Wall Street Journal: Austin Wants Mass Transit, but the New Infrastructure Law Will Give It a Bigger Highway | Part 2 -- learning from transit examples across the country

 The first entry discusses the "planning obstacles" in the way of transit planning and expansion when money all of a sudden becomes available.

-- "Wall Street Journal: Austin Wants Mass Transit, but the New Infrastructure Law Will Give It a Bigger Highway | Part 1 -- transit/sustainable mobility planning is not a priority"

This entry discusses the deep difficulties of transit expansion, in the context of examples from across the US.

he other way to look at this is in terms of the places that are changing their paradigm successfully, and the places that are failing to so. There are important lessons from each. 

But the big thing is it takes years (decades) to build the foundation of support. That there is always opposition. That government agencies aren't good at organizing for opposition. That it's essential to build from success. So trying to do things from an equity standpoint might be problematic, if you can't count on those populations for embracing transit, and if you fail there, you can't expand. Government gets excoriated when making even one mistake/program failure. 

1. You have the legacy transit cities. SF is probably the best example of a "monocentric service pattern" and because of the way that citizens forced the prioritization of transit, through a citizen initiated change to the city charter. It's a "streetcar/light rail" focused city. 

While other cities: Chicago, Boston, New York, Philadelphia are different, have different issues, etc., but usually a mix of heavy rail, light rail, railroad, bus, and maybe streetcar and/or ferry. 

Obviously, NYC is a great example but the conditions are so different from everywhere else. Interestingly, you have some satellite communities, like Hoboken and Jersey City which have some of the highest transit usage in the US per capita. 

Chicago is interesting because of the city/suburb divide, and the heavy rail/railroad divide. NYC has the subway system, and rail in NJ, NY and CT. While the subway system "should" be extended into close in NJ, because there isn't a regional transport compact comparable to how it works in Germany, that ain't happening. Plus PATH. 

From Cities in Full by Steve Belmont

2. Then you have the "new generation transit cities" that built heavy rail in the 1960s/1970s: BART, DC, Atlanta, Miami, Baltimore. Good to compare to Montreal, which developed its system at the same time. 

There are important lessons from each. BART was set up requiring sales tax participation by counties. So places like Marin and Sonoma opted out, and have suffered for it. 

Atlanta required counties to opt in. Many counties did not, crippling the effectiveness of the system. 

The DC area didn't aim to create sales and other taxes supporting the system, especially when it was out of the box and successful, instead relying on annual appropriations from the jurisdictions. There were also planning issues. 

Miami's system was designed to stoke revitalization, theoretically. So they put stations where they wanted economic development to occur, rather than also in places where you could have great success shifting people from cars to transit. 

Baltimore started too late and so only got funding for one of five proposed lines. So it's a key example of the difference between creating a transit line versus a multi-line network. 

DC created a sprawling polycentric network, but at the same time, and probably incidentally, there is a monocentric network at the core of the city--31 of the city's 42 stations.  DC showed the value of adding transit to potentially popular center city neighborhoods.  But it took more than 30 years to begin to fully reap this effect.

Before the pandemic and massive and continuous operational failures, the DC-based subway system had more than 700,000 daily riders, and was either the second or third busiest system in the US (after NYC and Chicago).

BART in the San Francisco Bay area even more than DC was more about re-creating a commuter railroad like polycentric system, providing service to the city over large suburban distances.

More recently, MARTA is getting some of the recalcitrant counties to participate, but 50 years after the system first began developing. 

BART is extending even further south, accentuating its commuter rail nature, while Marin and Sonoma Counties are developing their own single line of railroad.  BART is interesting too because of the difference of effect between SF and Oakland.  

-- "Making the case for intra-city (vs. inter-city) transit planning," 2011

SF's BART stations add regional access, but they have their own extensive intra-city transit system.  Oakland got regional access from BART, but without the intra-city transit system, it is only as SF has become "built out" that Oakland is revitalizing in its core, and transit isn't integral the story.

DC, Baltimore, and Miami also have commuter rail, which aren't well integrated into the transit system 

3. Obviously, the best example for places without legacy heavy rail is Portland. (Recognizing that most cities had extensive streetcar networks at one time, which were pretty much abandoned by the 1940s.) 

-- "Portland planning lessons," 2005

They changed their planning processes to prioritize sustainable mobility in ways that most other "metropolitan cities" have not. They built light rail, re-introduced streetcar, added commuter rail, eventually added support for bicycling (and walking). 

But despite all the planning successes, legacy city transit systems and DC have significantly higher "mode splits" for transit use.

 4. Now generation transit expansion, mostly light rail, except that LA and Denver have a mix of light and heavy rail.  And Southern California has a wide scale railroad passenger program with every day service.

The groupings of somewhat like systems are Los Angeles, Puget Sound and Denver | Minneapolis and Charlotte | Salt Lake, Phoenix, Dallas and Houston. 

The first set are building extensive networks, and encouraging land use intensification in association with transit.  Each time LA and Seattle add new lines or extensions, there is significant increase in ridership.  

