Sierra Club
Mike O'Neill rightly wonders if the Sierra Club is going to live up to its promise to support the next round of light rail. The club is still on the fence, apparently because park-and-ride lots encourage sprawl.
Let's be honest: park-and-rides do, in fact, make it easier for people to mix cars and transit. But as Will says, it's important to design with your users in mind. As long as you have to pay to park, you're imposing a cost and letting people make a rational decision. And park-and-rides eventually facilitate denser, transit-oriented-development down the line (notice how all the parking lots in downtown Seattle are being developed). Finally, Seattle has chosen (for good or ill) to go down the path of most mid-sized American cities and decided to use basically one system for both intracity and intercity transit (ignoring Sounder for a moment). So park-and-rides are an inevitability as the system expands outside of the downtown core.
As always, one has to consdier the alternatvies, and I will be curious to see what Mike O'Brien at the club has to say on that at the forum Will mentions on March 20. Because it's perfectly reasonable for the Sierra Club to be anti-light-rail, and they don't even have to be advocating an alternative. They're just an interest group with a singular mission: stop sprawl at all costs. That's one angle, but it's not the only angle.
But we as policymakers (yes, in the initiative-driven transit world, Joe Citizen is a policymaker) do need to weigh the alternatives. What, overall, is going to provide the best mix of decreasing fossil fuel usage, respecting the environment, increasing density, providing options to commuters, etc., etc. When you consider al the factors, ST 2.1 is a no-brainer.
Update: What Ben said. Habituating people to transit -- even if only for part of their commute -- is important in the short-term.
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No, the Sierra Club has the right to be anti-transit, but it is not reasonable for them to be anti-transit. They claim to be an environmental group and there really isn't any debate left about the fact that saving the environment requires an investment in rail transit.
And the rest of us do not need to give them a free pass on this, as though opinions might "reasonably" vary on the flatness of the Earth. In theory, and in actual fact, the Sierra Club opposition to rail transit has been a total disaster in Puget Sound.
At this point the Sierra Club has some 'splainin to do, and if they start by claiming their intentions were good, I'm not buying it.
"there really isn't any debate left about the fact that saving the environment requires an investment in rail transit"
Clearly you're wrong there (he says, while taking part in about 5 online debates on the subject).
Light rail induces sprawl. Sprawl induces larger houses (with more heating, cooling, products, lighting, pets, children...) and further commutes. People will always live about an hour from work (some 2 hours, some 10 minutes). Decrease transit time and you increase development further out.
I'm for light rail, but can't fool myself that it's purely for the environment. Sure, building light rail may stop us from building roads later on and will densify a bit around stations. But the real reason I want light rail is so that people (including myself when I need to get to the east side or to the airport) will have to spend less time in traffic - and we'll have a good system in place in case some day more of people do live car-free lives.
Serial Catowner forgive me, but come on. Saying the Sierra Club is anti-transit reminds me of the president who says you’re ‘with us or with the terrorists.’
We’re talking about investing $6 billion on transportation--I’m very interested in what environmental leaders like O’Brien—who call it like they see it, regardless of the political capital they spend in doing so—have to say about the project.
Sure, the Sierra Club promised to support light rail, that doesn’t give Sound Transit the right to demand they fall in line with whatever they come up with. I know park-and-ride lots are popular at community meetings, and I hadn’t thought about the sprawl connection, but it wouldn’t be the first time that the Sierra Club was demanding better before I even knew there was anything wrong with the way we were doing things.
At the same time, edge cities from Federal Way to Burien to Lynwood to Shoreline are rethinking their development patterns and embracing the health and lifestyle benefits of mixed use and increased walkability. For the thousands of dollars per spot we would otherwise spend on multilevel car-storage (concrete structures that big rarely get replaced by something better within a generation, unless they house professional sports), we can get a lot more bang for the buck connecting and improving pedestrian routes, building housing, or, hey, how about using the money to just make the rails go a little farther?
And, Frank, I have to say, I’m a little heartbroken. I was at the same NoRTID kickoff party with Will and I think he mischaracterizes it. I though it was cool of him to come and talk with us but I don’t remember the talk turning to punishing people for where they live. Maybe rewarding sustainable choices?
