» Facing increasing criticism from a city council, Mayor Rob Ford’s plans for new subways may not come to fruition after all.

Transportation is an intensely political game in Toronto. Canada’s largest city, home to millions of daily transit users, has been fighting for half a decade on how to expand its rail network over issues that might be familiar to inhabitants of many metropolises. Should trains be put in a subway or remain on the surface? Should extensions be developed downtown or in the suburbs? Should funding come from the public or private pocketbook?

The election of Rob Ford to the mayoralty in fall 2010 seemed to answer some of those questions: All new urban rail projects would be built underground in order to avoid disrupting traffic. Most new lines would be designed to extend into suburban business districts, rather than reinforce the network in the center city. And an emphasis would be placed on finding private financing to cover costs. Almost as soon as he entered office, Mr. Ford managed to dismantle the light rail surface-running, publicly funded Transit City plans his predecessor David Miller had imagined and, in one case, actually brought to the construction stage.

In the process, no one seemed to notice that the mayor, who never sought full approval from the council in renegotiating the funding contract with Ontario Province, didn’t have the legal authority to trash the plans.

For Toronto, this once again puts the city’s public transportation future up in the air. Mr. Miller’s project would have funded three new light rail lines and a refurbishment and extension to another by 2020; only a 6-mile segment of the Eglinton Crosstown corridor would have been underground, compared to 29 miles overground on the rest of the plan, all at an Ontario-funded cost of C$8.2 billion. Mr. Ford squashed plans for the Finch Avenue and Sheppard Avenue light rail lines and killed the planned extension of the Scarborough RT; in their place would be a 12-mile fully-underground Eglinton line and a refurbishment of the Scarborough line — a total of about 15 miles of fixed-guideway transit at the same cost, serving far fewer Torontonians in the process. A subway extension along the Sheppard corridor would be paid for by the private sector. In theory.

The new mayor claimed he had a public mandate to build only subways; people hated Mr. Miller’s cheaper light rail lines, he said.

These changes brought on by Mayor Ford’s honeymoon in office, however, have come to an end. Left wing and centrists members of the city council banded together to push back on the administration’s efforts to reduce public services a few months back — and now a majority may be in favor of going back to Mr. Miller’s Transit City plans, especially since many on Finch Avenue northwest of the city center feel completely excluded from current plans. Mr. Ford’s own counselors suggested that private businesses would only be able to contribute 10 to 30% of the Sheppard subway’s costs. Karen Stintz, who chairs the board of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), recommended last week moving parts of the Eglinton corridor back above ground to save up to C$2 billion, limiting the extension of the Sheppard subway to one stop (instead of five) at a cost of C$1 billion, and adding a busway to Finch Avenue for C$400 million.

Mr. Ford’s response so far: “I did what the taxpayers want. They want subways. That’s it. They don’t want streetcars.” At a meeting today, Ford sympathizers on the TTC board voted against continuing to work with provincial planners — despite Ms. Stintz’s recommendations, putting her future in jeopardy, according to one observer. The mayor, who continues to label the Transit City light rail services designed to run in independent guideways “streetcars,” does not take criticism well.

But the mayor may be an increasingly irrelevant player here, since a majority on the council may be able to overrule him. In the process, Toronto may backtrack on its transit policies, taking the city two years back in time.

As for the public reaction, people do not seem to be screaming in the streets about the potential loss of their much-promised subways in favor of twice as many route miles of above-ground light rail. In the name of fiscal efficiency, one does wonder how it ever made sense to anyone to prioritize building subways through areas of only moderately dense development. Mayor Ford’s unwillingness to change rather comes across as the same old fight to “end the war on cars” he promised during the 2010 elections, a stand against getting in the way of a few drivers for the sake of speeding the commutes of many transit riders. In the meantime, the inhabitants of Toronto have seen few improvements to their daily commutes and delays in acting on future proposed services.

Nonetheless, the intense disagreement between Mr. Ford and his council counterparts — one that seems unlikely to die down at least for the next few months — suggests that public involvement is necessary. It might be reasonable to suggest a direct vote on the options available: With C$8.2 billion, what would you do? Think big: You never know what might come next.

Image above: Toronto transit street art, from Flickr user jmv (cc)

» For Washington Dulles Airport, raising the unthinkable on a new rail link.

