With the kind assistance of Wendi Dunlap, who can whip up a website faster than I can whip up some biscuits, I am now blogging at Save the Waterfront Streetcar, a blog dedicated to the proposition that the George Benson Streetcar must not die.
The greatest part about the New Deal is the incredible infrastructure that it built which, for better and for worse, we still rely on today. Think about it. The roads and bridges and dams and park trails that youre using were crafted by a bunch of people almost 80 years ago. In some ways, hallelujah for the Great Recession, because how else were we going to get money to rebuild all of this crumbling infrastructure, much less build the new infrastructure of the 21st century, like broadband, smart grid and energy efficient offices and homes.
I think that’s basically right, although I’m adopting a wait-and-see approach to the rural broadband and smart grid initiatives. But the larger point is that infrastructure investments not only pay dividends for generations, they create new economic possibilities by reducing the distance between people. For thousands of years, cities and settlements clustered near rivers, then, more recently, railroads and highways. Infrastructure facilitates trade, commerce, culture… and community.
Everyone’stalkingabout this NYT piece on the almost-carfree German suburb of Vauban. It’s a great article, and worth reading. I want to specifically call out this section:
Vauban, the site of a former Nazi army base, was occupied by the French Army from the end of World War II until the reunification of Germany two decades ago. Because it was planned as a base, the grid was never meant to accommodate private car use: the roads were narrow passageways between barracks.
The original buildings have long since been torn down. The stylish row houses that replaced them are buildings of four or five stories, designed to reduce heat loss and maximize energy efficiency, and trimmed with exotic woods and elaborate balconies; free-standing homes are forbidden.
This give me two thoughts. First, the built environment really does stay with us for a long time. It’s much easier to reorient existing street grids to carless living — even if they’re from abandoned army bases — than to adapt new ones.
Second thought: is this a possible future for Sand Point?
At first blush, Obama’s HSR network appears simple-minded, and I intend to take him to task for that in a future post. Lines are shown connecting cities across vast distances that everyone knows are too great for trains, and best served by air.
On second thought, however, it seems entirely reasonable that, at some point in the future, travel in the continental US will be entirely on the surface, and long distances will be covered by very high-speed trains.
Imagine, for a moment, that a train could travel at 200 mph. This certainly appears to be a goal that could be reached in the next 70 years, and at that speed San Francisco would be five hours from Seattle. This, I will boldly say, is not an unreasonable time to spend traveling that distance.
But what, you will ask, of the slower trains, the corridor trains at 125 mph, the stopping trains? Well, consider Germany rebuilding after WW II. They did not adopt a one-size-fits-all solution to implement, they built some high-speed corridors connecting a few cities, a network of rail connecting more cities, helped sponsor European trains crossing several borders, and built other lines primarily for the haulage of heavy freight tonnage.
If it took twenty hours to travel from Chicago to Los Angeles, we would survive. Whether we will survive the last great effort to keep the airliners flying is a different matter entirely.
Here’s a neat site that shows the subway systems of the world, all at the same scale. Now, the definition of “subway” is pretty loose here, and you have commuter systems like BART and MARTA intermingling with real Metros like London’s and NYCs. Nevertheless, it’s pretty neat. Neat enough that I actually took the time to superimpose BART and the NYC subway on top of Seattle, to get a sense of how massive those systems are:
I understand that people bitterly oppose tolling roads. I really do. I was discussing congestion pricing the other day with one of my co-workers. I told her that if I were dictator, the first thing I’d do is congestion price I-35. She told me the first thing she’d do is have my wife put arsenic in my drink. Since she is an intelligent, well-educated attorney who lives in the ‘burbs — and would benefit from congestion pricing as much as anyone — I have little hope that it will ever be politically palatable.
Sadly, this is very true. Even among people whom I’d normally consider as fairly left-of-center, the idea of congestion pricing or gas taxes or any kind of mass transit can be very unpopular. There are plenty of well-meaning folks out there who are happy to recycle, even interested in saving the spotted owl, but won’t support policy choices that make driving more difficult or more expensive.
Yet even here, attitudes are changing, slowly. I was watching the film Singles again recently, and there’s a scene early on where Steve (Campbell Scott) is introducing Linda (Kyra Sedgwick) to the SUPERTRAIN. Steve is a transit planner, Linda is an environmental activist.
STEVE
Let me ask you a question. You think about traffic? Because I do, constantly. Traffic is caused by the single car driver. Single people get in their cars every morning. They drive and wonder why there’s gridlock. This is what I’ve been working on. If you had a supertrain… you give people a reason to get out
of their cars. Coffee, great music…they will park and ride. I know they will.
LINDA
But I still love my car, though.
Of course, this is just a movie, but it’s remarkable that in 1992, it doesn’t occur to Linda that driving to work is doing more damage to the environment than anything she’s fighting against in her day job. Nor does it occur to Steve to use the global warming argument to convince her to take the train.
If you re-shot that scene in 2009 (the year that the SUPERTRAIN finally goes live!!), you’d obviously include a bit about global warming. I think that’s progress. The connection is being made. Maybe more slowly and painfully than we’d like, but it’s being made.
Mega-region hubs are becoming more economically central to our spiky world. There’s no getting around this. Chicago has in effect sucked up scads of economic functions that used to be done by other second- and third-tier Midwest cities. On the east coast, Baltimore and Philadelphia and, yes, Washington, D.C. have prospered because of transit connections, including relatively fast rail, which has allowed them to grow by hiving off pieces of economic activity attracted into the world city orbit of New York.
Cascadia as a region, united by high-speed (or even pseudo-high-speed) rail would be a relatively large economic engine.
While I’m making random, half-assed demands for transit-only lanes, let us turn our attention to the intersection of 12th & Union (& Madison), where our friend the #2 bus must drive a meandering bow-tie shaped route to get across 12th:
Could the intersection be altered so that buses — and only buses — have a special traffic light that allows them to shoot straight across on Union?
I don’t know why I am unable to post this under your entry regarding the video, but if you still want the full version you can find it at: http://www.bikejax.org/search?updated-max=2009-04-16T15%3A57%3A00-04%3A00&max-results=10
Just scroll down if you don’t see it right away. SOrry if I could have done this better. I don’t usually do blog to blog sharing, but I was doing a search for this video for my Transportation Planning class and your site came up.
Sound Transit Latest News
Recent Comments