» $10 billion spending spree will improve transit in Cordoba and improve branch railway lines. China expects to improve trade relations and open access to natural resources.

Expanding its effort to use infrastructure investments to spread its influence, the Chinese government has agreed to a $10 billion commitment to upgrade a series of intercity rail lines in Argentina and improve urban transit systems in Buenos Aires and Cordoba. Funds come from the China Development Bank and will require a 15% match from the Argentinian government.

This money will not contribute to to the construction of the Buenos Aires-Rosario high-speed line, a separate and currently delayed project.

The effort suggests not only that China is willing and able to contribute its national funds to foreign projects, but also that it intends to structure its investments as an alternative to the World Bank, a grant-making institution that since World War II has sponsored infrastructure in underdeveloped countries with the general aim of spreading Western economic interests. China announced in March that it was planning to invest in a series of transcontinental high-speed rail lines throughout Asia and Europe; in addition, the Eastern superpower has been upping its spending in Africa far above the engagement of any other country. China clearly hopes that new infrastructure abroad will help speed goods to its rapidly expanding domestic market and encourage the expansion of its own international business.

Thanks to talks between Presidents Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Hu Jintao, Argentina will receive $4.35 billion to renovate three freight railroad lines, including $1.85 billion to improve conditions on the Belgrano Line, which links the country to Bolivia and is an important link for the nation’s agricultural producers. China undoubtedly wants to expand its access to Argentina’s productive farmland, and rail transport is significantly cheaper than road movements.

But China has also agreed to more than four billion dollars for the improvement of the Buenos Aires Subway and the creation of a four-corridor Metro in Cordoba — projects that provide no clear economic benefit to the latter country. This suggests that Argentina has agreed to giving China preferential trade treatment above and beyond the improved access to the country’s agricultural resources.

China, of course, does not have infinite resources so it won’t be able to promise similar spending in every country around the world. That said, its own extensive investment in its high-speed rail and urban rapid transit suggests that similar American projects could potentially find funding in Chinese hands. If U.S. companies aren’t able to provide adequate private sector support for construction programs, and if neither the federal government nor states themselves are able to develop infrastructure banks to advance such funding, foreign aid could be a realistic possibility.

This could be seen as a significant let-down for Americans used to thinking that we should be able to fund our infrastructure using our own funds. But the opportunity for expanded global trade could be an excellent opportunity for improvements in the U.S.; there’s no reason to be worried about direct investment from abroad if it makes possible the construction of resources that we couldn’t otherwise build.

Image above: Cordoba, Argentina, from Flickr user Javier de Cordoba

» Northern extension to Broward County line to be pulled out of federal New Starts process as limited tax revenues hit home. A reconsideration of priorities was in order anyway.

Miami-Dade County voters were promised way too much when they were asked to endorse a half-cent sales tax increase for better transit back in 2002. Not only would they get much more bus service, but also the construction of two new Metrorail extensions, more than doubling the size of the system by 2020.

Suffice it to say that despite electoral approval of the funding source, little has improved. Thanks to a reduction in tax receipts seen across the country and corruption within the transit agency, bus offerings have been cut back to levels not much different than those available around ten years ago. The one Metrorail line that has entered construction, the 2.4-mile AirportLink, has seen its cost double to more than half a billion dollars and its opening date delayed to April 2012.

Miami’s first and only Metrorail corridor opened in 1984 and now includes 22 miles of service to about 70,000 daily riders.

After a year of confusion about the status of the full “Orange Line,” which would have eventually included links west to Florida International University and north to the Broward County line, Miami-Dade County’s manager has announced that he will remove the project from the federal New Starts applicant pool. The County has been unable in recent years to convince Washington of the merits of the project, thanks both to difficulties assuring local support for transit operations and low projected ridership numbers; it has repeatedly received medium-low ratings from the Federal Transit Administration, making it unable to qualify for aid. In addition, the county’s sales tax revenues have been too low to even support a “light” bus rapid transit program along the NW 27th Avenue corridor where trains were supposed to go.

The North extension, also known as Orange Line Phase II, would have cost $1.6 billion and carry about 23,000 daily riders along 9.5 miles of tracks, a miserable investment-to-return ratio. The even more expensive 10.6-mile East-West line has been assumed to be dead for years.

This is bad, albeit unsurprising, news for Miami, which has been particularly hard hit by the recession. And it’s not alone: Other cities, including Dallas and Charlotte, are suffering similar fates. Nonetheless, the fact that Miami now must reevaluate both its transit funding system and its future priorities could lead to better thinking about cost-effective ways to advance the future of the city’s public transportation. It could also force local leaders to push for more sustainable funding.

The problem with Miami’s decision-making when it developed the Orange Line program ten years ago was that it envisioned very expensive metro service to areas that do not have the passenger demand for much more than upgraded buses. The low ridership estimates for the North corridor attest to the fact that areas to which extensions would run are of relatively low densities, with few big user generators along the route. Meanwhile, potentially more attractive routes through the county’s most populated areas, including along the waterfront and to places like Miami Beach and Little Havana, were simply not considered priorities by a board skewed towards the needs of the county’s north and west sides.

Moreover, the project was pursued without serious thinking as to how the system would work in the long term. Because both extensions would have been from sections of the existing system north of downtown, the Metrorail line would have become seriously unbalanced, with far more service needed to northern destinations than to areas south of downtown, causing operational difficulties. Even the first section to the airport, a one-station spur, will produce some difficulties, since Miami doesn’t have the funds to increase service dramatically and trains already only run every seven to eight minutes at rush hour and every 30 minutes on weekends. How attractive can an airport link be to customers who are forced to wait more than half an hour for a train?

