Last week, John Niles, oft-quoted rail critic, tweeted:
With more rail & TOD, higher fuel prices, & more climate awareness, why can’t PSRC write 2040 Plan to double transit market share?
Good question! Fortunately, the plan Niles is talking about does exactly that… where it counts.
Niles is referring to this chart (PDF):
The transit share of “all trips” increases from 2.9% to 5.2% under Alternative 5 . But the share of “work trips” shoots from 10.4% to 19%. That’s pretty close to doubling, and significantly more than the baseline scenario.
As I commented on the Cascadia Prospectus site (where they’re equally confounded by the plan), the reason that this is important is that it’s the work trips that cost us all the money. If someone needs to run out for milk in Issaquah at 10pm, sure, that counts as a “trip,” but it’s not really an expensive trip from a peak capacity perspective, because the roads of Issaquah aren’t clogged at 10pm.
The trips that are expensive to add capacity are the peak, “work” trips. And for those trips, additional transit service and right-of-way is the only realistic way to add enough capacity.
Sadly, it also shows how poorly we’ve done our built environment in the last 50 years or so. Not much open at 10pm, but in general I don’t think you should need to drive for a small errand. Here in the U-District I have 4 full-service grocery stores within a mile (3 more if you want to bike a couple miles).
Niles stands by 8%, all-trips
The above comment on my request of PSRC for 8% all-trip transit mode share is an apology for lousy performance expectations coming from spending billions and billions of dollars on a light rail system that is supposed to transform mobility in the region.
I don’t happen to think moving work trip transit market share to 19% and non-work to 2.4% represents a transformation.
The 140 character Tweet referred to my on-record comment to PSRC at http://www.psrc.org/projects/trans2040/comment/Comments%20Only/item_8205.pdf to move all-trips market share from 4% to 8%. The 4% refers to the 4.2% in the 2040 Baseline, second column, third line from the bottom in the chart above. The Baseline incorporates all of Sound Transit phases 1 and 2.
The PSRC Plan is about what to spend and build above the Baseline, which is already committed to be spent by 2040, according to PSRC.
The 8% I propose that PSRC seek for all-trips transit share represents a somewhat higher number than the 5.2% accepted above by Frank. 5.2% to transit is the forecast result of tolling every expressway and arterial in the region, and using the money to fund Sound Transit phases 3 and 4.
The vast majority of daytime trips in the Puget Sound region are non-commute trips, so it is perfectly reasonable to focus on transit market share for all trips, commuting and non-work together.
Talking about a 10pm milk run in Issaquah is a distraction. It fits well within the 92% of non-transit trips that are compatible with my advocacy of PSRC showing us how to get to 8% transit share.
A graphical picture of travel in the PSRC region by time of day and by trip purpose is available at http://www.bettertransport.info/pitf/PSRC-tripPurposeGraph.jpg .
While Niles wants to double transit market share, I’d like to go ahead and advocate for doubling walk/bike share as well. Both of them go together.
How do you double transit market share? I prefer doubling non-auto market share instead of just transit. To answer that you must also find out what will get people to choose transit (or walk/bike) over their automobile?
Easiest answer is land use. I agree with joshuadf. Not only you shouldn’t have to drive, you shouldn’t even need transit for life’s basics! We need to think beyond just TOD or just transit. Transit is nice but if I could walk or bike I’d rather do that instead.
The land use change is simply not aggressive enough. The baseline population distribution has more than 40% living in rural and outlying urban areas. Even within core urban areas, how the growth is distributed matters. If the infill is still low-density, auto-oriented style development, people will drive because it’s designed that way.
I currently live in an outlying urban area. My household never takes transit or walk to Costco or Safeway, or to drop my sister off at violin practice simply because everything is so spread out, meaning transit service is ineffective (cul de sacs, dead ends, limited grid connectivity, high speed arterials, etc.) We’ve been discussing plans to move back to Seattle (all of us work/school there) to an urban neighborhood that’s more walkable and transit friendly but the economy put that plan on hold. So in a sense, we are trapped in the suburbs.
If there was a mass exodus from the auto-burbs back into the city, meaning a net population/jobs decrease in those areas in the baseline. It’s guaranteed that transit would dramatically increase. How realistic is that scenario? I don’t know but it seems more plausible every year that passes by.
