Orphan Road

I consider the amount of well thought out long-term infrastructure a society builds to be a direct measure of its past residents' humanity. One does not decide to spend tax money on a 20-year subway project to get to work faster. He knows he is spending his hard-earned money to better his city, to change the environment of others that perhaps haven't been born yet but whom he knows will live easier lives because of his actions.

I appreciate those that built our city's water supply, the Denny regrade, our system of boulevards and parks, our bus tunnel, our nation's intercontinental railroad, our power grid, our nuclear power plants, and even our freeway system. These projects could not have been easy or cheap, and those that voted for these plans knew they would not directly benefit for years, if ever.

Lately it feels as if we're looking for quick solutions. Widening roads to fix traffic problems, "clean coal" to generate power, buses to save fuel. What we really need are large long-term projects: improved power grids, high-speed rail, subways, green power on a massive scale. Modern shallow politics focuses on direct voter benefits to pass laws and win elections. Have we misplaced our humanity?

How does a pro-roads organization come to favor rail? Well, they don't. But they provide a great reason to push for infrastructure improvements immediately. The world is awash with global capital right now (article here). Sure, they want to use this cheap capital for building roads, but the argument is the same for building massive rail improvements quickly.

Here's the situation. Remember the collapse of the mortgage industry, specifically the sub-prime mortgages? Well the bubble was caused by a glut of global capital looking for a safe place to rest, and the bubble popped when investors realized that sub-prime mortgages were not a safe bet. This capital hasn't gone away - it's still there looking for safe, long term investments (see: Dubai for one of the places it has landed). For a great primer on this, listen to a rare This American Life documentary on the subject (here).

What would be a safe, long-term investment for global capital? Discovery says infrastructure fits the bill. We may disagree on what that infrastructure should be, and I don't think they realize the full financial potential out there, but we agree on the major financial points. This global capital is available now. We don't know what the financial picture will look like in several years. Actually, this is a great reason to do more than just ST2.1 immediately - let's build an in-city light rail system while we're at it. We just may not ever get this good of an opportunity again.

Around the country, local governments are relying on existing freight tracks to provide commuter rail service quickly and cheaply. In the Puget Sound we have the very popular Sounder running on BNSF tracks, South Florida uses CSX tracks to run Tri-Rail commuter rail, and Utah's FrontRunner and New Mexico's Rail Runner operate with similar arrangements.

These services require complicated leasing arranements with the freight companies involved, and service is often limited or delayed because the freight trains have priority on the tracks. This is the major reason Sound Transit hasn't been able to offer as many round trips as it would like to.

Today I came across not one, but two stories from back East on this issue: one involving Florida and CSX, and the other related to Massachusetts and CSX. Both issues center around liability agreements: CSX is saying to both states, in effect, "sure, you can lease our tracks, but we don't want to be liable in the event of a passenger train crash, even if it's caused by our neglegence."

Lawmakers are understandably skeptical about agreeing to such conditions. But what else can they do? We've let our passenger rail system atrophy over the last 100 years, and building new rights-of-way is time consuming and expensive. Even Amtrak only owns the Northeast Corridor tracks -- their trains run on leased freight rail everywhere else in the country, as far as I know.

Add to this the fact that demand for freight rail is surging in America. You've no doubt seen the factoid being pushed by the freight rail industry that it can move one ton of freight 400 miles on a gallon of gas. With business booming, freight companies have little incentive to give up track capacity to passenger rail.

And so we have a bit of a crisis simmering between local goverments and big rail companies, one that could evenutally come to a boil as demand for rail -- both for freight and passenger travel -- continues to rise. Could we nationalize the freight rail industry like France? I very much doubt our Congress would do something that bold. Yet even if the two sides can come to an agreement on the liability issue, the capacity problem will still be there, and getting worse.

One piece of a transit-friendly city that is often neglected is the experience of walking. Shifting from a world of driving to a world of public transportation usually includes more foot travel. This can be an enjoyable leg (heh) of a journey or a drawn out burden depending on many factors from storefronts to weather to incline. The issue I'd like to focus on here is the interface between foot traffic and car traffic.