The county does not have the funds to ponder major transportation projects at the moment, though it could focus on simple and cheap bus improvements like installing signal priority at intersections, improving customer information displays, and marking off dedicated lanes. These require no significant spending, just good management. Does Miami-Dade have what it takes?

Once the economy recovers and county board members wake up to the benefits of increased spending on public transportation, though, there should be a countywide rethink about the best way to use varying modes of transit. In the past, I’ve suggested that routes into Midtown and Miami Beach likely could garner enough passengers to merit the installation of cheap street-running light rail (though probably not Metrorail). In other areas, bus rapid transit is sufficient. But until the county’s back on its financial feet, nothing is going to be built.

» The project continues the suburban-oriented focus of BART regional rail, but at least it points the way towards serving a city center.

Somewhere in the learning curve about how best to take advantage of rapid transit technology, the San Francisco Bay Area took a wrong turn. Despite a long history of walkable, moderately scaled urbanism in many of the area’s cities epitomized by San Francisco, beginning in the 1960s planners and political leaders became obsessed with a different vision for how the place should look and work. The result was both the gradual effort to “Manhattanize” downtown San Francisco and the related push to speed people from far-away single-family homes to those new office towers via the particularly high-quality BART regional rail.

Regional efforts in recent years have pushed similar goals: There has been a renewed effort to solidify San Francisco as the West Coast’s New York City through the upzoning of central city land as the regional transit system is extended outward. BART has an extension south to Warm Springs under construction and a diesel multiple unit link planned into East Contra Costa County; north of the Bay, Sonoma and Marin Counties have set aside funding for a new commuter railroad. These projects are arguably overbuilt, serving far suburbs with transit funds that would be better used in the central city. But for a region in which money comes from taxpayers everywhere, it’s hard to justify BART in one place and just better buses elsewhere. Everyone wants the best.

Though this planning experiment had its beneficial effects — it kept the area’s central city healthy as other urban centers in the United States declined — it also reinforced a building pattern not so different from regions with no rapid transit system available at all, with suburban sprawl extending out in all directions.

Considering the region’s most recent decisions, that emphasis seems unlikely to change. The effort to spread regional transit service was advanced this week with the approval of a preferred corridor for an extension of BART to Livermore from an existing system terminus at Dublin/Pleasanton.

The project will bring urban rapid transit — a technology reserved typically for the densest downtown and apartment communities — to a (relatively small) city of 200,000 people. While most similar systems have stops every half to three quarters mile, this Livermore extension will have two new stations for 11 miles of new service. With average speeds along the route approaching 60 mph, and an estimated future daily ridership of 32,000, the line will in all appearances be a well-frequented intercity rail system. The problem, of course, is its estimated $3.8 billion price tag.

To summarize matters quickly, other options, such as improved bus lines or intercity rail, could provide similar or perhaps even better  mobility improvements at a dramatically lower price. But they do not have the appeal of BART, so though they could be implemented more rapidly, there is little chance that they will be.

The approval of a preferred alignment in no way assures this project’s construction — the regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which sets priorities for the use of federal funding for local projects, has set its sights on the southern extension of BART from the future station at Warm Springs to San Jose and Santa Clara. That’s a megaproject whose $5.9 billion cost is likely to consume the regional pocketbook for another fifteen years, leaving little room for rail to Livermore.

Even so, it’s striking that planning on this new route continues as if it should be one of the Bay Area’s top priorities. Despite the fact the both San Francisco and the close-in communities across the Bay have a number of corridors that demand a major improvement in transit service (Geary Boulevard highest among them), and in spite of crowding on the existing BART and Muni Metro systems, there has been no official endorsement of planning for new center city rail corridors, with the exception of the Central Subway project. But this problem results from a metropolitan political structure that enshrined the concept that investments should be spread across the region, no matter their relative benefits.

All that said, the choice of a preferred alignment for the Livermore project suggests a maturity of thinking in the minds of decision-makers in this part of California. The analysis of route options suggested that a number of routes extending east from Dublin/Pleasanton could attract about thirty thousand daily riders and improve trip times roughly similarly. But both the City of Livermore and the BART board endorsed the most expensive option, which would send trains from the existing route along I-580 to downtown Livermore using a tunnel under Portola Avenue and then connecting to an existing railroad corridor.

The decision to route the extension underground for a part of the journey (and even build a new subway station) added hundreds of millions to the project’s cost. But the choice to construct a station in downtown Livermore will allow for far more transit-oriented development than would have another route that remained along the highway, and it will encourage infill instead of greenfield projects. Cities must understand the direct land use effects of their transportation investments if they expect to take serious advantage of them, and the decision here is clearly in the right direction.

If leaders in the Bay Area and elsewhere are to continue investing in massively expensive and under-performing projects that serve the far suburbs, they are likely losing out on potentially more valuable spending. But if the projects are built well, such as is being proposed here for downtown Livermore, at least there can be some positive gain in terms of land use.

Image above: Section of map showing proposed alignments for BART to Livermore, from BART

» The latest segment of lines 9 and 10 opened last week. The city should have 30 miles of automatic metros by 2014.

Over the next ten years, New York, Los Angeles, and Barcelona each hope to have new underground rapid transit lines up and running. Gotham will spend $4.5 billion on a 1.7-mile line under Second Avenue. Los Angeles will get a 8.6-mile extension to the Westside for $6 billion. And Barcelona will have built 30 miles of automated subways for €6.5 billion ($7.9 billion according to today’s exchange rate).

