meeting last week. "That does not mean, 'whenever we feel like we're flushed with money.' That language (in the agreement) does not mean we can pay whenever we want.

"You can dismiss this as coming from a city guy. But I believe Cap Metro would be in a weak position if it came to litigation."

Note this proves that CM was lying about their reserves, and their enablers who insisted they'd be paying the 1/4 cent money owe Ben Wear a big fat apology.

Earlier coverage:

Capital Metro is trying to mislead you

No, I can't stop beating that horse

2010-01-18T14:21:15Z

A lot of people wonder why I keep talking about the Red Line, seeing as how any month now it'll finally open - it can't actually be stopped at this point. The dead horse analogy is repeatedly invoked, sometimes by people on 'my' side; often by gladhanders like JMVC on the other side.

]]> Check out this post on Capital Metro's blog, especially this comment:

alas, yes. When MetroRail starts up, it will be a commuter service to get people to work M-F. We can’t immediately expand to all day/night/weekend service because we are obligated by law to carry freight (remember passenger and freight rail use the same set of tracks). Of course we will work towards expansion over time–we want to take you to downtown at night!–but it will take time because we have to build more track and possibly get more railcars, too.

I have responded in a comment, but since it's always a crapshoot if/when they publish me (I'm in moderation and sometimes 'forgotten'):

Spending scarce local rail dollars on a service which even if/when double-tracked and run all day will, by the Feds own judgement back in 2000, be a ridership loser, is a really bad idea - especially when we have a much better local project needing the money (city urban rail plan).

Yes, even today, Capital Metro's #1 priority publically is sending even more local and federal rail dollars down the Red Line rathole when, as referenced above and in the last crackplog, even with two tracks and all-day service and overhead electric wire, the Feds rated the line unlikely to achieve even moderate levels of ridership. Why is that? Well, for those not tired of the dead horse, you can't take it anywhere worth going without transferring to a shuttle-bus, and never, ever, ever will.

(metaphorical depiction of Red Line courtesy of "anw.fr" on flickr

Dead horse? Capital Metro keeps re-animating it, so I guess I need to keep beating it.

A few relevant past articles:

History, Not Learning From

2009-12-18T14:18:32Z

A couple weeks ago, I posted this "Quick Hit" about the fact that the Feds rated what is now the Red Line very poorly back in 1998-2000. To be more precise, they actually panned a doubletracked light-rail proposal on what is the current Red Line's route (i.e. running down the existing freight rail corridor rather than going down Lamar and Guadalupe as in what eventually became the 2000 proposal). This Red Line proposal was floating around for years as the primary rival to the Red/Green Line (that 2000 LRT route). To refresh your memory, from the old Chronicle article:

The prevailing wisdom has been that a project in Smart-Grown Austin, serving major trip generators like UT and the Capitol complex, supported by Cap Met's ample sales tax revenue, would be a slam dunk for a "highly recommended" rating. (Conversely, the original Red Line, which had far lower ridership and -- even though it was on existing rail right of way -- only marginally lower projected costs, was headed, Cap Met insiders say, for a "not recommended" kiss-of-death rating, which is why the transit authority switched tracks at the 11th hour.)

The "original Red Line" they're talking about is, to be clear, a proposal floated around 1998 which would have put down two new tracks and run light rail vehicles on the current Red Line. Note key phrase: far lower ridership.

Now, Jeff Wood picks up the history angle, pointing to his masters' thesis on the 2004 debacle. Note that even today Capital Metro's Doug Allen is claiming that the Red Line should have been done with two tracks from the getgo (although the quoted $300M would pretty much have to be two tracks with those stupid DMU cars, not electric trains), yet, once again, two brand new tracks in the Red Line right-of-way still doesn't go anywhere worth going. Nor would three, or four, or ten tracks. The problem isn't the number of tracks; the problem is where the tracks are.

