Hurray for mass transit, but it's no silver bullet
For one thing, bus and rail ridership represents only a fraction of trips now, and that's not likely to radically change soon. A Seattle think tank believes a balanced approach is called for, accepting the fact single-occupancy vehicles will play a huge role in years to come.
With U.S. gas prices blowing through the roof, transit ridership is growing along with enthusiasm for green vehicles that will run on electricity and liquid fuels, aka plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, or PHEVs. The Cascadia Center for Regional Development in Seattle has championed expanded transit for Central Puget Sound through proposals for an Eastside commuter rail line adjoining a walking and biking path and regional passenger-only ferry service.
We will continue to do so. We also back more and better bus service across the region, employer-provided transit such as Microsoft's outstanding Connector service, car- and van-pooling, and telecommuting. We see variable-priced highway lanes as essential to capping peak-hour solo drives, and also highlight improved roadway and vehicle technologies to ease congestion and pollution.
But all that said, vehicles are here to stay, and we'd better make them clean and green. That's where Cascadia Center's support for PHEVs comes in.
We need green vehicles in part because expanded transit is no silver bullet. Here in environmentally aware, pro-transit metro Seattle, it's important to note that although the numbers are ticking upward, transit is used on only a small percentage of all trips within the region. This past October, the Puget Sound Regional Council reported on its 2006 Household Activity Survey. In the fourth item from the top, you'll see that across the four-county Seattle region, transit's share of 2006 trips is in the low single digits, about 4 percent based on the bar graph. Single- and multiple-occupant vehicles accounted for 84 percent of trips, with transit, walking, and "other" dividing the remaining 16 percent. The 4 percent estimate is confirmed on page ES-6 in the survey's executive summary [PDF].
Urban affairs and transportation writer Miro Cernetig of the Vancouver Sun earlier this year discussed Vancouver transit ridership in light of British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell's bold $14 billion plan to beef up rapid transit rail and bus service in the next 12 years:
The premier hopes that by 2020 at least 22 percent of all our travels in Metro Vancouver will be on public transit, up from our current 12 percent.
Far-reaching Campbell is one of our favorite public officials, a North American leader on curtailing man-made greenhouse gas emissions who is using innovative public-private financing models to pay for transit and highway improvements. The current 12 percent transit share for metro Vancouver is quite impressive, and 22 percent or 25 percent would be outstanding.
Especially considering the baseline. A recent USA Today story accenting new highs in transit usage contains a sobering counterpoint left out of most similar stories.
Still, only 5% of workers commute by public transit, according to a U.S. Census survey in 2006. [American Public Transit Association President William] Millar says no more than 20% of households have easy access to buses or trains.
Thanks in part to the gas price jump, which is likely permanent, transit's share of trips within regions is growing. But many recent media reports focus on percentage growth in transit use versus the recent past, rather than the more revealing share of trips for transit, which remains exceedingly modest in most metro regions.
One response is that increased density will change that. Except that in Puget Sound, as former state Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald painstakingly documented on Crosscut, newcomers are moving to the edges of the region more than the inner rings. There is a limit to the coercive power of the government, and also a wide gap between transit advocacy and current transit market share in most locales.
Suppose transit use in the four counties grew five-fold from the PSRC's 2006 survey levels, due to high gas prices and growing concerns about man-made greenhouse gas emissions. That would still leave at least four-fifths of trips occurring via non-transit travel modes.
How do we approach this broad segment of intra-regional non-transit using travelers, while easing traffic congestion and carbon-bearing vehicle emissions? In a wide variety of ways, including more robust promotion of ride-sharing and telecommuting; regional expansion of variable pricing on highway lanes; and encouraging automaker success in developing affordable, reliable green vehicles such as PHEVs. (A PHEV-centric discussion of clean-source electricity versus fossil fuel-derived electricity is found toward the end of this post).
In the meantime, take this to the bank: Beware the man with the silver bullet.
This article first appeared in the blog Cascadia Prospectus, of the Cascadia Center for Regional Development.
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Comments:
Posted Mon, Jun 16, 12:28 a.m. inappropriate
Super train: One would think good coffee and good music would be enough to solve Seattle's traffic problems, but people just really love their cars.
Posted Mon, Jun 16, 8:19 a.m. inappropriate
mode share: Commute share is actually pretty important. It's what impacts "peak" demand.