Perhaps it’s an unfair comparison: Spain has lower labor costs, and despite Barcelona’s international prestige and high densities, land values there are generally lower than in the two American metropolises. But the disparity in infrastructure creation remains dramatic; countries like Spain and China are able to build far more than American cities can even dream about.

Barcelona’s newest exploit was the opening last week of the first shared segment of the L9 and L10 lines. Both are being constructed as part of a unified program that will increase the metro system’s size by a third, providing a new north-south circumferential corridor west of the city center, access to northern neighborhoods, a connection to the new high-speed rail station at La Sagrera, and direct links to both the airport and the port to the south. The first segment of L9 opened in December 2009 and the first section of L10 in April this year. The southern links will be completed in 2012, with the full program in service in 2014. That’s six years after the project was originally expected to be done.

Though Barcelona’s project doesn’t come close to the scale of Madrid’s metro expansion program — that city increased the size of its network by more than 100 miles between 1995 and 2007 and now has the highest metro route miles per person in the world — Barcelona will have Europe’s longest underground route and the continent’s most extensive automated line in four years.

For €6.5 billion, the city will be getting 52 stations, 20 of which will include transfers; the project is expected to attract 350,000 daily riders. Because of Barcelona’s already very dense metro network, the line has been built below everything else. Tunnel boring machines, which Spain specializes in, were used for the entire underground path (the line includes a few miles above ground on viaducts); this decreased costs by limiting surface cuts and land purchasing. The city also has taken advantage of the line’s building to produce some very interesting street reconstructions.

Stations in the center city are so far below ground that the transport authority has designed stops so that commuters move to and from trains by elevator.

This subway project has consumed the majority of the region’s transportation funds, but the city was also interested in investing in surface transit. Specifically, several boulevards were set aside for a bus rapid transit system. Yet the mayor’s biggest priority was supposed to be the reconstruction of the Diagonal Avenue, which cuts across the city roughly east-west. Though both its eastern and western extends are served by trams, its central section has no rapid transit either on it or below. So Mayor Jordi Hereu attempted to invoke public participation in the elaboration of the project, calling a referendum on the program to implant light rail and a more pedestrian-friendly streetscape there.

But the mayor’s effort to involve the people was a failure — the poll attracted only 12% of the electorate, and they voted massively against any of the two changes proposed by the mayor. For now, Diagonal will have to stay as it is.

Thus Spain’s second city will have to content itself on its relatively ambitious subway expansion program. Not too disappointing a result…

Image above: Barcelona L9 Tunnel, from Generalitat de Catalunya

» 1,900 miles of rapid transit planned for world’s most populated country by 2015.

Most of China’s growth is concentrated in its large urban centers, which will house fifty percent of the country’s population by 2020 and 75% by 2050. For these increasingly huge megacities, the central government has no choice but to develop adequate measures to transport the population. Following the American model of car dependence is simply not possible because of high densities and inadequate space. With its high-speed rail network, now the longest in the world, the Chinese are providing efficient intercity links into downtowns.

But it’s in urban rail networks that the country has made the biggest strides towards increasing mobility within cities. Shanghai’s huge Metro, the longest on earth, is just one among eleven currently operating in China. Dozens of other cities have rapid transit systems either under construction or in planning.

Now the central government has made a commitment to spend up to one trillion one hundred billion U.S. dollars by 2015 on such grade-separated urban public transportation corridors. This is part of a one trillion-dollar investment in urban infrastructure nationwide; China will also spend $450 billion on railway construction over the same period. By the end of this year, China will offer a total of 870 miles of metro systems, up from around 600 today, on the way to 1,900 miles in five years. Far more is planned by 2020, especially in the east coast powerhouses of Beijing, Shanghai, and the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong megaplex.

Urban infrastructure investment has consumed an average of 2.6% of China’s GDP since 1994. With a national growth rate predicted to hold at between seven and ten percent a year, the country will be able to guarantee its huge level of investment.

Total infrastructure investment across all levels of government accounts for roughly 1% of American GDP. The U.S. commits about $100 billion a year to all forms of transportation spending.

Whether China’s spending will be enough to prevent the rapid rise in car use there is unknown. Chinese’s per capita automobile ownership has increased from 24 cars per 1,000 people to 40 per 1,000, though that’s far less than the 765 cars per 1,000 people in the United States. The country’s decision to implement tolls on virtually all new highways and the use of vehicle restrictions in the central zones of cities like Shanghai and Beijing will spur more use of public transit.

China better be preparing for the future, though, when it will need to spend more rebuilding its infrastructure than constructing it anew. One hopes the Chinese have developed more stable long-term operations and maintenance funds than have those of us in North America.

» A sour economy puts Mayor David Miller’s hopes of an eight-line light rail network in jeopardy. But so far, the election to replace him has demonstrated just how much Toronto wants to be a transit city.

Missed in the hoopla over transit currently absorbing Toronto’s motley crew of mayoral aspirants is the fact that the city — just three years after its current mayor went full-bore in favor of new investments — is already underway in the construction on a new light rail line, the first among four that have received actual funding commitments from Ontario Provincial officials. That’s in addition to a subway line extension also being built and signed contracts for hundreds of new subway trains and streetcars. This city is serious about its future in public transportation.

That’s a rapid turn-around from decades of stagnation. Like most big North American cities, Toronto hasn’t had the wildest success extending its rapid transit network over the past twenty years; the 3.4-mile Sheppard Subway that it opened in 2002 was just the remnant of what was once supposed to be a massive re-envisioning of the region’s commuting patterns.

But financial circumstances and economic difficulties got in the way, much, unfortunately, as appears to be happening now.