As Jeff points out,

I don't think this should be hard for everyone to understand. 38,000 riders for LRT in 2000 versus 2,000 riders for Commuter rail in 2004. It's not rocket science. The politics was messy and Capital Metro allowed themselves to get pushed into it. This didn't start with the current contractor, this started back before 2000 with Krusee who was head of the House Transportation Committee.

As I've pointed out on what seems like a billion occasions, Mike Krusee is why this happened back then. Go read Jeff's article for independent confirmation, if for some reason you doubted me.

Again: 38,000 riders for the 2000 light rail plan, 2,000 riders for the 2004 commuter rail plan (with or without second track).

The Feds figured this out before 2000. For one brief moment, Capital Metro knew it too. Why are they being so obtuse now, and more importantly, why are our City Council members on their board allowing them to continue this delusionary path to spending hundreds of millions of dollars MORE on a line that will never be a functioning part of our transportation system? This is how Tri-Rail wasted almost two decades and a couple hundred million dollars in South Florida - adding a second track to the wrong line. Will our elected officials have the courage to make Capital Metro stop before we make the same mistake here?

MetroFAIL

2009-12-15T16:20:24Z

A project of a former cow orker and friend of mine, Mike Kaply:

As for the contract stuff with Veolia and the new guys, I'm sorry, folks, but I know my limitations - and I don't know enough about contract law to be able to say anything worthwhile other than it sure seems like Veolia had their act together (specific and detailed rebuttals of many CM charges, while CM kept things vague). I also find it hard to believe you can switch contractors at this point and not push back the start date, as I told KUT, but then again, Allen probably has some experience with the new guys from up in Dallas, so who knows.

I see that over the weekend I also missed a second good KUT story by Mose Buchele on Veolia's response to being thrown under the bus. This is something I've hinted at for a long time - Capital Metro used Veolia as a scapegoat way back in March when the line didn't open, when in retrospect it clearly wasn't their fault. Highly recommended.

Red Line Death Watch Part 1

2009-11-23T20:00:16Z

No, not like the GM Death Watch at my favorite car blog; this is a "how long before somebody's killed" series. Today, some pictures of the intersection I talked about on KUT last week.

First, the overheard. Imagine you're headed west on 51st across Airport because you just went to Home Depot and are headed back to Hyde Park or points south. (Hint: Red River starts just south of this image as a turn off of Clarkson; turning on Clarkson is thus by far the best way into or around Hyde Park by car).

Not a lot of room there to queue up for that left turn, huh. Let's zoom in with google's streetview:

]]>

Uh-oh. That don't look good. But surely Capital Metro has done something about this intersection since then, right?

Yep. They've flapped their gums about how stupid drivers are to stop on the tracks - but have done precisely nothing to address the conditions at this intersection that almost always require you to stop on or just past the tracks if you ever want to make this left turn.

Guess who just did that on Sunday? If you were following the twitter machine, you'd already know. And yes, I know better; but no, the trains weren't running, at least not yet. At the time I made this turn, traffic was moderate - too much to sit across Airport until clear on the other side; too little to be in serious danger on the other side (i.e. if the gate started going down I had an escape path ready).

There is just barely enough space before the gate for a small car to stop, if they don't mind sticking out past the beginning of the left-turn bay. There is not enough room past the gate for a left-turning car to stop without risking having the rear end of the car at or past the crossing gate. In other words, quite often there isn't enough space for even one vehicle to queue up for this left turn without being in violation of the crossing gate or the double yellow behind. Not even one. So what do you think drivers are going to do here, in the real world?

You don't open up a rail line that requires that people be willing to sit through multiple light cycles on the other side of Airport to make this turn safely (if you can even judge that far ahead - you usually can't; oncoming traffic comes too quickly). You redesign the intersection to eliminate the turn, or re-engineer it some other way to make it safe rather than just hoping your gum-flapping will convince motorists to do something which may prevent them from ever making their turn. That is, unless you sold this thing as a pig-in-a-poke by claiming it would be easy and cheap to run diesel trains on existing track.

