Streetsblog New York City

Right now, Seattle is making as serious a commitment to transit as any city in the nation. Recently, Streetfilms got to take a tour of the newest addition to the city's network -- the 13-station Link Light Rail, which opened in mid-2009.

The route is beautiful, swift, and has great multi-modal connections. Service is frequent, with headways as short as 7 minutes during rush hour, and never longer than 15 minutes. And like many of the newest American light rail systems, the stations feature copious art.

Seattle has a lot of car commuters, but in a sign that many are looking for more efficient and environmentally friendly ways of getting to work, the new light rail line will be followed by several more additions to the city's transit network. As Seattle's Sound Transit CEO Joni Earl told us:

[Voters] in November 2008, by 57 percent -- which was a thrill in a recession economy -- voted to expand our light rail system, and our commuter rail system, and our buses... to add another 36 miles of light rail in the region. And to add 65 percent more capacity to our commuter rail system.

We'd like to thank everyone who talked to us for this shoot, especially Bruce Gray from Sound Transit, and Andrew Schmid for arranging it all. And of course a big shout out to the intrepid scribes over at Seattle Transit Blog, who cover the local transportation scene with zeal and gusto.

Manhattan CB4's transportation committee passed a resolution last night in favor of speedier transit and improved pedestrian conditions on 34th Street. The vote followed a brief presentation from NYCDOT outlining several options for a second phase of transit enhancements on the crosstown corridor. It's still very early in the process: The decision whether to pursue BRT, light rail, or streetcars, for instance, is at least a few months away.

The purpose of last night's meeting was to define goals for the project, so we don't have dazzling drawings or concept plans to show you. But DOT's Eric Beaton, a senior project manager in the office of planning and sustainability, did have an answer to the question that many Streetsblog readers may be asking: What happened to the 34th Street transitway concept that DOT and the MTA debuted last spring?

"That plan was a brainstorm, and we were very excited about it," Beaton told the audience. "We realized that the proper way to go about this was to take a step back and follow a proper process. That doesn't mean we've forgotten about it."

Thirty-fourth Street has a lot going on: huge numbers of pedestrians (especially near Penn Station), local and express bus service, lots of crosstown car and truck traffic, commercial deliveries, ferry connections, and massive new development about to take shape at the Hudson Yards site on the far West Side.

Along with improved transit speeds and pedestrian conditions, the elimination of conflicts between buses and commercial deliveries was a top goal for the committee. Co-chair Christine Berthet said that a center-median configuration would make the most sense: "Having the [transit] infrastructure in the middle and protected is the one that will work."

The question of running buses or building rail has preoccupied transit planners in many an American town, with Maryland's Montgomery County being the latest locality to choose between trains and bus rapid transit (BRT), which tends to be the less expensive option.

Bogota's Transmilenio BRT has won praise for its roomy coaches and well-designed stations. Photo: Aaron Naparstek

But another, far thornier aspect of the bus versus rail debate has made its way into the public dialogue, giving fodder to transit-minded bloggers from Matt Yglesias to Atrios: Is there a cultural bias against buses? The issue, fraught with social equity implications, made its way into a debate on conservatives and transit held yesterday by Transportation for America.

The debate focused largely on the themes of the book Moving Minds, in which co-authors Bill Lind and the late Paul Weyrich aim to convert their fellow conservatives into transit advocates. But Lind is also an unabashed critic of buses, which he believes are unappealing to average American travelers and impede the prospects for transit expansion.

"Most Americans like transit but don't like riding buses," Lind said today, adding that "if you give them a bus, they drive," but rail would be a more preferable mode than the auto.

Sam Staley, the Reason Foundation director enlisted as the conservative transit skeptic for the debate, was put in the unlikely position of defending well-designed BRT's ability to serve communities.

Depicting buses as second fiddles to rail is "underestimating the importance of the quality of service provided," Staley said. Where rail is treated as superior, he added, often it is "doing a better job of getting point to point, and doing it faster, than a bus," but well-funded bus systems "are doing a good job at competing."

For a more in-depth look at the bus-rail dichotomy, check out the Transportation Research Board's recent paper on how the choice affects local transit goals.

Everyone knows that Phoenix has a huge sprawl problem. But now transit-oriented development is on the upswing in this Sun Belt metropolis. In December, the Phoenix region opened one of the most ambitious transit projects in recent U.S. history: a 20-mile light rail line with 28 stops serving three cities (Phoenix, Tempe, and Mesa). Future plans include an extension within three years, with several new corridors being studied. 

The Valley Metro vehicles are handsome and comfortable, and thus far ridership has far exceeded initial projections -- with as many as 40,000 riders per day, compared to the expected 25,000. Each station features amenities and art installations. In addition, with many folks using the light rail as an intermodal step in their commutes, bicycles are welcome aboard. 

Writer, cartoonist, cyclist and transit advocate Ken Avidor points us to this video, which he used in a recent Daily Kos diary entry. Writes Ken:

The Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) Pod People are always challenging me to prove that PRT promoters are anti-Light Rail Transit (LRT). Here is a video by one of these libertarian, "free-market" guys claiming LRT is old and expensive and PRT is more modern and won't cost the taxpayers a dime. The fact is PRT is a Nixon-era concept and there is no evidence to prove it can pay for itself.

PRT, Avidor says on his "PRT Is a Joke" website, is often used as a "stalking horse" to undermine the funding and build-out of real-world mass transit projects. Its supporters include Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who, among other transgressions, opposes the expansion of that state's Northstar commuter rail line.