After introducing his 75-mile Transit City light rail transit plan in 2007, Mayor David Miller began his campaign to convince other leaders to come on board; Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty agreed in Spring 2009 to fund the first three corridors along Eglinton, Finch, and Sheppard (now under construction) — and to replace the moribund Scarborough RT line with light rail. McGuinty’s own staff developed an even larger plan called Move Ontario under the auspices of the newly formed Metrolinx regional transit agency to fund similar projects outside of the city, including a network of “Viva” bus rapid transit lanes in York Region, just north of Toronto. But that support for infrastructure investments dimmed over the past year as construction cost estimates exploded and tax revenues slumped.

What was once supposed to be a 15-year, C$6 billion plan with eight east-west and north-south connections across the region has become an $8.15 billion plan with just four truncated east-west corridors. After last month’s decision by Ontario to reduce spending on transit by C$4 billion over the next five years, Metrolinx has reduced overall route length by 14 miles to 33 miles of new construction, cutting out 24 stations from the four lines that are funded. Completion of these initial routes is now delayed from 2016 to 2022.

The other four lines — including the Jane, Don Mills, Waterfront West, and Scarborough-Malvern light rail corridors — are stuck in planning purgatory.

Mayor Miller is understandably upset about the gutting of his proposal, and last week he accused Premier McGuinty of changing the rules behind his back, despite the fact that the two had evidently agreed to a cutback plan several weeks back. Transit City was to be sponsored almost entirely by provincial, not municipal, funds. Now Toronto is advancing a proposal to lend Ontario C$1.5 billion to begin construction more quickly — an idea that the province’s staff has rejected outright. Miller’s political positioning is seriously weakened by the fact that he isn’t running for reelection and that his appointed chair of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), Adam Giambrone, has been racked by scandals. Similarly, claims of incompetence on the part of TTC staffers and the reckless pursuit of an expensive new headquarters have diminished Miller’s arguments.

Now comments from the mayoral field — the candidate who wins on October 25th will ultimately find him or herself in charge of the TTC, which runs the subway — has put the whole expansion program into doubt.

Candidate Rocco Rossi made the first move in January when he announced he wanted a stop to all current Transit City projects, a move he premised on fiscal “responsibility” but one that sounded a lot more like simply pro-car rhetoric because he argued concurrently for the ban of bike lanes from some downtown streets. Now he’s out with a new proposal that would lay two kilometers of subway track a year — an idea that would undoubtedly cost more and produce fewer long-term results than the current Transit City projects. Rob Ford, who was once a transit opponent, is now towing a similar line, as is Sarah Thomson, a marginal player. Joe Pantalone, close to the mayor, and George Smitherman are likely to come out in favor of light rail extensions, though the latter has yet to be entirely clear about his long-term goals for transportation.

There are valid reasons to criticize Mayor Miller’s Transit City: the light rail lines, running at street-level with about twice as many stops per mile as the existing subways, won’t speed commuters from the inner suburbs as much as perhaps is needed. The choice of a different technology will require transit users to make more transfers and diminish the effectiveness of the existing network. Some corridors may demand higher-capacity vehicles than those proposed for these lines.

Much of the anti-light rail sentiment stems from the problems experienced over the past few years in the construction of a reserved right-of-way for the St. Clair Avenue Streetcar, which dismayed business owners and locals for its disruption to the street.

Most importantly, but less mentioned by politicians is the fact that Transit City doesn’t improve access to the downtown core, exactly the improvement Toronto may need most. Despite the fact that a downtown relief subway line, designed to alleviate congestion problems on the system, has been considered since at least 1985 and is even included as a possibility in the province’s transit plan, Mayor Miller makes no provisions for it. Transit City chooses instead to connect moderate-density outlying neighborhoods with each other.

More subways might theoretically be more appropriate for a city the size of Toronto, but the focus of this year’s mayoral candidates on underground corridors over light rail glosses over the fact that Mayor Miller’s choice of street-running light rail wasn’t a coincidence: It was a result of a realization that neither the city nor the province would be able to afford the cost of tunnels for these corridors, and that the city needs to be realistic about what it can build. 75 miles of subways would cost tens of billions of dollars that no one has. Though most will be built above ground, I should note that some sections of the Transit City network, including the midsection of the Eglinton Crosstown Line, are to be placed in a subway.

While there’s been plenty of talk about building new subway lines in Toronto over the years, proposals — no matter how well worked out — aren’t worth anything unless they’re backed by political power. That’s what David Miller added to the game. By promoting his massive and perhaps even too ambitious Transit City scheme as if his life depended on it, he secured provincial aid and shamed the region into actually moving forward. A less-than-perfect light rail line that riders can actually use is worth far more than a subway whose only existence is in the glimmer of a planner’s — or politician’s — eye.

The shouts in favor of subways by many of the city’s mayoral candidates haven’t been followed by any specifics about what routes would be prioritized and descriptions of what would be done for neighborhoods left without new transit access. One of the strengths of the Transit City proposal is that it is very clear in laying out the city’s future transit network; it doesn’t leave choices about new rail routes to future study, which inevitably mean delays and little actual accomplishment.

Nevertheless, Mayor Miller’s continued insistence that his program be built with the province’s money is starting to seem a bit out-of-whack. Since he’s not going to be at City Hall next year, what game is he playing? Does he think his legacy depends on the successful completion of his original project? Why doesn’t he make sure that something is built by cooperating with Premier McGuinty?

But maybe Miller’s legacy is not the transit system itself but rather his ability to make public transportation a matter of prime political concern for his city. Whether or not Transit City is completed as he hoped, he has managed in the midst of a difficult economy to convince the province to spend C$8 billion on rail transit expansion projects over the course of just ten years — a feat matched by few cities anywhere in the world. Though the candidates running to replace him may be promoting very different schemes for his city’s future, they are, right and left, universally in favor of more public transportation.