Challenge accepted. Alt 6: close I-5, replace with trains. Practically free, and just look how many people will get out of their cars when there isn’t a freeway for them to drive on.
Niles is just trying to pull a “slick trick” here. He’s choosing a metric and area in which transit will never do what he claims is good.
The number of trips made by suburban drivers is almost unbelievably huge- these are people who might make 4-5 trips a day without even noticing it. This is much different from transit riders, who tend to be more efficient and avoid trivial trips, such as you might make to save 10 cents on a gallon of laundry detergent.
Transit will never compare on a “number of trips” metric because the suburban driver wants to make many trips, and the transit rider doesn’t.
This is just another “look over there” trick by Niles. A big problem for Puget Sound is productivity lost to congestion, and there is no reason at all to imagine you would want to spend money supporting or improving trivial suburban driving. In fact, what he’s really showing is that the amount spent on rail transport has been tiny compared with the amount spent on roads, which over the past 50 years has actually made things a lot worse than they were.
Niles is probably too young to remember that there was a time when suburban families had one car, made one trip a week to the grocery store, and made their children walk to school or take the school bus. Raising the gas tax to restore that equilibrium would probably be the best way to solve all these “congestion” problems.
Nice to be “too young.” However, I was a child in the suburbs in the 1950s and recall very well the pattern that Serial Catowner describes.
Passenger rail funding around Puget Sound is in the process now of ramping up from zilch to enormous as a percentage of government surface transportation spending in the region generally. So let’s stipulate that “balance” is being restored if by “balance” you mean spending a lot more money on tracks, trains, and stations.
Until Sound Transit came along, nobody in the world had ever considered putting a light rail line in a six mile bored twin tube subway tunnel … or on taken-over lanes of a floating bridge of the Interstate Highway System. This history-making engineering is all completely baked into the Baseline of the 2040 Plan that I am criticizing, and thus into all the 5 alternatives for additional spending.
Here’s the deal: The official PSRC forecast for highest transit use in 2040 is the outcome (Alt 5 in the chart above) from adding a fine-tuned, congestion-busting road use fee for every mile driven and then sending vast sums of the money collected to Sound Transit to build light rail from Tacoma to Everett with a branch to Redmond, and much more. The light rail mileage bump is 93 miles above the 68 miles in the baseline.
But all this spending does damn little to change the mode preference of the people’s mobile lifestyle in our region.
I’m challenging PSRC to get much more transit market share out of all that new transit. From 4% to 8%, all-trips, all-region.
The PSRC model DOES show a significant reduction in travel delay (aka congestion) as a result of the road use fee — a 13% reduction in delay per capita. Driving is suppressed, although not enough to meet greenhouse gas reduction goals set now by State law.
I think we all need to find out if PSRC knows how to use government transportation spending to significantly change the regional mode preference, rather than just tweaking it up slightly.
That graph is interesting. Who knew escort services made so many trips!
John, “history-making” engineering is for stuff like the original tube under the Thames, still in use 150 years later, or the Gotthard Tunnel, or the tube the Japanese are working on to their northern island. Even the PATH, which actually is bored tube under the Hudson, doesn’t qualify as “history-making”. It’s certainly not as though “nobody in the world had ever considered” such a thing.
As for the cost, of course it’s front-loaded and the estimated benefits are conservative. Didn’t you do the same thing when you went to college?
There is nothing conservative about Sound Transit’s calculation of benefits. The agency went way out on a limb over-estimating benefits in its cost-benefit analysis document for PSRC in 2007 and 2008.
See http://www.bettertransport.info/pitf/benefit-cost.htm
“Sound Transit’s analysis produced the absurd claim that benefits for highway users with future light rail would exceed benefits for transit riders, in a direct contradiction with all earlier Sound Transit environmental analysis and earlier claims of ST leadership.”
There is also nothing conservative about ST’s estimation of future costs.
See http://www.bettertransport.info/fraud
As for closing I-5, I trust something less dramatic and less humorous would compute in PSRC’s models as doubling transit market share above the baseline.
While I’m sure you find your own cost/benefit assumptions “more reasonable”, it’s probably safe to say most of us trust the empirical evidence of more riders than estimated on systems built out in Charlotte, Denver, Minneapolis, Dallas. A lot of it is due to historical FTA forecasting rules:
http://theoverheadwire.blogspot.com/2008/09/documents-you-shouldnt-use-against.html