Orphan Road

So crushed was I by the stunning defeat of Prop 1, I had to step across the pond for a bit and bathe my wounded political sensibilities here in a land of livable communities, commuter choice, and healthy lifestyles.

[deep breath] Ahhhhhh ...

Actually, I'm here in Eindhoven on a business trip. I've apparently reached a point in my career where I'm expected to, uh, work, so I've had precious little time to wax philosophic about the things we care about here at Orphan Road, namely, our love of public transit and our quest to get more and better in Seattle post haste.

A few quick thoughts before my industrious Dutch office mates catch on to my literary procrastination:

• Walk like a European - I had the great honor of attending last weekend's PSV-AZ game at Philips Stadion. We were a little concerned about how we'd get out to the game, until we realized that the stadium is less than a ten minute walk from the center of town. They don't even bother to provide a parking lot -- it's just assumed that you're walking to the game.
• I want to ride my bicycle - The Dutch are famous for their love of bicycles, and Eindhoven is no exception. Bikes are so woven into the fabric of life here that it's hard to imagine this culture without them (supposedly, one of the reasons Dutch hate Germans is that, during the war, the Germans poured salt into the Dutch wounds by confiscating their bicycles and melting them down for the raw materials - OUCH!). And I'm not talking post-hippie strung out Seattle-ite bike riding style -- this is hot girls on their way to work smoking cigarettes and talking on their cell phones bike riding style. Pretty amazing.
• Cigarette anyone? - Despite a HUGE amount of smoking and drinking here, plus food that's not exactly low fat, the people here seem to be remarkably healthier than their American counterparts ... guess it's all the exercise that's built naturally into their lifestyles.
• Trans Netherlands Express - For about $20, you can take a train anywhere in the Netherlands. Train service on four or five main lines runs every half an hour, even on weekends. Service is so regular that the trains don't even have conductors -- it's an honor system similar to what I've seen for subways in Eastern Europe. Hell, when you have that many trains and are committed to running them, there's effectively zero marginal cost.

One more night in Amsterdam and then back to Seattle. Make no mistake -- we are way, way behind Europe these days.

Since Frank Bruno has declared weapons free on those who (irrationally) oppose Proposition 1, let me play el Abogado del Diablo for a momentito and ask the Hard Question: what, exactly, is the alternative?

I've started seeing signs for the last few days stating, basically: "Costs too much, does too little." Let's break this down [Frank, apologies ... I know I'm covering much the same ground as you did in the post linked above.]

Anyway, to break it down:

* Cost -- well, infrastructure costs money. And it doesn't cost less money in the future, especially with the dollar likely to continue its weakness in the coming years. We pay global prices for things like concrete (and even labor and engineering services), and those prices -- fueled by China and India's massive growth -- will continue to rise. So, yes, Prop 1 will cost money, but not taking steps now means we're only postponing the inevitable, and guaranteeing that we'll pay more for it when we finally buckle down. Remember, we're in the mess we're in today because we failed to make these investments 40 YEARS AGO when there was more federal money on the table and costs were relatively much lower.

* Does too Little -- okay, Prop 1 opponents, so YOUR plan does more? Wait. What's that? Ohhhhh. You don't HAVE an alternative plan. Okay. So, ah ... ? Truly, not to get all "I have a high school education" and everything, but "little" is a relative term, as in, Prop 1 does too little relative to WHAT? If there's no alternative, well, maybe that's sad, but the fact is that if we fail to pass Prop 1 it will set back infrastructure development in this region by decades ... maybe more, given our political culture.

[And, if you're a Green who thinks, like Ron Sims, that Prop 1 doesn't go far enough to alleviate global warming, I ask you the same question -- WHAT'S YOUR ALTERNATIVE?]

Okay, people, this is getting serious now. We must pass Proposition 1.

Great op-ed in WaPo today about why America's infrastructure is falling to bits. Apropos of our transportation discussion on B&P yesterday, thought I'd post some of it here.

Thomas Donohue, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, writes:

You'd be hard-pressed to convince the American people that we don't need to spend more on infrastructure after the tragic collapse of the Interstate 35 bridge in Minneapolis in August. Signs of decay are everywhere, from crumbling bridges to pothole-ridden streets to exploding manhole covers and underground steam pipes.