More later, if time warrants. Yes, there's other problems just at this one intersection.

Two quick hits

2009-11-18T17:33:04Z

Check out me on KUT yesterday about the intersection problems along Airport and notice that I'm not alone in failing to buy Capital Metro's BS about it just being a simple education problem. Good job, Mose, getting some key points across from a variety of interviewees.

Also,

While searching for something else, I stumbled on this old Chronicle article with this money quote, which backs up what I was saying for a long time about the failure of Capital Metro to seek federal funds despite it being promised in the run-up to the 2004 commuter rail election:

]]> The prevailing wisdom has been that a project in Smart-Grown Austin, serving major trip generators like UT and the Capitol complex, supported by Cap Met's ample sales tax revenue, would be a slam dunk for a "highly recommended" rating. (Conversely, the original Red Line, which had far lower ridership and -- even though it was on existing rail right of way -- only marginally lower projected costs, was headed, Cap Met insiders say, for a "not recommended" kiss-of-death rating, which is why the transit authority switched tracks at the 11th hour.)

Note, though, that this was back when they'd be talking about running new track in the Red Line corridor - not reusing the existing freight rail track (which, as it turns out, hasn't been as cheap or easy as advertised). The important point, though, is that the Feds (and Capital Metro) acknowledged that even with brand-new double-track, ridership on the Red Line as delivered today would never even approach the levels at which the FTA would have considered good enough to help pay for. And this wasn't the Bush FTA that hated rail - this was the Clinton FTA which paid for good light rail starts all over the country (although even Bush's FTA funded a couple, like Seattle's).

As per yesterday's crackplog, note that Capital Metro is still out there seeking funding, both federal and local, to double (or even triple) track the Red Line despite the fact that it won't make much difference for ridership - because as the Feds knew and CM used to admit, it doesn't go anywhere worth going and never will.

Why The Horse Isn't Dead

2009-11-16T15:04:00Z

Extracted from a comments thread on facebook; name omitted to protect privacy in case they mind.

we can always count on our buddy Mike to leave no dead horse unbeaten! Certainly Urban Rail will be great (if we do it right) and we all need to support it, but calling the redline 'useless' is a bit much. Perhaps useless to you, Mike, but so are dozens of bus routes (and roads for that matter) you will never use - that doesn't make them useless to the folks who do (and will) use them.

And my response:

http://mdahmus.monkeysystems.com/blog/archives/000573.html
(done with the old rail timetables, not the new presumably slower ones which aren't up yet).

The Red Line is 'useless' because for most people, it will be a slower commute than the existing express bus service. We spent a lot of capital dollars, in other words, to get lower quality service than what we already had. (And operating costs are likely to be close to express bus with the shuttle-bus costs added in).

And it is most definitely not a dead horse - because your agency continues to seek to spend additional scarce rail dollars on the Red Line (repeating Tri-Rail's mistake of trying to polish a you-know-what instead of building something more useful somewhere else) and on other similarly useless commuter rail lines - meaning those dollars obviously can't be spent on the CoA project.

So tell me, readers, is the argument of the CM guy compelling at all? Before the rebuttal? After? I really mean what I say here - the horse isn't dead, because it keeps getting fed. Those rail dollars (federal and local) could in fact be saved for the City of Austin's urban rail program - but once they're spent on commuter rail they're gone for good, and we aren't exactly swimming in other money to make up the difference. We need to stop further 'investments' in commuter rail, in other words, if the urban rail line is to have a decent shot at getting built in our lifetimes.

PS: Still a bike crackpot

2009-11-13T22:56:54Z

Recording this email for posterity, since I firmly believe this kind of discussion should be in the public eye - so it's possible for others to see whether the input was acted on or just ignored (as is commonly the case).