Cities throughout the United States and Canada should look to Mayor Miller’s ambition and political positioning as an example for how one politician can promote a seachange in mentality towards investing in transportation. One big plan, backed by significant funding commitments, can force everyone hoping to advance politically to jockey for first place in promoting the best possible transit improvements.

» Vancouver’s plans for a Broadway rapid transit line could come in the form of SkyTrain rapid transit or light rail.

With 40,000 students and almost 10,000 employees shoehorned into the tight space between the Strait of Georgia and the City of Vancouver, the University of British Columbia (UBC) is made for rapid transit. It’s an ideal terminus for a major public transportation line, with thousands of transit-friendly people ready to line up to commute to other parts of the region.

Indeed, the existing buses connecting UBC to the rest of Vancouver are jam-packed along their routes, with up to 100,000 riders making the link daily. The University has been envisioned as the eventual destination of one of the region’s rail lines since the automated SkyTrain Expo Line first opened its doors in 1985. With the active and pedestrian-heavy Broadway corridor serving as the connecting spine and the Millennium SkyTrain designed specifically to allow for an eventual western extension down that street, it has been assumed for years that UBC would get SkyTrain service at some point.

Several months after the successful opening of the Canada Line between downtown Vancouver, the airport, and suburban Richmond, transportation authority Translink has begun its study of six options for the future development of the Broadway corridor. Though a 12 km SkyTrain link is being considered (as shown above), so are bus rapid transit and light rail alternatives, each of which could offer good mass transit at a reduced price compared to the automated metro service offered by SkyTrain.

With the region facing a serious long-term budget gap, can it place economic concerns above the benefits of a more expensive expansion?

Jarrett Walker discusses the options on Human Transit, arguing that while extending the Millennium Line from its current terminus at VCC-Clark to Arbutus Street (about two-fifths of the way to UBC) is an important step, the lower densities west of there imply that a cheaper street-running light rail alternative could connect to UBC along the remainder of the routing. East of Arbutus Street, the light rail line could continue northeast along an existing rail right-of-way (including that of the ephemeral Olympic Line Streetcar) to the Canada Line Olympic Village Station and and Main Street Millennium/Expo Lines Station.

This alternative would provide connections to the Canada Line for both UBC and Millennium Line riders at a cheaper price than would be possible with a fully tunneled SkyTrain route, expected to cost up to C$2.8 billion. This would give riders from both sides of the region direct access to the very dense Fairview district (near City Hall) and allow one-transfer rides to UBC from anywhere with a rail link. The emphasis here would be on connections. (The light rail/SkyTrain alternative alignment shown below.)

Two fully light rail options and the bus rapid transit option would be less advantageous, as they would limit access to Fairview from the east side of the region by requiring a transfer to get there. (One of the light rail alternatives shown below.)

The question, though, is whether any of these options satisfy the strong transportation demand of the Broadway corridor. With expected ridership of 150,000 passengers a day, can a street-running light rail line from UBC to Fairview handle the traffic? Today’s buses, running every 90 seconds at peak, are overcrowded; it would be difficult to offer light rail trains at similar frequencies because of their long lengths and interaction with surrounding traffic, meaning that capacity would not increase nearly as much as it would with SkyTrain. Light rail, in other words, would leave little room for future growth.

Moreover, should riders hoping to get to UBC be expected to settle for 16 mph average speeds on light rail or buses — the fastest they’re expected to run even with exclusive lanes? The Canada Line travels at a significantly speedier average speed of 22 mph.

Today, downtown Vancouver has a 49% transit commute share, pretty high for any city; on the other hand, UBC is only able to attract 27% of commuters by transit (despite a very high student population), and Fairview’s even worse, at 21%. A relatively slow light rail line cannot provide the kind of mobility improvements possible with a fast, automated SkyTrain line.

The advantages of building the route as a SkyTrain line accrue as you zoom out, too; combined with the proposed Evergreen Line, a new UBC route could provide a direct link from Coquitlam and Port Moody to the city’s western edge, serving as the region’s new east-west mainline. By expanding the transfer-free links to UBC, the number of transit riders can be expected to increase substantially.

Meanwhile, while it is true that density decreases substantially west of Arbutus Street, even those neighborhoods have population densities of 16,000 people per square mile, not too low — and there is plenty of room for transit share growth among higher income residents there if faster options were offered. The Canada Line’s south Vancouver stations have been very popular, despite their similarly only moderate densities in the surrounding areas. Meanwhile, the massive population at the UBC end of the corridor should obviate concerns about limited ridership from stations between there and Arbutus, since trains will fill up from the beginning of the route. Light rail would slow down the commutes of tens of thousands of daily transit users.

As Translink considers its options over the next few months, it will have to put any projects within the context of its difficult financial condition — which means, given few resources, a full-length Millennium SkyTrain extension from its current terminus to UBC seems unlikely. That said, if there is political will to promote a SkyTrain extension to UBC, provincial and regional officials will be able to assemble the funding; the money should not be the limiting factor in choosing the appropriate technology for this corridor.

In the coming months, Translink will produce more detailed information about the corridor, including projected ridership and transit times for each technology. If those figures come out strongly in support of the SkyTrain alternative, as I would bet, it would be unfortunate to select either light rail or bus rapid transit alternatives for the line.

Images above: Alternatives for Vancouver’s Broadway Corridor, from Translink

» System will carry about five million passengers a day. Dozens of other Chinese cities are spending billions of dollars on similar grade-separated transit systems.

