A lesson from Chicago that all of us need to be clued into transportation planning

Patrons crowd the platform at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority's Metro Center stop in Washington, DC. Washington's Metro train system boosted security after a series of six blasts rocked London's bus and subway system.(AFP/File/Karen Bleier)

You can't ever take your eye off the primacy and importance of transit planning, including maintenance and capacity increases.

I have written about this quite a bit in terms of the expansion and capacity constraints of the WMATA system. See "entry, "Transit without borders or five omissions "in" the Transportation Element of the DC "Comprehensive" Plan."

Other fun reads include "Train wreck or a Land Use and Development Paradigm Wreck?" and "The Purple Line and the "Mobility" Shed."

On a elist someone wrote complaining about how a 5 minute trip became a two hour trip because of the road closures for last weekend's marathon in DC, which apparently caused quite a number of problems.

But my reply was "a subway goes under and over the streets." I ride around on my bike, or use transit for the most part, and these kinds of traffic tieups don't impact me.

But at the same time, WMATA is more and more susceptible to breakdowns as well. As the system gets older and as demand increases.

We need to be careful to not fall into the trap faced by the CTA in Chicago. Today's New York Times writes about this, in "A Rail System (and Patience) Are Stretched Thin in Chicago." From the article:

But deteriorating tracks and trains, chronic budget shortfalls and a region ever more dependent on rail service are forcing Chicagoans to confront the possibility that the system, commonly known as the El or the L, may be at a breaking point.

“We’re living on borrowed time,” said Frank Kruesi, the president of the Chicago Transit Authority, which runs the rail service. “The fact is, there’s no magic wand when we’re looking at modernizing a system that’s 100 years old in a very dense urban environment.”

The El, with its 1,190 rail cars and 222 miles of track, is the rail component of the transit authority, the second-largest public transit system in the country after New York’s. The C.T.A.’s trains and buses serve the city and 40 suburbs, logging 1.55 million rides daily. The El alone accounted for more than 195 million rides last year.

Many neighborhoods have thrived in recent years in part because they attracted residents eager to take advantage of the easy access to downtown that the trains afforded, some riders say. But the rail system is splitting at the seams, having carried 31 million more riders in 2005 than in 1985 on a fleet of cars with an average age of 27 years.

“I’ve been riding the El pretty much all my life, and I’ve never seen performance anywhere near this bad,” Alexander Facklis, 37, a rider on the Blue Line, said during a recent morning commute when a stalled train slowed most service. “There are delays every single day.”

For years, the story of the El has been one of too little money and costly patchwork maintenance, transit experts say. ...

The combination of slow zones, construction projects and packed rail cars has unleashed complaints from riders at community meetings and on blogs like C.T.A. Tattler, which refers to one of the most troubled routes, the Blue Line, as the “Blues Line.”

Jeff Gonzales, 40, sitting across the aisle from Mr. Facklis, said it used to take him 35 minutes to travel from his home in the Logan Square neighborhood to his job in the Loop. “Now, it takes an hour and 10 minutes,” he said.

We have to be diligent to ensure that this doesn't happen to the WMATA subway system, which was underdesigned--each line only has two tracks which prevents express service and is susceptible to problems due to lack of redundancy--and utilized heavily.

More cars and a change in seat configuration can add capacity in the short to intermediate run. But for the most part platforms can't be made larger and people are whining about adding stairs--but the escalators have capacity and breakdown issues as well.

New subway car seating configuration being tested currently. WMATA photo.

DC's competitive advantage is dependent on WMATA and speedy, efficient, and reliable subway service. Because of this is why I don't favor WMATA's abandonment of planning and managing construction.

The individual jurisdictions will fight for their own needs over the good of the overall system--witness expansion programs in Virginia for the "Silver Line" and proposals in Maryland to extend the subway to Fort Meade ("Fort Meade proposes Metro extension: Master plan includes adding to rail line to accommodate new jobs" from the Baltimore Sun and "Plan for Metro to BWI Gaining Momentum" from the Post), and towards Charles County ("Prince George's Sees Andrews As Hub of Development" from the Post) while the people proposing these schemes aren't really discussing (1) buying more cars, (2) the impact on the capacity of the extant system in Downtown, and (3) current reliability problems.

Dulles Metrorail -- Map and Stations.

I am writing (in theory, I am way behind) a paper for class on creating a "Transit First" planning and land use paradigm for DC. One of the things I'm going to have to cover is community input and control, governance, and the initiative, referenda, and bonding election process.

Maybe it's time that the WMATA board becomes popularly elected? Imagine a board with jurisdiction-based officials (just like now, with representatives from DC, VA, and MD) that are popularly elected rather than appointed, completed by another set of officials elected at-large, people who would have to campaign in multiple jurisdictions, and maybe get a certain number of votes from each jurisdiction in order to be elected.

Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times. Riders of the El system in Chicago transferring between the Red Line and the Brown Line, which serves some of the city’s most congested areas.