Posted Mon, Jun 16, 8:21 a.m. inappropriate
also: People drive so we should build more roads? That's like saying people eat doughnuts so we should add more doughnut shops. It's still not good for us. (Or is it "we should make wider belts"?)
Let drivers whine all they want about traffic. Let transit get past that via rail and HOV lanes, including HOV on more in-town arterials.
Posted Mon, Jun 16, 9:06 a.m. inappropriate
Shooting Blanks: More than ever before, we need to be flexible in our regional trasportation planning. We are in a new generation for patterns of human settlement. Our 19th century approach to getting people to use mass transit is not working here. Just wait until we see the lack of turnout for the light rail line. It's too site specific and won't provide service to oher than tourists and thefew who can get to it.
Our State's growth management is ass-backwards. In the pursuit of higher density in our urban centers, density has increased the cost of housing, driving low and middle income residents out of the centers, creating sprawl. Just what the GMA was trying to avoid.
People decide where to live by making those critical decisions, first with their wallet, second by the location of the workplace and third, the quality of their life. With 70% of the growth of our region occuring outside Seattle, it's no wonder people are moving out. Our leaders have failed this critical test.
Manufacturers are NOT going to stop making automobiles that include every kind of convenience built in ,and the market for them is very strong. Just look at your car and compare it to one that you had back in the 80's. The best we can hope for is that our next President will make a "first-man-on-the-moon" decision to develop an alternate fuel source and begin implementation with the same vigor as the creation of the federal Highway program of the 50's and 60's. Until then, we must cope with this problem and try to make incremental changes to the way we get around. First, we need MORE BUSES, MORE PLACES, MORE OFTEN as originally included in the Regional Transit Project...and make them free!
Second, we need to invest in expanding the commuter rail line with more frequescies and more train sets.
Third, we need to not only preserve but improve our current roadway infastructure and make them smarter.
Forth, we need to manage our traffic more efficiency. Why are trucks in our rush hours? Why do some drivers NOT honor the passing lane? Why don't our automobiles have existing technology onboard to prevent cars from coming too close to each other?
Finally, let's expand our potentials to be flexible by encouraging more telecommuting, staggerd work hours, work shifts, and by the way, moving to the small towns of America that we abandonded dcades ago and are ripe for new industry, affordable housing, up and running infastructure like schools, fire, police, hospitals etc. Current and future telecommunication technology will make this a slam dunk.
So, lets stop the shooting of blanks and see the silver bullet as a multi-facited effort that plays on our greatest American strength....flexibility.
I can't wait!
Art
Posted Mon, Jun 16, 12:44 p.m. inappropriate
Fact of the Day: 95% of homes in King County have easy transit access: While nationwide "no more than 20% of households have easy access to buses or trains," the access to transit is much better in the urbanized areas around Puget Sound.
For example, King County Metro published a map in 2002 that showed the "areas within the Urban Growth Area (UGA) that do NOT fall within 1.5 miles of a Park & Ride lot or within .25 miles of a Metro bus stop or within a DART (dial-a-ride) area." The map is online on the 7th page of a Metro planning document you can download here.
According to Metro's calculations, only 4.9% of households within the King County Urban Growth Area did not have transit access by this measure.
So by this measurement, about 95% of urban households in King County have good access to transit.
Being able to board a bus near home is of course only one part of making transit attractive to travelers compared with driving. How often the bus comes by, how fast it moves, the comfort of the ride, and where it goes are important also.
Metro plans indicate the agency is working on improving these characteristics, although implementation of improved bus service could happen a lot faster if Metro, as well as Snohomish County's Community Transit and Pierce Transit were able to spend some of Sound Transit's billions and billions now being wasted on geographically-limited, decades-to-construct passenger railroads.
Posted Mon, Jun 16, 4:10 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Shooting Blanks: The GMA doesn't cause sprawl. Much of our current sprawl is due to outer counties drawing their boundaries too loosely. In other words, the GMA is too lax. Sort of like gun store laws that only pertain to one state, the loophole is that the law isn't global enough.
I agree on buses. We need rail for spine routes and rail will help concentrate development, but buses can spiderweb into every neighborhood and give riders near "door to door" service assuming they work in concentrated job centers. My wish is a $50m/year levy within Seattle to augment the 80/20 increase we're already getting. This would turn our adequate bus system into a very good one, and the cost would be very each to swallow.