If China’s massive investment in high-speed rail is impressive, its huge spending binge in local rapid transit is remarkable. And nowhere is that record more dramatic than in Shanghai, the world’s most populous city proper.

Just fifteen years after the first segment of its first metro line opened, the city’s metro network has gained the title as the world’s longest with the opening of a section of Line 10 last week. This followed years of continuous construction and the opening of pieces of Lines 2, 9, and 11 over the past month. In anticipation of the inauguration of the city’s Expo 2010 event on May 1st, Line 13 will open sometime in the next two weeks.

Now Shanghai offers 282 stations and 420 km (261 mi) of lines, compared to 408 km in London and 368 km in New York, which now have the world’s second and third-largest rapid transit networks. Unlike those cities, which have only minor line extensions planned, Shanghai’s expansion plans are only half complete: not only does the city have 140 km of more lines currently under construction and intended for service by 2012, but it has an additional 300 km planned to be ready for operations by 2020, by which time this city alone will have more rapid transit mileage than the entire country of Japan.

The Shanghai Metro is now capable of handling about five million passengers a day; the system is likely to become the world’s most-used, passing Tokyo and Moscow, by the time the full construction program is complete.

Beijing is pursuing a similarly extension metro expansion project, but these cities aren’t alone: twelve Chinese municipalities currently have rapid transit, nineteen more have systems under construction, and an additional seventeen new networks are in planning. The national government has committed $150 billion to the projects by 2015, though additional funds originate from the municipalities themselves, such as the progressive and independent City of Shanghai. It’s a country-wide investment in urban transportation unparalleled in human history.

The American government, managing a much wealthier country than China, typically commits about two billion dollars a year to transit capital projects nationwide.

China’s aggressive efforts are a response to the country’s rapid urbanization, which has brought tens of millions of rural peasants into the cities as a result of increasing economic development. Though the Chinese automobile market is now larger than that of the United States, when compared on a per capita basis, it is still relatively small, especially considering that most Chinese car purchases are of first vehicles, not second or third, as are typical American consumer investments. This means that these quickly growing cities must respond with significant spending on improved public transportation — and they’ve chosen rapid transit as their preferred technology.

Specifically, Shanghai’s effort is an attempt to avoid American-style commuting habits even as its population increases in prosperity. With a per capita GDP three times the national average, Shanghai must endeavor to ensure that its growing number of middle-class inhabitants don’t clog the streets with their cars.

The European and North American experience shows that it can be done: In the first half of the 20th century, cities like New York, Berlin, and London reacted to a growing population and densification of land use by constructing extensive rapid transit networks and the results today are cities with high rates of public transportation use in spite of wealthy populations; Shanghai is likely to follow in the same mold.

But the extent and rapidity by which Shanghai is expanding its system reinforces the high-speed rail-driven sense that the West is falling behind, at least in infrastructure investment. Though no American and European cities are growing as quickly as their Chinese counterparts, there are significant demands for transportation improvements that are being unmet in virtually every major Western metropolitan region, with the possible exception of Madrid, Barcelona, and Paris, which are all spending billions to extend their transit networks out of the traditional urban core and into near suburbs. These neighborhoods have for years been deprived of adequate public transportation despite a real demand; most regions, however, aren’t spending on new line capacity.

Unlike the U.S. or Europe, China benefits from strong economic growth, making these investments more feasible, especially since construction costs are lower. Nonetheless, if Shanghai’s construction is so extensive as to be impossible to replicate in the more affluent parts of the world, current efforts in most major American and European cities are modest, doing very little in terms of transportation to respond to significant increases in population since the first half of the 20th century. They’re not making much of an effort to prepare for their increasingly urban futures by building new transit links.

China is.

Image my own work but based on standard Shanghai Metro Map.

» Mayor of nation’s second-largest city fights to advance city’s transit planning… by twenty years. It’s a job that necessitates a national infrastructure bank that does not yet exist.

Forget that old cliché about Los Angeles. It’s not the old highway-obsessed metropolis it used to be. In fact, as L.A. matures, it’s densifying, shedding its abhorrence towards public transportation.

The region already has one of the most ambitious transit expansion plans in the country; a new light rail line to East L.A. opened last year, the Expo light rail line from downtown to Culver City is under construction, and dozens of other routes are in planning throughout Los Angeles County. The passage in November 2008 of Measure R, an additional half-cent sales tax for transit, means that these projects aren’t just conjectural.

But L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who has always been a strong proponent of new rail and bus lines, isn’t satisfied by the thirty-year timetable that will be required to complete the projects lined up for $13.7 billion in local funding. (Measure R would also fund $27 billion in transit operations, maintenance, and roads projects.) Current financial assumptions indicate that the Mayor’s highest priority–an extension of the Westside subway (Purple Line) to Westwood–wouldn’t be complete until 2032. A fixed guideway link along I-405 between the San Fernando Valley and UCLA would have to wait until 2038.

For Mr. Villaraigosa, this situation isn’t feasible: he wants his subway as soon as possible, rather than force his city’s inhabitants to spend decades more in congestion. But over ten years, Measure R is only expected to bring in about $3 billion for transit capital projects–enough to build the first phase of the subway, but nothing else. Because the Metropolitan Transportation Authority represents L.A. County’s ten million inhabitants, not just the city’s four million, prioritizing a line that would provide service to a tiny percentage of the region’s overall geographic area would not be politically feasible.

In October last year, the mayor suggested an alternative: ask the federal government to loan Metro billions of dollars to complete the majority of the county’s transit projects, in the city and out, in ten years, rather then thirty. The transit authority would then pay Washington back for twenty more years as revenues from Measure R trickled in.