Yesterday, Robert Brown, a member of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA), suggested rethinking his agency’s planned Metro rail extension out to Dulles Airport, the Washington region’s prime international gateway. Instead of the bringing this $2.8 billion rail link — frequently referred to as the Silver Line — directly to the airport, Brown noted that replacing the final 1.5-mile connection with a people mover would save $70 million thanks to a more limited right-of-way and the construction of one less Metro station.

The Silver Line is an extension of the Washington Metro’s Orange Line and will eventually reach Loudoun County. The first segment of the project, to Tyson’s Corner and Wiehle  Avenue, is planned to open for service next year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the idea was perceived as heresy, both by local commenters and board members. Mame Reiley, one board member, said “I just don’t think that’s what we labored for… it is not rail to Dulles.” Concerns were raised that the federal government might delay the program because the board was “starting over.” And indeed the proposal appears to have been dismissed by the authority board as unacceptable.

Counter-intuitively, however, such a change in alignment could be a reasonable money-saver and may actually improve transit service for both commuters and air travelers. And though the question is immediately relevant to the Dulles Rail extension, it is equally valid to many cities, as the issue of extending rail networks out towards airports is frequently of concern for transportation planners in major metropolitan areas.

The question of how to reach Dulles by rail has been fraught with controversy since project development began. Originally, the concept was to connect the Metro line to an underground station about 550 feet from the main terminal, but after the project’s price tag had exploded past $3 billion, an effort at cost-savings was in order. The MWAA, which runs Dulles Airport in addition to the Metro extension, eventually agreed in July April 2011 to move the stop about 600 feet further away — and to elevate it above the ground. Riders wanting to get off at Dulles will have to make the more than thousand-foot walk from the station to check-in.

Mr. Brown’s likely stillborn proposal to replace the direct rail link with a people mover reflects the fact that riders are likely to see this connection as inconvenient, especially compared to that at Reagan National Airport, where customers only have to walk about 150 feet between Metro platform and the terminal entrance.

Mr. Brown would reroute the Metro line away from the airport (the existing plan is shown in orange below and would be about 4 miles from Route 28 to Route 606), so that it runs directly along the Dulles Greenway (in blue, about 2.5 miles from Route 28 to Route 606). A people mover (also in blue, about 1.5 miles) would connect the Route 28 station to the front of the terminal. Though customers would have to transfer, they would now get a more direct journey, since it would be far easier to fit in front of the terminal the tracks and station for the people mover than it would have been for the Metro line (and in fact this explains why that latter possibility was never brought up).

This would save a total of $70 million, according to planner estimates, because it would replace about 1.5 miles of very expensive Metro infrastructure (readied for eight-car trains) with much lighter automatic people mover infrastructure, designed for one- or two-car trains.

We know this would save some money. How would this change affect customers?

Riders commuting in to Tyson’s Corner, Arlington, or Washington from outer suburban destinations on the end of the rail line west of Dulles would save time: At the 35 mph average speed expected for Silver Line trains,* it will take about 6.9 minutes to get from Route 28 to Route 606 using the current plan. The more direct route proposed by Mr. Brown would reduce that journey to 4.3 minutes. That’s almost half an hour in saved travel time per week per commuter.

Even better, those using the Silver Line to get to and from the airport might actually save time travelling too!** Though these customers would have to transfer between Dulles Metro and the people mover, if that connection were timed and across the platform (as is quite possible when two automated systems are linked and built at the same time), the time lost would be only two or three minutes. Meanwhile, once they actually get off at the terminal, the experience of riders taking the people mover would be much superior: Rather than walking 1,150 feet to the terminal — which would take them about 4.8 minutes on average — they would walk something more like 150 feet, which would take them only 0.6 minutes.*** See this back of the envelope comparison:

Though the use of the people mover raises questions about operating another rail system, it could be maintained with similar vehicles as those already servicing Dulles on the Aerotrain, which connects checked-in passengers to the terminals.