Judging from the above video, trashing new light rail service in Phoenix, the thrust of the pro-PRT argument goes something like this: 

Dude! It goes like a hundred miles an hour! You wouldn't have to read books or sit beside weird people -- AND you could listen to AC/DC!

On your iPod, of course.

This film, as featured on YouTube via Infrastructurist, shows the streets of Barcelona a century ago, taken from the front window of a tram going down the street. It's an amazing film. The central avenues of this Catalan city are so vital, so alive, a mix of every activity. Then the film compares the old streets to the same streets today. Quite a comparison.

The streets a century ago illustrate the principal of “tout a la rue,” meaning everything into the street. Cyclists, cars, pedestrians, streetcars, kids. And of course horses. Seems to work.

Interesting how bold the cyclists are in 1907. I wonder why they don’t seem to fear being tipped over by the streetcar tracks? They ride right across them, often at only a slight angle, and don’t get channeled into them. Were tracks built somehow with less of a gap between track and street? Were the tires of the bicycles fatter?

The views of the same streets today are distressing. I love Barcelona. It's one of my favorite cities. But the streets of today seem lifeless and sterile. Could they really be that barren today? Maybe the films from today were shot in the early morning, when few people were around. The streets certainly seemed very alive when I was there in 1994. Still, it's no doubt true that even the most active streets today are less so than those of a century ago. It's mostly the fault of the car, which we have given our streets over to so completely.

Ready for some transit system envy? This week's StreetsWiki entry comes from Livable Streets member Andrew Nash, who fills us in on how surface transit became the mode of choice in Zürich, Switzerland:

Photo: Nicholas Kibre/Wikipedia

The first thing one notices about Zürich is that trams are ubiquitous downtown. The city considered changing its tram network several times (either placing the trams underground or replacing the trams with a metro system), but voters rejected spending money on these ideas. However, in 1977, Zürich voters did approve an initiative to make the existing surface transit system work better by providing transit priority for trams and buses.

Transit priority means that public transit vehicles are given priority over other forms of transportation through such measures as traffic signal control, transit-only lanes, and traffic regulations. Watch carefully as a traffic signal changes from red to green just when a tram arrives at the intersection. Transit priority was not a new idea, but Zürich has succeeded in implementing it to a greater degree than almost any other city in the world. Zürich's public transit priority program is described in Implementing Zurich's Transit Priority Program.

Combined with Zürich's regional rail network, the extensive implementation of transit priority techniques enables the city to provide subway-like service without a subway, Nash explains. If the Zürich article interests you, check out Nash's entry on optimizing traffic signals for surface transit -- he's looking to add information about other cities that have implemented such systems.

Seattle's South Lake Union Streetcar is a 1.3-mile line that opened in December 2007, the first leg in the city's commitment to new transit and light rail. It passed the half million passenger milestone in its first year, surpassing ridership projections.

The streetcar features many top-of-the-line tech amenities, including real time arrival message boards, solar-powered ticket vending machines, and human-activated doors to save energy while the train is in layover mode. If you go to the Seattle Streetcar web site, you can find out the next arrival time and actually watch the streetcars moving via GPS trackers.

As you'll see in the film, development is booming along the South Lake Union corridor. "If you build it, they will come" certainly seems to apply here.

Last week Freakonomics picked up a story from the Riverfront Times that connects an uptick in shoplifting, fighting and other crimes in the St. Louis suburbs to a two-year-old expansion of the city's MetroLink rail system.

Ask virtually any store manager at the Saint Louis Galleria about shoplifting, and you'll invariably get two responses: One, it's out of control; and two, it's gotten exceedingly worse since August 2006, when MetroLink opened a stop just 500 yards from the high-end shopping center.

In the first six months of this year, Richmond Heights police made 345 arrests at the mall. That's nearly double the number of arrests made in all of 2005, before MetroLink opened its Shrewsbury line.

More alarming are the numbers of juveniles (kids under the age of seventeen) arrested at the mall. This year police are on pace to take 276 juveniles into custody for shoplifting and other offenses — a sevenfold increase over the 39 kids arrested at the Galleria in 2005.

"I know it's not politically correct, but how else do you explain it?" comments a frustrated Galleria store manager.

Not everyone is as reactionary. A police officer who regularly patrols the mall, asked to explain the "surge," replied: "Who knows? Perhaps it's the downturn in the economy. Or maybe it's the need for teens to feel like they have to wear the latest fashions."

Texas officials this week marked the opening of new lanes on the Katy Freeway, a stretch of Interstate 10 that runs 40 miles west from downtown Houston. The state has added 20 miles of interior lanes, including 12 miles of HOV lanes, which officials say will eventually be converted to variable-rate HOT use. The rebuilt Katy Freeway is 18 lanes wide.

The ribbon cutting for the $2.8 billion project was attended by Congressman John Culberson and Governor Rick Perry. The Houston Chronicle was there and got some choice quotes.

"This project, for all intents and purposes, is complete," announced Delvin Dennis, interim director of the Texas Department of Transportation's Houston District. "Tomorrow morning the (high occupancy-toll) lanes open. If you're not doing anything, take a ride on them."

Perry noted the roar of traffic below, above and around the crowd, which was gathered on a frontage road overpass.

"This is the sound of freedom we hear," he said. "These people need roads to get to work, to church and to school."

One kind of freedom Texans don't need, according to the state and Rep. Culberson, is freedom of choice.