Yet Transportation Secretary Mary Peters is making precisely that argument. She has said that we could meet all of our transportation infrastructure needs if we spent current funds more wisely. She is only half right. Spending money wisely is important, but it's not nearly enough.

There are three things we must do to ensure that our nation has a superior physical platform capable of serving a growing economy: stop diverting dedicated transportation funds to wasteful or unrelated projects; unleash private infrastructure investment by removing regulatory impediments; and invest more federal, state and local dollars in infrastructure.

He continues:

What must our nation do to meet the urgent infrastructure funding challenges? Where is the money going to come from?

We can start by unlocking potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment just waiting to be spent on power plants; pipelines; shipping and hauling routes to railroads and airports; privately constructed and operated roadways; and more. The money is there if government regulators would get out of the way. Countries around the world use an array of innovative financing approaches and public-private partnerships to bring key projects on line quickly. It's about time America did the same.

There must also be a significant increase in government funding for infrastructure, which means we will have to consider an increase in the federal gasoline user fee. This could mean a straightforward increase in a fee that hasn't been raised in 14 years, or it may be in the form of a carbon fee designed to address global warming. Either would work as long as the proceeds are dedicated to transportation and other infrastructure.

What will we get for these investments? We will save lives, create American jobs and set the foundation for a more robust, productive, globally competitive economy.

Now, I don't want to get too partisan (check out B&P for that), but I do find it extraordinary that the leader of one of America's venerable business organizations goes out of his way to propose a increase to the gas tax as the only way to get enough funding to rebuild our infrastructure. Put another way, our infrastructure is in such bad shape that business leaders are calling for tax increases in order to raise the funds to fix it.

America may be great, but our infrastructure is no longer extraordinary. Good to see the business community -- if not yet the median voter -- starting to recognize that.

NYT with a great little piece on a 22-mile rail tunnel recently opened in the Swiss Alps.

... the Lötschberg tunnel is only part of an ambitious program to protect the Alps, a Swiss national heritage, from environmental damage.

The environmental problem arises because the Alps lie right between two of Europe’s most dynamic economic regions, northern Italy and southern Germany, which have threatened to overwhelm the mountains with truck traffic. So more than a decade ago, the Swiss voted to impose steep tariffs on trucks passing through their country. They also voted to ban the construction of four-lane highways in the Alps.

By last year Switzerland had collected more than $1.1 billion in tolls. The money has been used to improve older tunnels and build new ones to put freight on rails, either directly or by putting truck trailers onto flatbed rail cars.

But when the Swiss go, they go first class. When the tunnel is fully operational in December, it will accommodate not just 70 freight trains a day, but as many as 30 passenger trains, capable of going 120 miles per hour, cutting an hour off the trip from Basel, in northern Switzerland, to the south.

The Swiss are not finished, either. They are now busily digging an even more ambitious 35-mile tunnel under the St. Gotthard Pass to the east, to supplement two existing 19th-century tunnels, to be completed by 2016.

By 2009, the Swiss want to reduce the number of trucks that pass over the country’s north-south roads to 650,000 a year, from 1.4 million in 2000, which would continue a long decline in truck traffic. Since 1995, such traffic has swollen by 40 percent in the European Union, but has declined by 8 percent in Switzerland.

More and more I feel like Americans would do well to spend less time harrumphing about their mythical superiority in things like monster engineering projects, and more time learning about how they get things done these days in other parts of the developed world. Fact is there's just nothing (maybe the Big Dig or the East Side Subway, but little else) going on in the US that even compares to the Swiss tunnel plan in its scope and ambition.

Great article in today's NYT about the challenges facing Congo's state-owned rail line.

In large swaths of Congo, a vast country the size of Western Europe, roads are impassable or nonexistent, large riverboats no longer ply the waterways and air travel is prohibitively expensive, leaving many people to rely on an increasingly dangerous railway system long past its prime.

Fresh from its first democratic elections in nearly 50 years and still struggling to emerge from civil war, Congo is trying to get its trains running again. But it has a long way to go.

My bet? You'll see maglev running between New York and Chicago before Congo has a rail system up to the standards of the late 19th century.