If these benefits are not convincing enough in themselves, it should be noted that the Washington region would not be alone if it chose to make its airport rail link stop somewhat short of the terminal itself. In Phoenix, the new light rail system was built in coordination with airport officials, who are currently constructing an automated train between the rail station and the terminals. The San Francisco Bay Area is building an airport connector to the Oakland Airport that will link a BART station some miles away to the terminals. And Miami’s new AirportLink Metro Rail project will not actually stop at the airport, but instead at a new central station (pictured at the top of this article), where transfers to a people mover will be offered.

Riders in these regions will not suffer; they may lose a few minutes transferring between trains, but if the connection is short and timed, that pain can be minimized. Avoiding the airport, paradoxically enough, could both save money and improve the situation for riders.

Update: I should say that the underground passage way from the elevated station as currently planned will include moving walkways (it already exists), so the time difference between getting from the elevated station to the terminals and getting from the people mover station to the terminals will not be as large as I suggested above. The time difference still should be in the range of two to three minutes longer, however, making the travel time about equal overall.

* 35 mph: PlanItMetro projects it will take about 22 minutes to travel the 12.8 miles between Dulles Airport and Tysons 7 Station.

** The only customers would would lose out with this change would be those traveling to and from Dulles from outer-suburban locations.

*** Assuming that people with bags travel at about 4 feet/second, a bit slower than the average walking speed of an elderly person.

Image above: Miami Central Station rendering, from Miami Intermodal Center

» Mayor Rob Ford’s claim that he can build new subway with little public financing looks increasingly unlikely. But value capture remains one of many funding devices that should be considered seriously by transit agencies.

Last fall’s mayoral election in Toronto was a watershed moment for Canada’s largest city; in electing conservative Rob Ford to the top post, the public essentially rejected the approach that had been taken by former Mayor David Miller. For transportation, the change was particularly dramatic. Whereas Mr. Miller had advocated a network of surface-running light rail lines called Transit City, Mr. Ford lambasted this approach as a “war on cars” and declared that the only public transportation projects he would pursue would be in subways.

In March, in an agreement with the Ontario provincial government, he got what he wanted. The planned surface line on Eglinton would be replaced with a subway sponsored by the Province. The light rail line on Finch West would be put off to a later date, as would an extension of the Scarborough RT. And the Sheppard East light rail line — then already under construction — would be substituted by an extension of the Sheppard Subway, to be funded by the city.

That project now appears fiscally impossible.

The Mayor, pursuant to his electoral promises, said that the Sheppard Subway could be done with the commitment of no new city funds; rather, he claimed, private investors interested in development rights around stations would produce an increase in area property values. The city would be able to sell off enough station-area land and collect a large enough amount of new taxes to be able to pay for the project. The idea was that Toronto, like Hong Kong, would be able to build better transit through private development.

This week, the wildly optimistic proposal fell apart. Gordon Chong, the man appointed by Mr. Ford to head up Toronto Transit Infrastructure Ltd., the group meant to pioneer this public-private partnership, said that even with significant upzoning around stations, the private sector would be able to contribute a maximum of only 40% of the line’s C$4.2 billion estimated costs. And in a city where neighborhood groups have fought hard to prevent such zoning changes in the past, the prospect of 30-to-40 story towers in the backyards of single-family homes was not likely to be easily accepted by local residents — so that 40% was probably a high estimate.

Though federal funds could aid a bit, lacking provincial aid, the rest of the line’s costs would have to be paid for by other funding devices, such as road tolls, according to Mr. Chong. Mr. Ford, who made his campaign work on the basis of his predecessor’s supposed hated of cars, rejected the idea hastily.

While Toronto appeared in early 2010 to have four transit lines ready to go, it now is down to just one and a half — the Eglinton Corridor and the replacement of the Scarborough RT. Unless Mr. Ford makes a quick turnaround on the use of municipal funds for his Sheppard Subway (or provincial or national governments fly in for the rescue), the project will be dead in the water.

In some ways, that’s a pity: The financing scheme being considered — using value capture on surrounding properties to fund the project’s completion — is a reasonable one that should be used much more frequently in cities funding new transit lines. That is, to pay for a portion of total costs, since for now most cities will not be able to raise the kinds of funds from property development that Hong Kong has. Fortunately, its adoption by cities in the U.S. and abroad appears to be gathering steam.

