Tag Archives: bus-rapid transit

Thrive 2050

Thrive 2050: The Good

The county’s proposed general plan for the next thirty years is a long document that not only takes time to read but can be hard to decode if you’re not hip to the lingo. Today, I draw out what I see as some of the positives contained in the plan.

Mixed-Use Density on Commercial Land

Thrive 2050 continues with existing practice of promoting high density mixed-use commercial and residential development in commercial districts near transit. The planned developments along Wisconsin Ave. north and south of the Bethesda Metro and west of Chevy Chase provide good examples of this type of development.

Converting current office parks into mixed-use and more pedestrian friendly areas is also a positive idea. The integration of housing into the array of office building towers near the old Marriott Headquarters just east of Montgomery Mall is one good example that should continue. It provides an opportunity to make the area more welcoming as well as to add residential units. Though served by bus, the area’s prime transportation attraction is ts proximity to both I-495 and I-270 as well as major road arteries.

Other aging commercial shopping centers provide similar opportunities. They cannot accommodate the same levels of density if they aren’t located near transit–a bus stop or two doesn’t count–but nonetheless provide good locations to add residential components while reinvigorating and better designing existing retail centers. The mostly completed Cabin John Shopping Center redevelopment provides a good example of better use and design.

Bus-Rapid Transit

Thrive 2050 give further impetus to moving forward with the bus-rapid transit network originally proposed and developed by County Executive Marc Elrich. The Flash BRT is now up and running on Colesville Rd. The advantages of BRT are manifest. Unlike traditional buses, it provides fast transit. It will enable Montgomery to develop the full lungs of a transit system separate from constantly troubled Metro.

It can be built relatively quickly and adjusted over time to accommodate unanticipated developments. Critically, BRT provides fast transit at a fraction of the cost of Metro or light rail. Consider that the unfinished Purple Line, which has now ballooned to billions more than the original cost, could have been built as a BRT line at one-half of the original cost. It would also already be up and running—like the Flash line which started being planned much later.

One key missing element that Thrive 2050 needs to incorporate is a cost-benefit analysis in terms of how to best use our transit dollars. It needs to add evaluation as a principle for infrastructure improvements. Not all transit lines, bike lanes etc. provide equal bang for the buck.

BRT also expands development opportunities by placing more locations within transit nodes. Even with tight definitions of what is walkable to a BRT line, one could develop properties to house a lot more people as well as new locally focused retail. All of this would expand transit, housing and retail opportunities far beyond those who live on pricey land near Metro. It’s smarter smart growth.

More Development in the East County

I don’t know nearly enough to say how it should be done or where it should be done but the idea of creating additional residential, commercial and retail opportunities in East County is a fine one. The Racial Equity and Social Justice (RESJ) review has raised questions about how to do this in a way that protects and enhances the interests of existing low-income residents.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the basic idea is bad. It just suggests that Thrive 2050 needs fewer gauzy good intentions and more concrete strategies to implement to achieve this end. Towards that end, the RESJ review suggests conducting more meaningful consultations, hopefully ones that listen to their concerns rather than implicitly direct people to or recruit people who will give the “right” answers.

Removing River Road as a Growth Corridor

One bizarre moment during the 2018 election was when the Greater Greater Washington blog attacked Marc Elrich in a candidate interview for not wanting to concentrate large amounts of density on River Road. Except that even the most grandiose transit plans did not envision a transit line on River Rd., so Elrich argued instead for concentrating density near existing transit in line with smart growth planning. Thrive 2050 acknowledges the sense of that approach and removes River Rd. from the Beltway through Potomac Village as a growth corridor.

It should probably be extended to the DC line. The major expansion and redevelopment at Westbard shopping center has already added significant density at the one location with major potential to combine residential and retail. It has already taxed what that area can accommodate, suggesting steering additional density elsewhere.

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Montgomery County

Gloom from Floreen and Leventhal

Though Montgomery County Councilmembers George Leventhal and Nancy Floreen voted for the County’s bus-rapid transit (BRT) plan, both poured lots of cold water on the idea at a transit symposium at White Flint recently. In the process, both made statements that would likely surprise County voters regarding future taxes and spending.

Annual Purple Line Operation Payment?

Councilmember Nancy Floreen mentioned that that Montgomery County might have to make an annual payment toward the operational costs of the Purple Line. This ongoing cost would be in addition to the millions that the County has pledged to the light rail line’s construction. News to me, and suspect others, who expected the State to cover these costs.

Taxes Headed Up

Councilmember George Leventhal said that County Executive Ike Leggett would propose a “massive” tax increase in the forthcoming year just to meet current commitments in the context of explaining why he believes that the BRT system is not affordable.