Nadia,
This is expanded feedback from the forum - as you may know I was on the UTC for 5 years and used to be a serious bicycle commuter and still maintain a healthy interest, and I live about 500 feet from the intersection in question.

First issue is the fact that the bike lanes 'downstream' of the intersection were recently restriped all the way back to the intersection. This removes much of the supposed reason for bike boxes (in the old design where the bike lanes didn't start for 100 feet or so past the intersection, the bike boxes would have allowed cyclists to be at the front of through traffic so they could get 'up and over' rather than having to wait behind motorists - now there is literally no reason to even get in the bike box.

The second problem is one of signage and paint - without a "Stop HERE on Red" sign, motorists don't typically stop that far back from the intersection - even when white lines exist on the pavement. Coloring the bike box would help but would, I think, not be sufficient.

Please forward my email to the CTR people and invite them to contact me if they would like. I'd be very happy to share continued observations as I go through this intersection an average of 2 times per day, usually in the rush hours.

Regards, Mike Dahmus
mike@dahmus.org

Board of Adjustment versus Urbanism

2009-11-11T21:49:56Z

Short and not-so-sweet; still no time for this.

Those who didn't think it was a big deal when the ANC crowd were appointed en-masse to several critical boards and commissions should be ashamed of themselves.

Go to this video. If it doesn't advance automatically, go to C11.

What's here? Well, it's just ANC guys Bryan King and Jeff Jack pressuring a property owner on a downtown block to tear down a deck so he can add more off-street parking. Note that not a single time in this entire conversation does anybody, to be fair, including the applicant, even mention the fact that some people patronizing this small business or living in the apartment might not drive every single trip. Only once does anybody bring up the fact that ample on-street parking exists (of course, gasp!, people would have to pay!)

This is downtown, people. This isn't the suburbs. For those who think the government influence on development is mainly to force density, this ought to be (but probably isn't) a wake-up call: the primary influence of the government is to force car-dependent development patterns to continue even downtown.

And those who think the ANC crowd and their patron Laura Morrison are going to leave downtown alone and just focus on keeping the neighborhoods suburban should think again, too. Nowhere is safe from these people; right before this video I watched the Planning Commission fail to come to a recommendation on a hotel at 5th/Colorado because the ANC contingent wanted to force another couple hundred grand in concessions for affordable housing (used as a convenient crutch in this case; none of those people actually have any interest in affordable housing or they'd support more multi-family development in their neighborhoods).

Sickening. You were warned; but most of you didn't listen.

Football: Myth destruction

2009-11-05T15:50:27Z

Sports post; political/transportation readers feel free to skip.

Once again, all over the stupider parts of the PSU sports internet, apologists are claiming that the Big Ten schedule is still stronger than what we'd have ended up with had we stayed the course with our old eastern independent pals plus intersectional games, or that Pitt is equivalent to Temple and should thus not warrant a 1-1 long-term deal, or whatnot. A particularly odious thread at BWI included an attempt to talk about the old schedules as "playing Temple and Syracuse every year". This is a really useful way to look at it, as it turns out! Thanks, homer!

Below, you find a table (old school HTML is all I know) comparing the current Sagarin rankings (using his combined rating of the brain-dead BCS formula and the far better predictor) for the teams contained within our 1982 MNC schedule (regarded as quite strong in retrospect), our 1986 MNC schedule (regarded as quite weak at the time and in retrospect), and our current year schedule. Sorted by Sagarin rank, so you can see strength against strength.

What this shows you, in a way, is what this year would have looked like if, instead of being in the Big Ten, we had played the same teams we did in 1982 and 1986.