Amtrak clearly knows that one of the biggest advantages it offers over car travel is the opportunity to kick it while the countryside rolls by.

Now they're making the rail-travel experience even more appealing -- offering $100 in free booze to customers on a new, premium long haul intercity service.

Members of Amtrak's guest rewards program—the railroad equivalent of frequent fliers—can get a $100 per person credit for alcohol between November and January.

The offer of free drinks comes on top of the dinner wine that is already included in the cost of a ticket for GrandLuxe trips on the California Zephyr—chugging between Chicago and San Francisco—the Southwest Chief between Chicago and Los Angeles, or the Silver Meteor between Washington, D.C., and Miami or Orlando, Fla.

I can't imagine how the offer of some free drinks is really going to improve ridership on these cross-country routes, but you can't blame Amtrak for trying. At least Amtrak marketing executives understand that the only reason to take one of these trips is for the experience, and props to them for creating a marketing program designed to emphasize that.

Now if I can just get Metro to kick in a couple of beers for those days when the #8 bus is stuck in Denny traffic ...

Sometimes there are advantages to living in one of the places most recently settled by Europeans -- the relative dearth of historical sites gives us much more flexibility in determining where we lay out our transportation infrastructure.

Consider the plight of a new rail tunnel being built to complete the AVE connection between Barcelona and Madrid.

The chief architect working on the Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona yesterday condemned a plan to build a bullet-train tunnel less than two metres from Gaudi's unfinished masterpiece.

Backed by local civic groups, the advisers to Unesco in Spain, and architects and engineers from 50 universities around the world, Jordi Bonet i Armengol, who has worked on Gaudi's daring cathedral for 40 years, said yesterday: "I am astounded by this brutality. This is an attack on culture of the highest order, something one would only expect of a third-world country."

I find it fascinating that in the U.S. we worry most about gentrification and some oak trees, while in Europe there's the added complexity of preserving 80,000 years of human history. And yet, in spite of those challenges, Europe has superior public transporation infrastructure.

Conservatives and libertarians' arguments against transit boil down to three categories.

1) "No More Taxes"

2) "We Should Spend it on Roads"

3) "Transit is Socialism"

I can't say much about the first argument. If you sincerely believe that taxes in and of themselves are always bad, and if you're willing to trade off more and better public services for lower taxes (thus ignoring a fundamental finding of neo-classical economics -- that public goods such as roads, police, and schools will always be underprovided absent a government to provide them), well, then, there's not much I can say to you. Congratulations on your good fortune ... it's not many people who can afford private armies with which to conduct their own personal foreign policies, and fewer still who can pave their own private roads to get to and from work. So, good luck to you, sirs and madams; you are truly fortunate.

The second argument was highlighted in an op-ed in yesterday's Seattle Times (read Frank's rebuttal). As Frank points out, there are hidden costs inherent in roads. In formal economic terms, some of these costs are "externalities", i.e., the source of the cost (say, the air pollution from car exhaust), is spread equally among all people who breathe the air. Thus, the driver of any single polluting vehicle bears little of the total cost of this pollution, and so has an incentive to pollute. Use taxes on vehicles -- such as license tabs, gas taxes, tolls, etc. -- can help mitigate some of these impacts, but the truth is that in the United States we generally do a poor job of forcing drivers to bear the total costs of their activities.

In addition to such externalities, the other fallacy inherent in the "spend it on roads" argument is that road capacity is scalable linearly. It's not. Doubling theoretical capacity of a road (say, by doubling the number of lanes), does not in fact lead to a doubling in capacity (an accident that closes the highway closes the highway whether there's one lane or twenty, e.g.). Not to mention the huge footprint that roads require. Something like 10% of urban land in the U.S. is devoted to roads and parking lots ... insane, in my opinion.

Which leads me to the third argument -- "transit is socialist." The idea here is that transit, a "mass" activity, is somehow unAmerican by the fact that it requires people to congregate together in a communal activity, while cars are more in line with the individualistic nature of American life.

There're (at least) a couple of problems with this argument. No one is "forced" to use transit. Therefore anyone who chooses to ride in a car will always have that option available. But I think there's a more fundamental refutation.