Leventhal Makes Anti-Purple Line Arguments

Weirdly, George then went on to make a string of arguments frequently used against the Purple Line . . . but against bus-rapid transit. The concern about cost was particularly bizarre as BRT is far cheaper than light rail.

George also explained that we could not be sure that the hoped for development would come if we built BRT. Though the Purple Line entails much greater financial risk, George has brushed aside concerns regarding his favored project.

Perhaps most oddly, George argued the incompetence surrounding the Silver Spring Transit Center meant that people would not trust the County to build and operate BRT. Additionally, he explained that all of the trees that would be torn down and construction associated with the Purple Line would further turn people against transit.

Not exactly a vote of confidence in the County’s government and strange since BRT entails much less risk for more gain than the Purple Line. Why did George or Nancy vote for the plan that they now are now publicly undermining in the first place?

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Bus Rapid Transit, Metro, transportation

Moving Forward on Public Transit

WMATA_Metro

Making This Work Should Be Our #1 Priority

In a series of posts, I’ve outlined how the major light-rail and streetcar projects are in deep trouble and why. Today’s final post completes the more recent portion of the series on what we should do to spend smart to produce workable, effective transit.

Fix Metro

Members of the Maryland General Assembly have rightly come to the conclusion that they have had enough of the failing WMATA status quo and want to grapple in a serious way with the issue. Fixing the Metro system should be our #1 transit priority because it remains the lungs of the region’s public transit network. We need a serious assessment of how to turn the corner on this one because the problems have only been getting worse. MTA also has major problems that need attention and merits more oversight.

Reorganize Existing Bus Lines

I love solutions that don’t cost any money. This isn’t a case of getting something for nothing (that just doesn’t happen) but getting a lot more out of our existing budget. Houston just showed the way by reorganizing its bus routes in a smart way:

The old system, like many bus routes in the United States, expended a lot of resources on very low-ridership routes for the sake of saying there’s “a bus that goes there.” The new plan says that the focus should be to provide reasonably frequent service on routes where reasonably frequent service will attract riders. That does mean that some people are further than ever from a transit stop. But it means that many more Houstonians will find themselves near a useful transit stop.

Just check out the before and after maps. I’ve often heard advocates of light-rail claim that we need it because there is no bus route that does not connect place A to place B. But this is, after all, an easily solvable problem without building light rail. In Houston, the difference is amazing and it didn’t cost the city any more money. Now that’s smart growth.

Bus-Rapid Transit

Bus-rapid transit (BRT) has real cost-benefit advantages over other more expensive modes. You can build an equivalent mode of transit at a far cheaper price. Montgomery County has already moved forward tentatively in this area. I hope they will continue.

Build Only What We Can Afford to Maintain

The key lesson from Metro is that transit systems take a lot of money to operate and to maintain. Governing recently highlighted an even more disastrous example from the Boston area. Though Boston is a slow-growing area, it embarked on very fast paced transit growth that it could not afford either to build or to maintain. Beyond the system’s collapse this winter:

Today the MBTA owes nearly $9 billion in debt and interest, which translates into more than one-quarter of its operating revenue going to debt service. And since money that should have funded maintenance had to be diverted to the legally mandated expansions, the system faces an estimated $5 billion maintenance backlog.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build anything. It means that we need to spend smart because money is always tight and we need to build future operation and maintenance costs into the plan before we begin construction.

Final Word

The point of this series was not just to discuss how and why we arrived in our current cul-de-sac of overly expensive projects but how we can get out of it through transit that provide more in the way of transit and economic benefits at a much lower cost and will be more sustainable over the long term.

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transportation

Getting to Yes on Bus-Rapid Transit (BRT)

circulatorFormer Bethesda Circulator

Yesterday, I detailed some advantages of bus-rapid transit (BRT) over the much more pricey streetcar and light-rail options that the Greater Greater Washington blog plugs very aggressively (yesterday’s example here) but now appear to be going nowhere.

So what is the barrier to BRT gaining more traction?

Paying Far More for Image Not Substance

Josh Barro on The Upshot blog at the New York Times put his finger on the source of the problem:

“Bus-based public transit in the United States suffers from an image problem.”

That fact, laid out in a 2009 report from the Federal Transit Administration, isn’t surprising, but it has led to a perverse outcome: Transit agencies are spending millions of dollars on new rail infrastructure that is no faster than existing bus service, simply because riders perceive a train as better than a bus.

Barro details how New York is now planning to spend $1 billion on an AirTrain from LaGuardia Airport that will go no faster than the existing bus connections. He reports similar investments in streetcars and trains elsewhere that go no or little faster than existing bus routes.

Corporate Welfare

In Washington, the proposed streetcar slows down far more people on buses than will ride the streetcar. This isn’t “greater” but grandiose public policy that wastes billions of transit dollars.