]]> Rank1982 opponent (rank)1986 opponent (rank)2009 opponent (rank) 1Alabama (3)Alabama (3)Iowa (8) 2Pittsburgh (17)Cincinatti (7)Ohio State (19) 3Notre Dame (22)Pittsburgh (17)Michigan State (51) 4Boston College (28)Notre Dame (22)Minnesota (56) 5West Virginia (40)Boston College (28)Temple (61) 6Nebraska (43)West Virginia (40)Michigan (67) 7Rutgers (55)Rutgers (55)Northwestern (93) 8Temple (61)Temple (61)Syracuse (94) 9NC State (80)East Carolina (71)Indiana (95) 10Syracuse (94)Syracuse (94)Illinois (102) 11Maryland (103)Maryland (103)Eastern Illinois (124**) 12 Akron (146) Top 10111 Top 30442 Top 50662

** - 1-AA team (FCS); ranking likely inflated due to problems with the algorithm on non-1A teams.

Observe what I'm going to call the Temple/Syracuse line. In the 1982 schedule (with current rankings), 3 of the other 10 opponents have ratings this year worse than Temple's (and remember, 2009 has been a very strong year for Temple!). In the 1986 schedule, also, 3 of the 10 other teams are worse than Temple; 7 are better. In the 2009 schedule, however, 7 of the remaining 11 teams are worse than Temple.

With Syracuse, it's even worse. 1982 schedule? One team worse than SU. 1986 schedule? Ditto; only one team worse than the Orange. In the 2009 schedule, however, 4 teams are worse than SU, and one is only one spot better.

And those who would bitch about putting Pitt back on the schedule? Pittsburgh would be the second strongest team on the 2009 schedule.

Hey, you're welcome.

Cap Metro is lying to you - again.

2009-10-30T13:59:16Z

This time in an attempt to make excuses for the Red Line being such an unmitigated failure of execution.

First off, News 8 is the second media outlet to be completely fooled by this talking point being spread around to many media outlets as a talking point lately. I am also even more disappointed to see Mike Martinez fall for this load of crap.

"Comparatively, we're pretty much like the rest of the country. It takes time to build a rail system, but once you get it going, what we've seen in other cities is that it tends to expand in much more rapid pace," Austin Mayor Pro Tem and Capital Metro Board Member Mike Martinez said.
Martinez along with other council members and Mayor Lee Leffingwell all recently returned from a trip to Phoenix, Arizona, where they were able to look at Phoenix's $1-billion, 20-mile rail line that took 10 years to build.

Phoenix's line is light rail, not commuter rail. It is considerably similar to our 2000 proposal, as well as what Dallas, Houston, Portland, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Seattle have built. And, hello? You can't start a successful rail system with an awful starter line.

This talking point was more directly fed to a disappointingly credulous Lee Nichols in last week's Chronicle:

The total duration, he said, should be from 7.5 to 10.5 years, significantly longer than the four years attempted with MetroRail.

This, folks, is a lie - other rail starts that are commuter rail, not light rail, have NOT taken ten years to get running. What does take 7.5-10 years? Real light rail starts, you know, the ones that unlike commuter rail, require streets to be dug up, utilities moved, streets rebuilt in new configurations with brand new rails in them, and caternary wires hung up the entire length of the route.

]]> Our commuter rail start here, the Red Line, which is not light rail, required no streets to be dug up and no utilities to be moved. The only section of street affected was a tiny chunk of 4th street. Our commuter rail start, the Red Line, which is not light rail, did not require caternary wires anywhere. Our commuter rail start, the Red Line, is just like Tri-Rail - in that it primarily runs new vehicles on existing tracks with real cheap stations - and Tri-Rail took just a handful of years to get up and running.

Tri-Rail began commuter service in South Florida on January 9, 1989, the first of the major commuter start-ups of the 1990s.
Formed in 1987 by the Florida Department of Transportation to provide temporary commuter rail service while construction crews widened Interstate 95 and the parallel Florida Turnpike, Tri-Rail outlasted its temporary status, adding more trains and stations in the process.

Yes, that's right, Tri-Rail took about 2 years to get trains rolling on existing track, just like ours, with minor signal upgrades, just like ours were supposed to be. They are a far more apt comparison for the Red Line than is the light rail line in Phoenix.

