It seems outrageous to me that every city I travel to has custom rolling stock, stations, signage and platforms. Some even have custom gauges (BART). What ever happened to the lessons learned from the venerable PCC streetcar? Make the same vehicle and rail that every metropolitan are can share, thus reducing costs dramatically!

While at it, modularize and standardize station components as well.

One common standard for Long Range HSR (Maglev?), another for commuter rail (NJ Transit Overhead Catenary?/ Diesel Electric), and if needed another for inner-city transit (Streetcar or High Platform NY-Subway Style).

Then the major industrial vehicle builders (Bombardier, GM, Breda…) could compete on the same basic design standards and mass-produce for multiple customers. In addition, a shrinking system could sell cars to a growing one.

Why is this not done?

-PJL

Considering the New Starts funding formula already takes into account development, travel time savings, new riders and other factors, a blended formula seems like it would work the best. It may be better to try to optimize the formula than to rely on a single number that may exclude some very worthy projects.

A perfect example, is the proposed Urban Ring in Boston. Phase II is BRT and the MBTA and EOT has already stopped mentioning Phase III (heavy rail). This line clearly needs to be heavy rail, due to the immense congestion in the central tunnels, but because the boring process etc… for a heavy rail line is so expensive, the cheaper and worse alternative is being pushed (BRT), because the funding isn’t there; not to mention the EOT/MBTA obsession with BRT.

Building the proper, more efficient and larger long-term benefit infrastructure/transit project in a dense urban area will always cost more, but because of the outdated funding mechanism, cheaper alternatives will continue to be pushed and in the end, be a waste of money.

I also have a problem with development based funding. Another Boston example, is the completely falsified development assessments created by the EOT/MBTA regarding construction along the Silver Line. These figures are open to a large degree of falsification and exaggeration. Silver Line Phase I, is nothing more than a bus running on streets, in already dense urban areas, yet there is supposedly millions of dollars of development taking place because of the Silver Line Phase I. Just because something is built near a bus line, doesn’t mean it’s transit based development, especially when the area is already very dense.

Because of falsifications in facts like these, that is why I am extremely wary of funding based on potential development-based funding.

Also to be considered is not simply ridership, but passenger miles. A rider taking a 100 mile commuter train is not the same as a half a mile on a streetcar. And of course both have very different sprawl implications.

Another consideration is projects that will improve the financial efficiency of the system. For instance if we fund automatic train control on New York City subways, it won’t have any effect on ridership, but will improve the financial performance of the system considerably (perhaps allowing for additional service, with *will* have an effect on ridership). Double-deck commuter cars are another example of a cost savings from a capital investment and bus rapid transit may be too, if busses run faster (ie, it takes less of them and less drivers to transport the same ridership).

Individual pools of funds. Half of the funds go to 40% funding the top ranked projects, the other half to funding the next in line at 20%. A project that would qualify for over 80% gets “its” funding from the pools that it ranks most highly for, and in the other categories, projects shift up to suit.

Jersey Transit’s new Hudson River Tunnel is designed knowing that the feds will only pay $3 billion. Whether it connects to other lines now or in the future is not compelling. The cap determines how much will be spent and what it will get us, or not get.

So the cap means that most really big projects in the biggest cities will not be very good, or as good as if fair share funding had been possible.

In this way, the cities are penalized, and the projects are disappointing. They thus serve as examples to ‘prove’ the ideological claim that government can’t do anything right and that transit spending is always prone to major and wasteful mistakes.

Let me give an explicit, partisan, and historical rewrite of Yonah’s prose above. Since 1980 and the election of the Reagan Republicans, continuing under Clinton when the House was controlled by the Gingrich Republicans, and especially for the past 8 years under the Bushies, our national transportation policy has been controlled by ideologues who hate cities. They hate the people who live in big cities (disproportionately, cities are home to gays, Jews, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, immigrants, highly educated professionals, and Democrats). And they hate the notion of government doing good things for the people.

As a result, the funding formulas have been skewed. And to the extent that subjective factors may have come into play, big cities — and perhaps big Democratic states — have been passed over.

As I understand it, until a recent change, ridership projections had to be ‘stand alone’ on any given route, with no credit for connectivity to a larger system. So a city with a couple of routes to downtown, say, and the big hospital on one route and the junior college campus on the other, when applying for grant for a new line passing the university and museum could not calculate any benefit coming added traffic on the hospital line or the junior college line for riders expected to use them to travel to the university or the museum. In this way, cities trying to build systems were at best no better off than newbies wanting their first lone route to serve downtown.

Real justice would be to go back and ‘uncap’ every project, and give credit to future projects for the ones that had been penalized. So that L.A., for example, would get the federal funds it should have received for the Gold Line extension to be used on the next such project. But I know. We are supposed to look forward, and ignore the crimes of the recent past. That does not mean we must forget them.

Weighting TOD potential is also sensible, although this makes explicit the political reality that rail transit is built mostly for new residents, not existing ones. We may want be be careful about creating a situation where entirely built-out very dense corridors (Second Avenue Subway, NYC; Geary Corridor, San Francisco) would suffer just because they lack many developable parcels.