In Paris, the just-approved 125-mile metro network will be partially financed through the sale of land around stations. And in North Texas, the development of a new 68-mile commuter rail line called the Cotton Belt is moving forward thanks to a tax-increment financing district that is being proposed for neighborhoods around stops.

In a talk at the Congress for the New Urbanism in Madison today, Mike Krusee of the Partnership for Livable Communities suggested that this new route between Fort Worth and Northern Dallas County could cover about $380 million of its $1.54 billion in total construction costs — and all of its operations costs — through value capture in the towns through which the line would run. In short, increases in property tax collections over a few decades would be used to subsidize the creation and maintenance of the new transit offering. Though the proposal has yet to be adopted (and the remaining $1.16 billion in construction costs has yet to be found), it demonstrates the potential of integrating private investment into what is otherwise a public project.

Most American transit system capital programs are financed purely through federal and state grants and municipal sales tax income.

It is indicative that in the first request for proposals for constructing the Cotton Belt, investors in Dallas apparently hoped that the private sector would be able to step in and pay for the whole project, said Mr. Krusee. Facing revenue shortfalls, the metropolitan area had abandoned full government financing for the program. Of course, just as in Toronto, that was not possible: 55 replies from companies provided no solution to the overall lack of funds. Only since Mr. Krusee’s Partnership proposed the value capture system have private developers become seriously interested in working to raise funds to pay for construction. Major transit-oriented developments are apparently planned around many of the stations.

Increasingly, transit systems across the country looking for expansion opportunities may have no choice but to look for similar deals: Agree to use tax revenues from property value increases on transportation corridors to the area, and development will follow. No such deals could mean fewer new transit lines in the future.

Image above: Subway station at Sheppard-Yonge, from Flickr user Kenny Louie (cc)

» Months after regional and national officials agree to a huge plan for improving suburb-to-suburb connections, final decisions are made on future stations for Paris’ future supermetro. Completion of the initial project is planned for 2025.

In the developed world, few metropolitan areas are as dependent as Paris on their public transportation networks. Of mechanized trips within and into the central city, transit holds a majority mode share; in the 11.5-million-person Île-de-France region as a whole, almost 60% of all trips are made by foot, bus, or train. Part of the reason is that despite a century of continued development in the suburbs, densities are high throughout: The Petite Couronne (the inner ring of suburbs, with a collective population of about 4.3 million), for instance, is about as dense as the City of San Francisco.

But as in most cities, the increase in population outside of the central city (which now houses only about 20% of the region’s inhabitants) has until recently not been matched by significant investments in the transit network. Most new lines have been built either within the central city, such as the Métro Line 14, or radially out from it, like the RER E. Over the past few years, smaller projects like new tramways and bus rapid transit lines have assumed prominence, but their slow speeds and limited capacities have done little to improve circumferential travel around the city.

With yesterday’s announcement of the final route choice for the Grand Paris Express, however, that situation is set to change. After what was apparently Europe’s largest-ever series of public meetings and months of debate between local, regional, and national officials, the largest metro expansion on the continent and one of the most massive in the world is now under development. The national legislature is expected to approve the project and its financing this summer.

Altogether, officials plan to invest €20.5 billion ($29.5 billion) on 200 kilometers (125 miles) of rapid transit lines, most of which will be completed by 2025. With an expected two million daily riders, the Grand Paris Express program will transform the commutes of a huge percentage of the region’s inhabitants by offering far faster connections between suburbs, allowing people to avoid transferring trains in the central city and saving them twenty minutes or more on many popular trips. Trains will be automated and some sections may run 24 hours a day, a first for Paris.

The Grand Paris Express plan is a compromise between the French central government, which proposed a project called Métro Grand Paris in March 2009, and the Île-de-France region, which had separately concocted its own plan called Arc Express. They agreed to merge their projects in January, though final route alignments were not agreed upon until this week. A strategic decision was made not to directly connect Paris with Charles de Gaulle Airport north of the city, a component of the original Grand Paris plan, because it was feared that this link would overcrowd the system; instead, commuters will be able to transfer to another line to get there or use the existing link on the RER B.

Of total funding for the new lines, €4 billion will be granted from the national government, €1.5 billion from local governments, €7 billion from loans, €7 billion from new taxes on commercial activity and real estate (€500 million will be collected this year alone), and €1 billion from existing taxes. The state intends to use eminent domain to redevelop land around each of the stations. It will use the funds it accumulates through sales and added-value taxes to help pay off debt.