The 30/10 proposal would allow Metro to construct the full Westside extension, but also two easterly extensions of the Gold Line, two new branches for the Green Line, several busways in San Fernando Valley, a link along I-405, and new light rail lines downtown, along Crenshaw Boulevard, to Santa Monica, and via the West Santa Ana branch corridor. The West Santa Ana branch corridor would be served by commuter rail. All by 2020.

It was a brilliant solution to an intractable political problem by ensuring the extension of transit in corridors everywhere in the county within a tight time frame. The fight over which lines to prioritize would simply not have to happen.

This “big bang” strategy would not only dramatically improve the city’s public transportation system by opening rapid transit lines to areas of the county previously ignored, but also act as a stimulus for hundreds of thousands of construction workers currently out of work. But who in Washington would be ready to make such a deal? How serious was the mayor anyhow?

Considering the Mayor’s schedule over the past several weeks, it appears he’s dead-set on the proposal. Last week, he went to Washington to garner the support of several members of Congress, and got it, including from influential Oregon Democratic Representative Peter DeFazio, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit. California Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, who is currently running for reelection, announced that she would support the effort. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood signaled that he was open to the opportunity in a meeting in Los Angeles last month.

If the city is able to move forward on the 30/10 project, it will set quite an intriguing precedent for the dozens of other cities across the country currently considering major transit expansion proposals. The multi-billion-dollar bridge loan Mr. Villaraigosa hopes to have handed over to Metro would be a unique solution to a problem caused by limited short-term revenues. And it implies that Washington should get into the game of agreeing to act as an investment bank for municipalities that can guarantee a source of income over the long term.

If anything, L.A.’s proposal is the best example yet of a project that could really take advantage of a national infrastructure bank, which could provide low-interest loans to governmental agencies to pursue major projects of future importance. The bank would be able to rely on Measure R as an assurance that it will eventually get its money back, and L.A. will be able to benefit from a quick advancement of its rail and bus systems, creating a veritable rapid transit network that in the United States would rival only New York’s in route length.

But the national infrastructure bank does not yet exist. Nor does the Federal Transit Administration have the funds or mandate to pursue a similar policy. So, unless Congress acts on its own, Los Angeles’ transit plans will continue to be relegated to a thirty-year timetable.

Today, with one senator blocking funding for the Department of Transportation and 2,000 workers currently furloughed, it seems unlikely that politicians in Washington will be able to get their together well enough to fund transit at standard levels, let alone sponsor a national infrastructure bank.

That’s a disappointment, since the twelve projects Mayor Villaraigosa has selected for investment would each contribute to the creation of a strong transit system in America’s second city, something that’s been sorely lacking for decades.

Update, 21 March: The Source revealed last week the Mayor’s plan for the 30/10 project, demonstrating the planned expenditures as well as expected completion dates for each of the projects, as shown in the updated map above. Here are the basics:

• Current long-range transportation plan assumes $18.3 billion in transit expenditures over 30 years. 65% of funds would come from Measure R, with 23% from New Starts and 12% from other sources.
• The 30/10 Initiative would allow total expenditures to be reduced to $14.7 billion because of avoided inflation, since projects would be completed in ten years, twenty years ahead of schedule. More cost savings could also be possible because of a cheaper construction market.
  • Of that $14.7 billion, $5.8 billion is expected to be available from existing sources, with around $8.8 billion still necessary, which could be provided through a loan from the federal government.
  • Measure R would then pay back its $8.8 billion in debts for projects completed between 2010 and 2020 with $10.4 billion in tax revenue received between 2020 and 2040.

» The city’s largest borough currently suffers from a large gap in service, but relatively inexpensive improvements could address those problems well.

Though New Yorkers overall are used to some of the longest commute times in the country, residents of southeast Queens are particularly affected. The inhabitants of this large segment of the borough between JFK Airport and Jamaica, from Brooklyn to the city line, have average travel times to work of more than 50 minutes. That’s each way.

It’s a terrible situation, especially since so many people in the pretty dense neighborhood rely on public transportation to get around — and so many are headed to Midtown and downtown Manhattan, areas with high levels of train and bus service already. Transit planners have a moral obligation to find ways to improve their commutes, even in face of the mounting budget deficit currently pounding New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Commute times in Queens	Transit share in Queens

Fortunately, there are several cheap investments the city could make that would substantially reduce the trip times of those living in this part of the borough, starting with a change in fare policy. Leveraging existing transit corridors to a fuller extent by constructing more stations in southeast Queens is also a serious and relatively inexpensive option.

New York offers a standard ticket price for its subway and bus services; the same fare is paid for trips consisting of just a few blocks or twenty miles. The same applies for the city’s unlimited passes, which allow rides anywhere in the city on buses and subways for a set price over a period of time.

There are positives and negatives associated with this system — one thing it certainly does is instill the idea that the whole city is accessible to every citizen, of any class — but it certainly preferences people who live far from their jobs. Yet New York City is structured in a way that makes further densification of the central city core very difficult, even as most jobs continue to be located in Manhattan; people from the outskirts of the city, like it or not, need to be able to get to the center in a reasonably short period of time.

That single-fare policy has not been extended to the MTA’s commuter rail systems, Metro-North and the Long Island Railroad, both of which provide quick access from the outer boroughs to parts of the Manhattan office districts, at a higher price. From Jamaica, at the northwest tip of Queens’ southeast quadrant, a ride to Penn Station on the LIRR takes 19 minutes and costs $7.60 at peak times (or $5.46 during off-peak times); on the E Express Subway (faster than most), the trip requires 34 minutes, for $2.25 (or about $1.50 using an unlimited pass).