And as for those signals? The ONLY place Capital Metro gets a pass with me, and it's because I didn't even think of it, is there -- with Tri-Rail, the existing signals just needed to be augmented with additional crossing arms to stop stupid drivers from going around the lowered gates, because the existing freight service was medium-speed and frequent. The existing freight service on the Red Line was infrequent and very slow - so the signalling stuff really should have been thought of as a complete rebuild, but obviously wasn't.

Again, let's recap with a summary:

Work Item	Required for light rail?	Required for commuter rail?
Buying new trains	Yes	Yes
Digging up streets	Yes	No
Relocating utilities	Yes	No
Laying new rail in those streetsYes	No
Reconstructing those streets (new lane configurations)	Yes	No
Brand new signals	Yes	Maybe
Federal oversight requirements	High	Low(*)

(* - oversight requirements: Because the Red Line didn't get federal funding (Capital Metro didn't even try), the amount of hoops they had to jump through compared to the typical light rail start, or even the typical commuter rail start with federal cost sharing, was much less).

This is, if anything, a bit more favorable than Capital Metro deserves. Left out of this table for lack of a good way to organize is the fact that the Red Line reused quite a bit of the planning from the 2000 light rail line, from the 1997 rail proposals (similar to today's Red Line), and other planning documents dating back decades. The implicit claim that planning for the Red Line started right before the election in 2004 is a lie.

PS to readers: this table is not an argument in favor of commuter rail on the grounds that it ought to be 'easy'. The problem with the Red Line is that it doesn't go where anybody wants to go - it doesn't matter, in the end, how easy or hard it was to get there, if the only place "there" is is a shuttle-bus.

Math with M1EK, Lesson 1

2009-10-13T13:58:29Z

It's come up again, this time on the twitter. The old road-warrior chestnut argument that it doesn't matter if urbanites pay a much higher percentage of their driving costs than do suburbanites, because suburbanites drive more miles overall. This tactic is a favorite of the folks at various car blogs that M1EK frequents as well, and it's time it was taken out back and shot.

Let's use our favorite Houston road as an example, thanks to AC for maintaining the story.

For example, in Houston, the 15 miles of SH 99 from I-10 to US 290 will cost $1 billion to build and maintain over its lifetime, while only generating $162 million in gas taxes. That gives a tax gap ratio of .16, which means that the real gas tax rate people would need to pay on this segment of road to completely pay for it would be $2.22 per gallon.

So this means that for every given dollar in road costs, the driver pays $0.16 in gasoline taxes while driving on that roadway. Got it. This also means that another $0.84 is subsidized. That subsidy can come from gas taxes assessed on other roads, many of those being arterial roadways inside the city of Houston that TXDOT doesn't actually have to pay to maintain; from 'local contributions' that TXDOT often requires for freeway construction - i.e. property and sales taxes; or various other sources - the key is that the remaining money required to build and maintain this roadway isn't gas taxes generated by this road itself. So far, so good.

So let's assume that yesterday, Mr. Suburban Road-Warrior dove SH99 long enough to assess $1.00 in road costs to TXDOT and paid $0.16 in gas taxes for the privilege. Got it. Here's what that looks like:

]]> But what about the suburbanite/road-warrior claim that this subsidy is irrelevant because the suburban driver drives more, and thus pays more gas taxes? Well, they do pay more gas taxes. If they drive twice as far on SH99 the next day, they pay $0.32 in gas taxes, which is exactly twice as much as the $0.16 they paid yesterday. They also cause twice as much cost to TXDOT to build and maintain the roadway (duh). $2.00. The more important question: does this change the subsidy?

As amazing as this sounds, the concept that a subsidy is a percentage that increases when multiplied by a static number is apparently too difficult for road warriors to grasp. Do you think these pie charts will help? I sure hope so!