Conservatism -- the libertarian kind, any way -- is about choice. It's about having the opportunity to select from among as many different methods as possible to accomplish your own personal goals. In fact, our auto-centric culture creates precisely the opposite situation -- in many cities, for most people in the most common kinds of living situations, the fact that we've underprovided transit means that people are forced -- forced! -- to use a car. This is the opposite of choice, and is absolutely in opposition to the spirit and principles of American libertarianism.

More and more thoughtful conservatives are starting to realize this, and are adding their voices to the chorus of those of us calling for increased investment in transit and transit-related infrastructure.

Paul Weyrich (one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation, and an advocate for increased rail spending), for example, writes:

... my colleague William S. Lind and I have written several monographs ... making the conservative case for rail transit, including streetcars. It seems the public agrees with us because while in State after State conservatives have won ballot initiatives in many of these same States transit initiatives also have won. The libertarians have made the case that money for public transit is a waste. They want more roads. That is a form of subsidized transportation as well. But they don’t see it that way because individuals can drive. However, in city after city which has adopted light rail an overflow crowd has elected to use it as opposed to driving.

The point we try to make is that under the right circumstances rail works. No matter how fancy the bus people don’t care to ride a bus. Buses serve Manassas, Virginia, Fredericksburg, Virginia and Baltimore, Maryland. Yet competing commuter rail lines carry many more passengers than do the bus lines. That is true even though busses are in some cases more convenient. People like to ride rail.

Another member of the "neo-neo-conservative" (or, as he calls, it, the "next conservative") movement adds:

As someone who has lived and traveled extensively overseas, one thing I miss the most in the “good ol’ US of A” is a decent public transportation system. In many countries of the world, it is quite comfortable to get around without owning a car. But here, especially where I live, it is next to impossible to get by without one.

Although I appreciate the wealth and the freedom we have in this country to own cars and drive where we like, when we like, I feel we take this freedom to an extreme. Or perhaps I should say, our urban environment forces us to use cars far more often than is necessary or prudent. I don’t put the blame on any one group, person or factor. But clearly, our city planning has evolved in an environment where cars, gas and land were cheap, and public transportation seemed too costly because our cities are too spread out ...

In conclusion, I strongly believe the next conservatism should support mass transit, to conserve our precious resources, decrease urban sprawl, lower the blood pressure of every commuter who rides it, and help relieve the heavy load on many of our roads.

In short, the Seattle Times and its contributors need to get with the program and realize that even conservatives increasingly draw the conclusion -- transit works, build more.

A friend of mine who commutes on her bicycle was recently hit by a car. Thankfully, she was okay. Conversation over drinks motivated Friend of Orphan Road (and sometime B&P contributor) Eugene to dig up this great article in the PI about bicycle safety in Seattle. Every year in Seattle, around 200 bicyclists are struck by cars.

In high school, I used to commute 20 miles a day on my bike -- a 5 mile ride to and from football practice, twice a day (uphill! into the wind! in the snow!).

Which got me to thinking, why don't I ride my bike now? I mean, my old mountain bike is a charming living room ornament and all, but in theory I might actually be using it for its intended purpose.

And the answer is: I'm terrified. My commute takes me straight downhill on Denny, where there's no bike lane, and even if there was there are enough SUVs, semis, and distracted drivers to make me shiver even when I'm on foot.

I'd love to have bicycling as a commuting option, but unless and until the city closes off whole streets to motorized traffic (not bloody likely), I'll stick with the bus and my feet.

Hot off the presses. Transit information system NextBus will be coming to Seattle.

According to my sources, the soon to be completed SLU streetcar will incorporate NextBus technology.

Unlike Metro's homegrown MyBus (and the equally homegrown BusMonster), NextBus is already being used by transit systems around the country, including BART, D.C.'s Metro, and more. They've got some really cool functionality, including an online form that lets you set up automated text messaging to alert you to the impending arrival of a certain bus or train. It's great stuff.

While I'm all about the "can do it" spirit that's gone into MyBus (and thanks, Google, for the funding), I have to ask Metro -- why build something from scratch when there's already a great application out there that does everything you could want it to do?

NextBus suggests that we write Metro and the city and county governments to encourage them to adopt their system. If you're interested, here's the Metro "comments" page: Metro comments.