Indeed, it’s really corporate welfare masked as social justice as it benefits property developers. There is nothing wrong with benefiting developers or other companies if we think that makes good transit policy and economic sense. But it just becomes corporate welfare when we can get the benefits much more cheaply through another similar technology.

Improving BRT’s Image

The good news is that FTA has found that gaining acceptance for lower cost BRT occurs with the adoption of straightforward design and marketing solutions:

That 2009 transit report gives reason to believe it’s possible. The researchers conducted focus groups with “choice riders” in Los Angeles: people who have cars but sometimes use transit. These riders had an unsurprising preference for trains.

“Riding the bus carries a ‘shame factor,’ ” the researchers found. “Most of the choice riders would not consider using it, or if they did, they would feel ashamed and keep it a secret.”

But what the local transit agency marketed as the “Orange Line” — really just a bus route in the San Fernando Valley with high frequencies on a dedicated right of way — managed to gain acceptance among “choice riders.”

As it turns out, making buses look as good as light rail or streetcars is just not that hard as this photo from the Montgomery Planning website shows:

brt-photo1

We can even make them look like streetcars, complete with hard and uncomfortable benches, as the former Bethesda Circulator bus (shown at top) demonstrated for many years. People still ride it even though it now looks like a bright red bus.

These design features and marketing simply have to be far less expensive than the literally billions of dollars more that streetcars and light-rail cost to do the same thing. The good news is that BRT is expanding around the country and so hopefully the unfamiliarity with it will decrease.

Conclusion

Public officials along with transit advocates need to get past the idea that trains are better and more elite or equivalent to faster, heavy rail Metro. They’re not. They just waste dollars that could used be to provide more public transit or something else useful. The sooner they realize it, the sooner we might stop spinning our wheels and build something useful and affordable.

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purple line, Red Line, transportation

The Giant Purple Credit Card, Part III: Is Pro-Purple Anti-Transit?

Opportunity Costs

The choice to spend vast sums of money on one project requires foregoing other choices. The tangled finances for the Purple and Red Lines (see also here) render it especially obvious. When the fares from Baltimore’s public transit system are needed as a backstop in case Purple Line fares are lower than hoped, the use of the Transportation Trust Fund (TTF) for non-Purple purposes is obviously going to be quite limited.

The plans to move ahead also with Baltimore’s Red Line should further assure that the TTF is tied up for literally decades. Indeed, the two projects have been closely tied together in order to build political support. It is hard to imagine moving ahead with one project without the other, as legislators in one metro area are unlikely to want to fund an incredibly expensive project in the other unless their constituents share in the benefits.

Existing Transit Needs

Montgomery and Prince George’s County already have an extensive public transit system. Both are integrated into WMATA’s Metro and Metrobus system. Each operates its own bus system: RideOn and TheBus. Both are also tied into the MARC system.

All parts of the system have suffered from cutbacks and need investment in infrastructure. Metro, the lungs of Washington’s transit system, remains in particularly dire need of money to maintain and to upgrade its infrastructure. Placing so many chips on the Purple Line will constrain the ability of the State to aid Metro–Montgomery and Prince George’s cannot expect to get all of Maryland’s transportation funding.

Less widely heralded in Montgomery in the face of perennial Metro problems–endless single tracking, escalators that don’t work, overly crowded trains at rush hour despite stagnating ridership–have been the cutbacks to MARC and Ride-On. Oddly, we reduced transit service designed to connect to the Purple Line even as we move forward with building it.

Foregoing Other Transit Opportunities

Some key supporters of the Purple Line recognize these implicit tradeoffs even if they don’t advertise them. In the at-large County Council debate in Chevy Chase, new Council President George Leventhal derided Councilmember Hans Riemer’s support for additional Ride-On service. He and other Purple Line supporters have also expressed great skepticism about the proposed countywide bus-Rapid Transit System (RTS).

The irony here is that for the cost of building the Purple Line, we could build a RTS that would serve all parts of the County. Indeed, a Purple Line incorporated into an RTS would accomplish most of the goal at far less cost than the proposed light-rail system even according to MTA’s own analysis (see also here).

Purple Line supporters like to accuse opponents of being anti-transit–it’s a good simple communication meme that boils down a complex decision to good versus bad. Except that wanting to spend transportation dollars wisely and get the most for our tax dollars is pro-transit. Opposition to expanding bus service and continued negativity regarding an RTS that could serve the whole county sure doesn’t sound pro-transit.

The Bottom Line

We shouldn’t starve our existing transit system and forego future opportunities in order to build the Purple Line and the Red Line. Ironically, we could build cheaper RTS versions of both that would save the State billions–not chump change–and allow for additional transit and road improvements that would truly aid economic development and the ability of all Marylanders to reach jobs far more broadly. Now that’s smart growth.