What are some general conclusions to draw from this? Well, they seem pretty obvious, but some folks either can't or don't want to understand, so here they are, in black and white:

If the road funding system in a given state doesn't collect enough gas tax from suburbanites to cover the cost of the roadways they use, they are being subsidized by urbanites - NO MATTER HOW MANY MORE MILES THEY DRIVE!
The subsidy increases with the amount of miles driven; it does NOT decrease.
If you drive more of your miles on roads that actually receive gas tax funding than does a given urbanite, that urbanite is subsidizing you even if he drives one-tenth as many miles as you do (there would have to be a lot more guys like him for this to work, of course)
(this one is a bit tougher): Increasing the gas tax won't help unless the funds are redistributed (to cities, to maintain their locally-funded arterials) to address the subsidy. Doubling the tax assessed per mile is essentially the same as doubling the miles driven as far as the relative subsidy from urbanite to suburbanite is concerned - TXDOT would just have more money to build more roads that maintain the same level of subsidies.

Don't Let The Door Hit You, Fred

2009-10-01T14:15:58Z

One thing left out of many of the accounts of yesterday's fun time is that Capital Metro actually called the cops on the media before eventually relenting and allowing them to stay. Thanks to tweeting reporters Reagan Hackleman and Matt Flener for carrying the torch. Also, Lee Nichols' blog post yesterday had the most details early-on; nobody else mentioned Watson's implied pressure or got Jay Wyatt's attention, both kind of important.

]]> And now, on to some of Fred's greatest hits, compiled from the crackplog, to back up the thesis that he, after Krusee himself, is the one most responsible for Austin not having, and maybe never having, urban rail; all tweeted yesterday as well.

October 27, 2004, his own words (click on link for my words):

What Capital Metro does not intend to do, at least in the foreseeable future, is have lanes of city streets dedicated solely to bus traffic. When that occurs, the system is called "bus rapid transit." Lacking those lanes, Capital Metro calls its proposal rapid bus. But Gilliam made it clear he'd like to reverse those two words in the long run.
"My hope is that . . . eventually we will get to bus lanes," Gilliam said. "But
our plan is not designed around having to have them."

From November 1, 2004; click on link for much more:

The fact that the ROAD guys aren't fighting this very hard should tell you all you need to know about their feeling on the matter. But if you don't believe THAT, consider the fact that this plan comes from Mike Krusee, no friend of Austin and definitely no friend of public transportation. He and Fred Gilliam have come up with the cheapest possible way to show once and for all that rail "doesn't work in Austin" - at which point I'm sure their common cause evaporates as Krusee seeks road funds and Gilliam seeks bus rapid transit. Either way, central Austin in particular gets nothing but the back of the hand.
There is no way I can see in which urban rail can be salvaged if this election passes. David is parroting the dubious party line that this commuter rail line can be turned into "light rail" by running the trains more often and through TOD - ignoring the fact that TOD won't occur if nobody is riding the line when it opens (real estate developers will shy away from such development if the line looks like a failure AS HAPPENED IN SOUTH FLORIDA). And NOBODY has explained how Austin is going to be SO DIFFERENT from South Florida that the shuttle-bus liability won't be a huge problem here for building choice commuter ridership. High-frequency shuttle buses waiting for you when you get off the train? Check. Speedy rail portion of commute? Check. Cheap because they used existing track? Check. Now planning on shifting emphasis over the next decade to a much better rail corridor after 15 wasted years? One down, one to go.

Finally, much more recently, this post from August 26, 2009, pay special attention to this comment from Jeff Wood, aka "The Overhead Wire":

That main road is Guadalupe and is going to get plowed up anyways. There's not a lot of difference between repaving a street and repaving plus laying some tracks. And honestly, 37,000 riders is much better than 2,000.
http://www.fta.dot.gov/publications/reports/reports_to_congress/planning_environment_2915.html

$120 million to $736 million. 1/7 ratio for cost versus a 1/18 ratio on ridership doesn't quite add up does it.