Counties in Southern California are large enough to be single county MPOs, that is Metropolitan Planning Organizations tasked by the USDOT to do large scale transportation planning.  LA County has been particularly successful in passing sales tax measures to accelerate funding of transit expansion.  

The multi-county Sound Transit system for the Puget Sound has a more difficult time raising money, which significantly delays system development, as key extensions won't be operative for almost 20 years from now.  Separately, Seattle passes its own transit funding measures, which they use to fund bus service expansion and the streetcar program.

Minneapolis and Charlotte are single lines like Baltimore, although Minneapolis is to me one line even if it's two lines. Both with plans to expand towards a network paradigm. But it's harder politically to expand in Charlotte. 

The third set are sprawl cities, and are building networks of lines, but while the transit has positive marginal effects it's not changing the land use and transportation planning paradigm much. Some of these places also have commuter rail.  But despite real transit networks, the lines aren't used much.

SoCal is the best at fare integration between rail and local transit.(Although Baltimore does this too.)  Rail riders get free access to local transit through a QR code on tickets.

5. One line "systems" like Buffalo, the light rail in New Jersey, Norfolk, etc. They are good examples of the need to have networks as opposed to lines. That in the context of the automobile centric mobility paradigm in the US, one line be it rail or bus rapid transit, is unable to have much significant effect in unifying transportation and land use policy.

Although the NJ light rail lines integrate with various forms of transit around Trenton and Philadelphia, showing a difference. 

The Purple Line light rail in Suburban Maryland is a separate case. It should be part of DC Metrorail, but WMATA is parochial, focused on heavy rail and regional bus, and wasn't interested in learning how to operate a new mode.  

It is expected that there will be integrated fares. And it will extend the existing network, and at least in terms of pre-pandemic use, I expected it to be the most heavily used single line LR in the US, with more than 60,000 daily riders. 

6. And streetcar projects of varying success. Portland, Seattle, Tucson, Kansas City, Cincinnati, Atlanta, DC, Oklahoma City, Dallas, etc. Including legacy streetcar projects like Tampa, Dallas, Memphis, Newark, etc.  And failed programs, like Arlington County, Virginia and to some extent DC. 

It's logical to compare them to legacy systems in Toronto and Philadelphia, and I guess Boston, which I know little about. Granted Toronto is Canada's most populous city. The King Street Streetcar alone has 65,000 daily riders. (SF brought back vintage streetcars and run them in revenue service on particular lines.) 

There is a difference between the larger city based systems in Portland and Seattle, which are developing streetcar networks, which can complement light rail, and the smaller cities, where a streetcar is the only example they have of fixed rail transit.  Tucson and Kansas City seem to be some of the more successful projects.

I use the relative failure of streetcar planning and introduction in DC as an example of why it's important to not fail, because failures in one place are used as an example by transit opponents in other places.  Interestingly, despite the failure as a streetcar service, DC's streetcar is an massive success in terms of spurring economic development.

-- "Sometimes you have to wonder if transit/transit projects are being deliberately screwed up to make transit expansion almost impossible," 2022
-- "DC and streetcars #4: from the standpoint of stoking real estate development, the line is incredibly successful and it isn't even in service yet, and now that development is extending eastward past 15th Street," 2015

 7. And the places that are failing when it comes to rail transit development due to opposition, etc. Tampa-St. Petersburg, Nashville, Georgia in general, Detroit.   

-- "What can Suburban Atlanta and Greater Detroit learn from Virginia's Fairfax and Loudoun Counties," 2018
-- "https://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2018/05/nashville-voting-today-on-transit.html," 2018

These places have weak transit generally.  And may have serious competition between the city and suburbs like in the Detroit area.

Charlotte and Phoenix have to withstand anti transit initiatives every so often even though they have light rail programs that are working. (Charlotte's isn't used all that much.) 

The biggest lesson is that the automobility paradigm is so entrenched and it takes years, if not decades to build the support for building rail-based transit

8. Then there are the places with bus transit and are trying to add light rail. Austin would be one. San Antonio I think. Raleigh-Durham. All of these places have lessons. 

But as I wrote in 2012 about Georgia's creation of the opportunity for tax districts on a large scale, you can't just put this forward and expect action within 18 months.

-- "Failure of the transit-roads sales tax measure in Metro Atlanta" 

Conclusion.  It takes years to build the foundation of a support for sustainable mobility in the midst of a transportation and land use paradigm that favors automobile centricity and automobile dependence.

Even with some success, in sprawled places, transit faces continuous operation.

So the least bit of failure or the appearance of corruption is seized upon to justify reduction in funding and/or expansion plans.

Relatedly, continuous investment is required to keep the systems operating well.  Failure to invest in maintenance and revivification can result in catastrophic failure.  The NYC Subway system in the 1970s, and the DC area Metrorail system today are the best examples of this.

-- "A tenure of failure doesn't deserve encomiums: Paul Wiedefeld, WMATA CEO," 2022

And even without failure, the metropolitan consensus in favor of transit system creation, maintenance and expansion needs to be reconstructed over time, as stakeholders and residents and communities change.

-- "WMATA 40th anniversary in 2016 as an opportunity for assessment," 2016