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purple line, Red Line, transportation

Why Do Light Rail Costs Only Go Up?

The Washington Post reports that cost estimates for the Purple Line in the DC suburbs have risen by $56 million while the Red Line in Baltimore now is estimated to cost another $220 million. Total cost estimates for the Purple Line are now $2.43 billion–more than double the original cost estimates. As with the previous increase, the State must foot the entire bill for the change.

MTA decided not to publicize the cost increase:

Henry Kay, who heads transit project development for the state, said the MTA didn’t publicize the increase because it was considered a “minor adjustment” on such a large, complex project. He said the additional costs came from refined estimates based on more detailed engineering and still-rising real estate prices.

“It doesn’t reflect some faulty approach” to cost estimating, Kay said. “It’s just the nature of a mega-project being developed over a number of years.”

Except that, as recently as March, Henry Kay also claimed that ““We have a high level of confidence” when they released their previous estimates. Moreover, as I pointed out in a previous post, the continual errors in one direction are highly suspicious:

The excuse that cost estimates have risen because the earlier estimates were only rough estimates is suspicious if only because cost estimates have always increased. They never decline. If the estimates are unbiased, the errors shouldn’t be off only in one direction.

Put more bluntly, if MTA is being straight with us, why have the costs continually risen instead of sometimes going down instead of up? And these changes have occurred even as they have tended to take out expensive features, such as the promised continuation of the Capital Crescent Trail through the Purple Line tunnel.

It would be useful to hear the Montgomery and Prince George’s County Councils debate what project they would give up to pay for the latest increase in costs even as they figure out how to pay for their share of the project. The Montgomery County Council still has to figure out how to pay for the trail–whose costs have also doubled to $95 million.

The County Council also to convince the owner of the APEX building in Bethesda to tear down the building so the station can be built there–something the County is rightly working hard to accomplish (it’s the right place) but will also take money.

Will the next increase break $2.5 billion? One question we should’ve asked long ago: at what point does this project in the form of light rail become too expensive, especially since (1) the CCT has already been transmuted from the previously promised light rail into BRT; (2) Montgomery County is planning a countywide BRT system; (3) MTA’s own estimates showed BRT as much more cost effective; and (4) we have many pressing transportation needs, including other public transit investments and the maintenance of existing infrastructure (e.g. Metro and MARC) to make.

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Montgomery County Council

At-Large MoCo Council Race, Pt. 1

MarcElrichMarc Elrich Argues for a Higher Minimum Wage

All four Montgomery County Council incumbents elected at-large are running for reelection: Marc Elrich, Nancy Floreen, George Leventhal, and Hans Riemer. Two challengers are also in the race: Beth Daly and Vivian Malloy. Both are credible candidates.

Nancy Floreen and George Leventhal joined the Council in 2002 as part of County Executive Doug Duncan’s “End Gridlock” slate. Elrich lost that year but joined the Council when tides turned in 2006. Hans Riemer lost the primary for the District 5 seat to Valerie Ervin in 2006 but unseated one-term incumbent Duchy Trachtenberg with Valerie’s support in 2010.

Gauging the shape of these primaries is difficult. In a county of roughly 1 million people, the county government–equivalent to the city council of a city of the same size–remains much less known than it deserves. Indeed, for the challengers, one of the main problems is getting sufficiently well-known to pose a serious challenge.

None can afford to advertise on television in this very expensive media market. Communication through the mail, in person, and now through social media are the central means of voter contact. All also race around the county following a brutal schedule that makes me tired just thinking about it.

Oddly enough, the Council’s most conservative and liberal members seem safe. In his first reelection bid in 2010, liberal Marc Elrich came in first by a mile despite being underfunded as usual. He is best known for his relentless advocacy of a countywide bus-rapid transit system–an indication of a willingness to work with development interests that he is better known for opposing.

Marc’s BRT plan still strikes me as the most innovative and future-oriented vision for the County. It has the potential not just to aid the County’s transportation needs but also to promote economic and job growth in a sustainable way over the long term.

Nancy has been a leading voice on the other side, successfully promoting revision of zoning laws in a developer friendly manner. While part of the County’s liberal consensus on social questions, she also has staked out conservative positions on other issues, such as her opposition to the county bag tax.

Even as she argues tenaciously for her positions, Nancy also does a good job of keeping in touch with all sides. Despite being seen in many ways as the Chamber’s closest ally on the Council, she is also occasionally willing to deviate from this pattern, particularly when pressed hard by well-organized large civic groups.

Both Marc and Nancy are smart, opinionated lawmakers who utterly disagree on many big issues before the Council.

nancy_and_alexandraNancy Floreen Seeking Golden Shovel Nominees

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