SC - I don't think that the Sierra club belongs in the same club as the flat-earthers at all. I think reasonable people can disagree about what means achieve what ends. America is becoming more environmentally sensitive by the day, and as the center shifts, so must the extremes. So I think they're absolutely doing the right thing by moving the goalposts further. That's what interest groups should do. I just think they have a specific, narrow agenda. That's fine, it's not my agenda.
Nate -- why are you heartbroken? Because I'm not vehemently opposed to park-and-rides? I don't want to punish people either. As I've said before I think a positive vision of transit, density, etc. is a good one. I don't believe in being punitive as a general rule.
Finally, I thought will was talking about a meeting next week so I'm puzzled as to how you could have been there. Or maybe it's just too late at night and I've been on the internets too long...
Ha ha, sorry for the confusion. Will references the NoRTID kick off party last fall in the first paragraph of his post, and says we were all more excited about punishing people for living in Eatonville than promoting light rail... So, I was whining about that.
No, light rail in the US does not induce sprawl. In some alternate universe, on the planet Zirgun, that might happen. Over a hundred years ago, when LA was mainly orange groves, it did happen. But it doesn't happen now.
Let me explain. Rail costs a lot of money. Powerful road and developer lobbies oppose it (this alone should tell you how likely rail is to create sprawl). So every rail system proposed in the US has to do studies of potential ridership. These studies must be very conservative, because as soon as they are published they will be attacked as being too optimistic.
Bottom line- in the US rail only goes where potential ridership already exists, or possibly, in our wilder dreams, where a company like Weyerhauser has long-announced plans to turn 5000 or 10,000 acres into a planned community of 30,000-40,000 people.
Think I'm wrong? Show me a rail startup in the past century in the US that didn't have a ridership base.
As for whether we need rail to save the environment, read that recent WASHPIRG report again, then head over to Climate Progress for a less rosy view of just how long we have.
Rail moves a ton of freight 403 miles on a gallon of diesel. That's a claim by a major railroad, so discount it by half and you still have a major advantage over rubber-tired anything. If ridership increases 12% a year, that's 8 years to double. Try folding a piece of paper on itself and see how long it takes before you can't tear it.
As for the Sierra Club, I've been listening to them oppose rail for so long that it is just as reasonable for me to call them elitest fruitcakes as it is for them to continue their opposition. It's not as though their prolonged squawking kept the fox out of the henhouse.
"Show me a rail startup in the past century in the US that didn't have a ridership base."
But a ridership base alone proves nothing. Increasing capacity for long commutes increases sprawl. It's really as simple as that. If you're looking for examples, go take a look at BART - the light rail system that's closest to ours in scope and geography (water-constrained road traffic). Hop on any line and ride it to the end. You'll find sprawling suburbs extending in at least a half an hour's drive in any direction. Most of these suburbs didn't exist before BART. My parents started their family out in those suburbs because there was affordable housing a half hour from BART - which could speed them to the city (though my dad often ended up driving so that he could take clients in his car).
Again, I'm for light rail and think the positives outweigh the negatives. It's a valid argument that fuel use can go down, but I'm not seeing any credible argument that sprawl won't increase.
That's a good point, Matt, but isn't it a land-use issue at that point?
I'm not sure what the Bay Area's land use guidelines were in the 1960s, but I'm going to guess that they were not as strict as Seattle in the post-1990 (i.e. post-Growth Management Act) era.
Thanks Frank, I didn't realize we had a Growth Management Plan. It looks like a good general plan to slow encroachment on forests, etc. But it seems like it tells towns where they can best expand growth - not by how much.
I have to disagree with your comments about BART. First, BART is heavy rail, not light rail. Secondly, having grown up in the Bay Area, most of those far out sprawling suburbs were there before BART. Because of housing costs in the Bay Area they would probably have existed even if BART had never been built. Just look at Southern California; Riverside County and the Palmdale area are examples of the same type of massive sprawl and they were built with no mass transit.
That's an odd thing to disagree with. Call BART light, medium, or heavy rail - it serves the same function as LINK will (mostly commuter).
Your view of housing prices seems simplistic. Given the choice between a 2-hour per direction commute and more space for the same housing price, many people will choose the smaller but closer house (/condo).
There is a definite difference between light and heavy rail. Light rail often runs in mixed traffic with stations fairly close to each other, both of which limits speed and increase travel time versus a completely grade separated system running at up to 80 mph and stations for the most part 2-4 miles from each other. This makes for quite different travel and development patterns.