And yes please, Sound Transit. More rail!
Posted Mon, Jun 16, 5:09 p.m. inappropriate
PHEVs: Cascadia Center acknowledges that wide use of Plug-in Hybrid
Electric Vehicles would, perhaps, "strain the grid". I seem to remember some similar mild warning prior to the pursuit of ethanol from corn. Something like, "... broad use of ethanol refined from corn may raise the price of food grains slightly."
I drive a hybrid (I think it's the patriotic thing to do) and I would love to be able to plug it in at night but I think if PHEVs became the norm we would be facing an electricity shortage. Raising the price of electric power (that people use to cook with and heat their homes) is not going to be politically attractive. If the PHEVs mean more reliance on coal fired generators then the environmental benefit is completely wiped out. The advocates of PHEVs usually mention gas-fired generators which, I believe, are in short supply in Washington.
It's not going to be easy but public transit is the only thing that offers a long-term benefit (I am careful not to say "solution" because I don't think there is one)
Posted Mon, Jun 16, 6:50 p.m. inappropriate
Cascadia part of Discovery Institute: Note that the Cascadia Center is part of the Discovery Institute, one of the leading advocacy organizations for Intelligent Design. Their "research" is not science; they simply look for data that fits a pre-conceived belief.
I can't speak much about Cascadia itself, but if it's similar to its parent organization, I doubt this is anything other than cherry-picked data to support a pro-car agenda.
Posted Tue, Jun 17, 2:59 p.m. inappropriate
The nuclear option: Certainly switching from gasoline to electricity has no environmental benefits if that electricity is produced from coal. At least we have a good hydroelectric infrastructure in the Northwest. But if everything is going to be plugged in, I honestly don't see an alternative to nuclear. Time to finish Satsop?
Posted Tue, Jun 17, 11 p.m. inappropriate
RE: RE: Shooting Blanks: "Much of our current sprawl is due to outer counties drawing their boundaries too loosely."
Right, and and before you know it non-planning counties will be forced to plan under the GMA to keep folks who can not afford to live in Seattle out of those counties. The oblivious hegemony will go right on refusing to "share growth," something the GMA also mandates, until citizens are wise enough to tell the "problems industries" that it's their solutions that are feeding the problems. Here's as good a place to get beyond Econ 101 as any I know:
Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy
Posted Wed, Jun 18, 11:12 p.m. inappropriate
Buses, cars and living close to work.: We are seeing a sea change in people's attitudes, but it still hasn't done enough to get them out of their cars in large enough numbers. Rail just won't cut it, except for us to expand routes between large urban areas. Rail will take years to build, cost vast amounts (as is our light rail system) and ultimately take very few people off roads. Even Europe, which has fabulous rail systems, has huge car useage. The biggest bang for our buck in the shortest time is still buses. Additionally, promoting 4 x 10 hour work days, work from home, and carpooling is going to help in the short run. And what about the quaint notion of living close to work? Do we really want to support allowing someone to commute daily 50 miles to a job?
Restarting bankrupt ideas like Satsop (nuclear power), or allowing oil drilling in every national park and seaside that the industry wants to drill in seems like ideas by people who are not thinking this through. Is nothing sacred for a quick fix of gas? Can't we see what we are saying here by saying we will drill anywhere for our fix? Are you willing to give up the Washington coast to oil or even wells in Mount Rainier? What have we become?
Posted Fri, Jun 20, 8:44 a.m. inappropriate
RE: Fact of the Day: 95% of homes in King County have easy transit access: Finally, someone states the obvious. People will ride any type of transit if it takes them where they want to go. That is the number one driver. I live in the Rainier Valley. A light rail platform is being completed 5 blocks from my home. Therefore I should be leaving my car at home and taking the train. I have proximity, frequency, speed, and comfort. However, the train doesn't take me to my job.
The only places light rail serves is downtown and the airport. If you don't work in either of those locations, the multi-billion dollar investment is useless. A political decision (not a planning decision) was made to make sure the train didn't stop at Southcenter (the #2 employment center in King County). The political class on the ST board didn't want to disturb the powers that be in downtown Seattle. So we have a system that is virtually useless (it provides transit options) unless you upzone a significant portion of the Rainier Valley to make sure ST hits their ridership numbers. What a terrible thing to do to a community just so ST can get even more Federal dollars.