A bit over a year ago I left a job across the water for a job in Seattle. Something I've noticed since more often becoming a pedestrian is how car-centric our city is. Other than a small handful of areas that value people - the Pike Street Market area being the only one that springs to mind - intersections seem to be designed to let the most cars through as quickly as possible.

Let's take a few examples. Walk to 6th between Union and University. Someone's gone through the trouble of installing a mid-block crosswalk and light for the high amount foot traffic coming from a hotel. Great. But when you push the button, you'll find that you can stand there for a good 2 minutes before it will give you a walk signal - even if there are no cars. Walk a half block south. That intersection is just as cruel - rarely backed up with cars, but always backed up with people. Walk another block south - here's a crosswalk most try to avoid, as it's an offramp from a freeway and if you want to cross you'd better have a book handy.

This post isn't just about my pet-peeve intersections - there are many. It's the planning that sits behind it. Clearly somone put thought into intersection rules, and have decided that cars should have priority. What would our city be like if the bias went the other way?

If I were king, here's how I'd run things. If you push a button, the light immediately turns yellow, then red, and the little green walking man appears. To keep things fair, this won't happen again in this direction for another 2 minutes no matter how often you press the button. I'd make high-ped-traffic areas completely car free. I'd banish high-volume streets to the outskirts of the city. I'd add pedestrian and bike overpasses near freeway on/off ramps - if I was feeling nice and allowing them at all.

We may spend millions of dollars on making our transit systems a few minutes faster, just to have to wait for cars once we step off the train. I know the drivers out there will feel this is unfair, but then they're in warm weather-proof pods and are probably too distracted with their coffee and radio to notice anyway.

To follow up on serial catowner's post below, one thing I've not mentioned enough is the federal Dodd-Hagel bill to create a National Infrastructure Bank.

Obama's on board, and Hillary Clinton's a co-sponsor as well. The Campaign for America's Future has a good overview of the legislation:

Perhaps most importantly, the selection criteria required by the National Infrastructure Bank would encourage the federal government to undertake projects that are significant to the country’s long-term well-being: rather than stop-gap measures to repair existing problems, such projects would take into account new challenges like climate change, the growing importance of urban areas, and the need for more affordable housing, while at the same time confronting the more typical concerns associated with economic growth (increased air, highway, and port traffic). A database with details about each infrastructure project and its funding would provide at least some public oversight.

I'm glad to see restore and improve urban infrastructure" made the list.

Normally, I wouldn't even waste the time responding to this piece from Michael Ennis at the right-wing Washington Policy Center, but he uses a line of spurious reasoning that, like the infamous whack-a-mole, needs to be smacked down everywhere it appears:

In Switzerland, for example, light rail is successful, not because of the amount of service or infrastructure, but because the country has certain demographic and economic characteristics that induce demand.

In other words, there is an existing market with a customer base, and Swiss policy makers responded with proportional infrastructure investments. As a result, mode share, ridership and fare box recovery are high.

Here in Washington, transit resources are distributed in just the opposite way.

Under the "build it, and they will come" theory, many policy makers think that increasing the supply of transit will somehow create more public demand. This approach is failing because Washington cities do not possess the underlying demographic or economic characteristics that create enough voluntary consumers for light rail.

Despite years of spending increases, the share of commuters using public transit in Seattle actually fell to 6.8 percent in 2000 from 7.5 percent in 1980.

Since "If you built it, they will come" is the subject of a whole series of posts here at OR, we should define what "it" really is. "It" doesn't refer to simply dropping drains into the middle of nowhere and hoping for the best. No, "it" involves a whole ethos of transit-oriented development, from land use planning to economic develoment strategies to zoning to, yes, transit.

Given a lack of transit development between 1980 and today, is it really any surprise that job centers and housing centers have spread further out? Of course not. But now that we've got the Growth Management Act in place, and the PSRC doing regional planning, we're focused on reversing that trend. And despite the protestations of dead-end highway builders like Ennis, this is going to be a good thing for the region and the planet.

PS: We've been building roads for the last 100 years, and congestion keeps getting worse. Which leads me to conclude that if we build exclusively roads for 100 more, congestion will get even worse. Why some folks don't get this baffles me.

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.