As far as housing prices, first, you're looking at it through the prism of today's reality. BART was planned and built in the 60s and 70s (which is when my parents bought our house(s)) and when these suburbs began their growth. House in the suburbs, big yards and cheap gas so who really cared about the commute? Having grown up in Pleasanton YEARS before BART was extended to the Tri-Valley area, public transportation (or the lack of it) was not even a consideration. I don't think most Bay Area suburbs would have been all that different without BART.
Second, even with that I think my point is still valid. Growing up it was always amazing to me the number of people who would buy a home in Tracy (the Central Valley) and commute into the Bay Area, which involved at least a 2 hour drive EACH WAY. All so they could have that bigger house, or at least a house they could afford. There are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people in Northern and Southern California who begin their commutes at 4:00 or 5:00 am in order to reach their jobs by 8:00!
So I don't think my view of housing prices is simplistic; I think it is based in reality which can be easily seen by looking at the growth patterns at every American city over the last few decades. Admittedly, there are many people who will choose the smaller but closer house. But not as many as you might think; probably many more will not. With the increases in gas prices this will probably change, but for now that is reality today.
What you have to ask yourself is: why are housing prices so cheap in the suburbs? The answer is because it's less desirable to live there. The largest factor in this lower desirability is the fact that you live far from work.
Then ask yourself what happens to those same housing prices when a commuter rail station is built in that community. The commute time goes way down, and the housing prices go up. Where, then, are the cheap houses? They're the ones that still take 2 hours each way to get to work. This could be in the towns that didn't have a new rail station, but they could now also be new areas 1.5 hours from this new rail station.
The main reason housing prices are cheaper in the suburbs is 1) the land is cheaper and 2) the taxes are lower. If you ask any builder land costs are usually the biggest part of the cost of a home. Cheaper land equals more house for the buck.
You cannot say that it is because it is "less desirable" to live there. Desirability is extremely subjective; what is desirable to you may be totally unacceptable to the person next to you. Having a short commute may be your overriding concern in choosing where to live; to someone else the major criteria is having the large house on a one acre lot. Or the school district. Or one of a thousand different things. If what is most important to them is found in some far off suburb then they'll put up with the two hour commute.
Again, for MOST people, access to transit is a very minor factor in the choice of where to live, especially if transit doesn't go from your home to your job. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for transit and it would be great if all of the planned lines could be built as soon as possible. But unfotunately, for the vast majority of people rail as it's currently being planned just isn't going to work.
I'm sorry to keep on this subject, but I think you're missing basic economics here. The reason that land is cheaper in in suburbs is because it's less desirable. Price in housing is directly related to how desirable that housing is. If it was absolutely equal in everyone's mind to have a house in the suburbs or an identical house in the city, and the land in the city costs more, people wouldn't buy that house in the city and the price would drop (until it was exactly equal to the suburb house). A very real measure of how desirable something is is the price someone is willing to pay for it.
Actually, I'm not. In a perfect world where the economics of growth were truly "free and unhindered" and your "basic economics" were real that would be true but we don't live in that world. As I think we would all agree, growth in the suburbs is heavily subsidized, roads are subsidized at the local, state and federal level to an amazing degree, local governments zone and set policies to encourage growth in their areas (never mind the effect this has on other areas), tax breaks are given to builders, water and power rates are set at such a level as to enable expansion into previously unserved areas. This has been going on for over 60 years and is why we have the problems we have today. Your world of "basic economics" as applied to the American city of today just doesn't exist.
The other point from my earlier post you seem to be overlooking is that for most people "basic economics" is only a part, and usually not the major part, of most people's purchasing decisions. If it was, advertising wouldn't exist. People's reasons for buying just about anything, even a house, are more likely to be based on "I like how it looks", "I love the layout", "this backyard would be perfect for ______". Even the locations where people look for a house are in most cases based upon "I want to live near the water", "I like the east side", "It wouldn't be a very good neighborhood for the kids because of the traffic" or a myriad of other reasons.
Considering your handle, you're probably quite "rational" when it comes to something like a home purchase (nothing against you, several of my best friends are engineers), but most people aren't and builders and politicians know this, which is also why we have the world we do today.