One bothersome part about the CEI is it generally seems to reward far suburban/exurb bus transit service well. It’s better to run a ‘slow bus’ than to operate a ‘fast bus’ — if its slow and has more ridership and the modal trip time difference is huge, you’ve scored! Skip the city core and go right downtown and still be ok on CEI numbers. Bypass the transit dependent (with exceedingly slow trip times with low ridership due to their slow trip times) and well operated lines (ie: dedicated guideway use through over congested roads like 252) even though they have more potential ridership nearby due to higher density, because we’ve got a pile of suburban bus riders to move to rail transit!

Heck, I guess BP is not looking well for Bottineau because they don’t have a good handle on where the Target project is at vs. Maple Grove who has a master plan for their gravel pits (who knows when those get developed, but they have a plan, BP does not have something solid yet it sounds)

I agree whole-heartedly. But then, TLC has become an institution dedicated to preserving unsustainable suburban sprawl by supporting suburban commuter lines for new dedicated-ROW transit. TLC–its founders included–has become a laughingstock when you contrast it to its far more progressive nationwide peers.

-I’ll be clear on the race issue. While it wasn’t wholly explicit in the studies or by the Southwest LRT project management, they made sure that everybody knew that the Kenilworth corridor “served” North Minneapolis. Demographically, the neighborhood that is hypothetically served, Harrison, has nearly the same demographics as Whittier.

They also coaxed the numbers into appearing that large numbers of bus transfers from North Minneapolis (routes 5, 19, 22) would come to Royalston station. It’s a wash, and is a terrible blunder. Transit for Livable Communities’ founder, John DeWitt, along with many people in that organization, are definitely the “misguided advocates” you’re referring to.

I think that’s another name for the so-called “outer product”, where you “multiply” two vectors and get IIRC a matrix. It’s rarely used, but you can look it up.

What you say about having a commuter support ranking and an energy efficiency ranking is taking a vector in 3 or 4 dimensions, and then projecting it onto 1 dimension based on some weighting formula. Personally I think the primary metric should be “cost per rider” and the feds should say something like “We pay up to a flat $30 per annual ride.” That translates to about $9,000 per weekday boarding.

Yes, there will be always more potential projects than money. However, this post reinforces the modal tranches of federal investment that have been around for too long as making sense in the first place.

A new transportation bill where funding moves away from backwards state DOTs and towards MPOs, with a fixed percentage match for infrastructure across all modes rather than 80% for highways even if they generate low benefits and “50% if you’re lucky” for transit projects that generate massive benefits– is the key to getting this fixed, not nibbling around the edges of a poorly designed, elaborate Rube Goldberg device of an evaluation program whose sole purpose is to split hairs among even the most worthy projects to allocate an embarrassingly small pot of money across a nation of 300 million people.

Is cost per boarding really a good metric? It seems that cost per passenger-mile is a far better metric. Consider the choice between operating the following two bus lines:

They are both good metrics. Consider that if the Express Bus runs with 10 miles between stops and each stop is a local TOD center, a far greater variety of trips are available via the Express bus than if it is a non-stop commuter from park and ride lot to downtown destination. Each trip offered transport of value to someone, even if they only rode 1 mile, and that diversity of service is ignored in a passenger-miles only metric.

The problem with the CEI is that it is trying to do the analytically impossible – assign a single scalar index to a vector joint product. Certainly under the traditional neoclassical model its possible, but that is at the expense of accepting counter-factuals as model assumption. Out in the real world, its impossible. And failing at the impossible should not be tremendously surprising.

Better to have a Commuter’s support ranking, a Local Transport support ranking, and Energy efficiency support ranking, etc. and allow projects to gain a certain proportion of funding (10%, 20% or 40%, based on the weight given to the goal) for being a winning project in a particular specific goal, to a maximum of 80% total federal funding.