For many commuters, there’s a difficult choice to make: pay more than twice as much and get a 45% faster ride, or save money and squeeze into buses and subways. Most choose the latter option because it’s cheaper — which explains the high average commute times for people from Southeast Queens in spite of the large number of transit lines that criss-cross the area.

It also explains the under-use of some of the existing branches of the LIRR in southeast Queens, including the Far Rockaway Branch, which stops at Locust Manor and Laurelton Stations; the Hempstead branch, which includes stations at Queens Village and Hollis; and the West Hempstead branch, with its stop at St. Albans.

Thus an easy fix for this problem would be to make in-city trips on the commuter railroads the same price as those on the subway and buses, and allow commuters to make free transfers between the two. This would instantly reduce typical travel times for people in this section of Queens (and areas of the northern Bronx) and increase the use of the existing commuter rail capacity on the three LIRR corridors mentioned above.

If the city subsidized this fare reduction, the state-financed MTA could continue charging current fares on trips coming from outside of the city without encouraging debate over differences in transit provisions for the city and its suburbs, a discussion already at the heart of many of the agency’s financial problems.

Creating fare equity between the commuter railroads and the subways would produce significant time savings for the residents of southeast Queens. But the introduction of more people onto the LIRR system would require some substantial changes in commuter rail operations in order for the services to remain reliable. For one, in-city stations benefiting from reduced fares would have to have turnstiles installed so that free transfers could be enforced. Or, the MTA could wait for the universal contactless farecard it is already developing, a ticket designed to allow conductors on the commuter trains to make pass inspections using the same system as installed at subway faregates.

The introduction of thousands of new daily riders on LIRR trains would likely cause some capacity problems, since many of the system’s trains are already overcrowded at rush hour. Some of the difficulties would be solved with the opening of East Side Access to Grand Central Terminal in 2016, which will allow a larger number of trains to enter Manhattan. Moreover, with increasing ridership likely to occur anyway, the railroad will have to buy more trains over the next decade; if these vehicles were configured more like rapid transit, with more doors and more standing room (unlike existing LIRR trains, which prioritize comfortable seating), the larger number of riders could be handled easily.

And of course, there’s another easy way to relieve capacity issues at Penn Station: simply run trains through from New Jersey to Long Island, reducing track use in the central segments of the system. It can be done.

Though the MTA would lose revenue by significantly reducing the cost of inner-city commuter rail trips, it would likely also increase transit ridership on trips coming from areas at the edges of the metropolis. Meanwhile, the changes I’ve suggested would require limited investment above and beyond what was already planned — the new contactless farecard is being designed already; new trains are to be ordered within a few years anyway, and a change in their design won’t affect their pricetag.

But there are other, more costly investments that would focus on the commuting problems of this particularly isolated neighborhood. By adding stations to the three branches of the LIRR that pass through the community, a far larger slice of the population would suddenly find itself within half a mile of a rail station. Though adding a stop or two for each line would slightly increase the commute times of people coming from further away, they would significantly reduce the trip times of people in this neighborhood by providing quick, direct access to Midtown Manhattan and connections further down the line to subway routes heading throughout the city.

Building a new station is not exactly a cheap proposition, but taking advantage of an existing rail line, rather than, say, extending a subway (something that’s been proposed for Southeast Queens in the past), is a much less expensive alternative.

And then there’s AirTrain JFK.

Since it opened in December 2003, the line has become an important tool for commuters getting to and from JFK Airport; it connects each of the airport’s terminals directly to LIRR and subway services (E, J, and Z trains) at Jamaica, and to A Subway services at Howard Beach. Elevated above the median of the Van Wyck Expressway, its route passes directly adjacent to some of the neighborhoods that suffer from exactly the long commutes that irritate so many people who live in southeast Queens.

Unfortunately, because the AirTrain was built with funds from the federal government’s Aviation Trust Fund and airport Passenger Facility Charge revenues, it could not include local stations — the only stops on the line are at airport terminals, passenger facilities, and at the transit drop-offs at Howard Beach and Jamaica. Federal regulations state that those revenue sources can only be used for a project that “must exclusively serve airport traffic.” This results in a number of peculiar situations that ultimately reduce the effectiveness of transit that serves airports in the United States, since through-running and local (non-airport) stops are basically banned by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Theoretically, several new stations could be added to AirTrain along the Van Wyck corridor without reducing existing capacity by creating side-platform stations and building access tracks separate from the express tracks used by JFK-Jamaica trains. This would be a pricey investment, since it would require the creation of a new track connection between Howard Beach and Jamaica trains (to avoid interrupting airport express and inter-terminal service) and it would require the construction of a series of elevated platforms above a freeway and connected to an in-use transit line. Faregates would also have to be installed at JFK terminals to ensure that passengers pay the correct charge, since those riding on the new Howard Beach-Jamaica train would pay standard subway fares, while those heading for the airport would continue to pay the $5 airport fee.

These improvements would provide direct operations from a number of isolated neighborhoods to Jamaica and Howard Beach, from which there would be easy transfers to Midtown and Downtown Manhattan-bound trains.

It would have been more convenient to make these changes when the project was first being built, to say the least. But these changes wouldn’t affect the quality of the original investment and therefore would not pose an affront to FAA regulations.

Sadly, the MTA has done very little to address the excessive commute times of southeast Queens residents, who deserve improved transportation access, and there has been no coordinated planning for better transit service for the neighborhood. Its denizens are likely to see long trip times for decades to come.