And it would have been done with Karen Rae who is now second in command at the FRA instead of Fred Gillam who seems to be at the center of all this mess.

Summary: The guy never wanted to do rail in the first place. Whether or not he eventually came around to support the idea of commuter rail, his original idea was the same as Gerald Daugherty - allow a crappy rail line to be built and fail so he could stop getting bothered about light rail. Mission Accomplished!

What I Would Have Said

2009-09-25T14:54:20Z

on the Jeff Ward show yesterday had I not had to bail out while on hold. Short form because I'm writing this as I'm complaining about a bogus EZPass charge from last November that the lovely folks in New Jersey are just now trying to stick me with.

Dear Carole, a few points:

Yes, the commuter rail line sucks. Where have you been?. Yes, they're projecting just 1000 riders per day.
No, Rapid Bus isn't going to get 10,000 riders. They're going to get probably 90% of the current ridership of the #101, and perhaps 50% of the current ridership of the #1, with a few people from other buses in the same corridor. The number of people likely to ride Rapid Bus who aren't currently riding other buses in this corridor could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Why is Rapid Bus such a loser? Read the blog. Service that doesn't offer any real reliability or speed improvements over the existing #101 is logically not going to attract very many new riders.
No, I don't believe you when you say you only care about the poor bus riders and then immediately switch gears and argue for cutting Capital Metro's tax rate. The way to help the transit dependent around here is to make sure middle-class people have some investment in the transit system - by building services that choice commuters will use. Otherwise, voters are prone to actually cut the tax support for the system - which in the long-run inevitably hurts those transit-dependent riders.
Yes, Austin is plenty dense enough for rail. Austin has three very dense employment centers within close proximity of each other which could have been directly served by rail in the 2000 plan, on a line that travelled through dense residential areas and then out to suburban park-and-rides - a formula which has worked like magic everywhere it's been tried. The Feds, who tend to underestimate ridership, estimated we'd have between 37,000 and 46,000 riders on that line.Yes, this is worth it; most of these tens of thousands of riders are people who weren't previously riding the bus - and you could not have added freeway capacity for that many people for less money. To say nothing of the arterial roadways leading into downtown or the UT area, all of which are over capacity as well.

Dear Jeff, an additional two points:

The Houston light rail line did, indeed, have quite a few accidents - right after it opened, several years ago. Since then, it's grown to be the second most heavily ridden light rail line in the country in proportion to miles covered (around 40,000 per day) - providing the momentum for a massive expansion of the system all over town, approved overwhelmingly by voters. It, in fact, likely returns a higher percentage of its tax dollar investment than do highway projects in that area (one of which was recently studied and found to return 16 cents in gas taxes for every dollar spent on that road).
I'm not that hard to find. Seriously. Aren't you tired of hearing the same anti-tax anti-transit crap? How about talking to a guy who's strongly in favor of transit but still hates this commuter rail line? Wouldn't that be a neat change?

Dear Jeff's callers, an additional point:

The hoary old argument about buying each passenger a car (or in one case, running limos for them) ignores several realities: the roads are full; and the people who would be willing to take a train to save time aren't as willing to take a limo (or a bus) that's stuck in the same traffic their car would have been, See, it's a trade-off; you can get people to trade the convenience of having their own car for the day if you give them a faster and/or more reliable trip, but if you just give them the same trip, except even less reliable, they're not going to take it.

Dear people who supported the Red Line who fell for the "foot in the door" bullshit:

DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU DID? It's getting trivially easy for people to lump all rail projects, including the far more worthy CAMPO TWG plan, in with this 1,000 rider debacle - just as somebody predicted it would. People in Austin are getting the message "rail doesn't work" instead of the message "we need more and better rail". Too bad you didn't listen back in 2004.

OK THANKS BYE.