Separately, the region and state will by 2025 fund €12.5 billion ($17.7 billion) in upgrades to the existing system, including the construction of several new tram lines and busways and the extension of the RER E to the west.

Construction is expected to ramp up quickly, with the Île-de-France region and its STIF funding agency beginning an extension of the Line 14 Metro north to St. Ouen in 2014, with completion set for 2017 or 2018. This project, labeled the Blue Line, will use Line 14′s rubber tire trains and travel at average speeds of 40 km/h and is intended to relieve crowding on one of the existing system’s most overbooked lines, the Line 13.

Soon after, the Société du Grand Paris, a national government entity, will begin work on the southern section of the Red Line, from Champigny-Centre to Nanterre. This project will feature steel-wheel trains and average speeds of 60-65 km/h (37-40 mph), quite a bit higher than most of the Metro network today.

By 2020, work should be underway on the northern and eastern sections of the Red Line, as well as the extension of the Blue Line south to Orly Airport and the Green Line from Orly Airport to Versailles. Due to lower expected ridership, the latter project will be a light metro more like Vancouver’s SkyTrain, featuring trains with a capacity of about 250 people each, compared to 1,000 on the Red and Blue Lines.

In addition, an inner-east section of the project, from Noisy-Champs to St. Denis-Pleyel via Rosny-Sous-Bois and a short segment from Champigny-Centre to Val-de-Fontenay, will be put under construction by the region (the exact routing of these lines has yet to be determined). The original national government plan did not include this component, but the region insisted on its inclusion to serve the densest sections of the inner suburbs.

Up to eight tunnel boring machines are expected to be in use in parallel.

In total, 57 stations are to be built, 44 of which will provide transfers to the existing system and seven of which will offer links to the high-speed TGV rail network.

After 2025, other sections, including a branch of the Green Line from Versailles to Nanterre, a connection from Val-de-Fontenary to Rosny-Sous-Bois, and a link between Les Agnettes and Nanterre via Colombes, will be put under construction, though their funding has yet to be assured.

The scale of ambition in this Paris region project is stunning, especially since the hope is to concentrate 95% of the region’s job growth and two-thirds of its population growth within areas adjacent to network stations. Thanks to hard-fought cooperation between the regional and the national government, funding is assured for most of the project, and the result will be a tremendously improved transit system for the region’s inhabitants, especially those who live outside of the center city.

» After a strong push by new Mayor Rob Ford, the extensive planned network of surface-running light rail lines will be replaced by a light rail subway to be funded by Ontario. The city argues it can fund another subway extension project itself.

In 2007, Toronto looked to be pioneering a more cost-effective way of providing major new transit infrastructure: Rather than investing huge sums on short segments of new subways as it had done in the past, the city would construct dozens of miles of street-running light rail, connecting far-off parts to the city without breaking the bank.

The “Transit City” effort, pushed by Mayor David Miller, eventually garnered the support of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, who agreed to use C$8.2 billion in provincial funds to complete 35 miles of rail on four lines, most of which would be above ground.

After the fall election of Rob Ford to the mayor’s office, however, the world of Toronto transit decision-making has turned upside down thanks to Mr. Ford’s insistence that no new transit lines be built within the street right-of-way, which he argued represented a “war on cars.” Today, Mr. McGuinty heeded that advice and announced that Ontario will fund just two of those lines — the replacement of the Scarborough RT with elevated light rail along the existing guideway and the construction of a crosstown light rail subway underneath Eglinton Avenue for a total cost of C$8.2 billion, both to be completed by 2020 as a unified line. That would be a total of about 15.5 miles of new transit for the same cost as 35 miles of Transit City projects.

Mr. Ford, who argued extensively during the mayoral campaign for extensions to the 3.4-mile Sheppard subway west to Downsview (C$1.4 billion for 3.4 miles) and east to Scarborough Center (C$2.75 billion for 5 miles), has dedicated the city to building that project. Funding would come from public-private partnerships that would fill the C$4.2 billion gap. Other previously proposed lines, including along Finch Avenue in the northwest section of the city, have relegated to future “express buses” whose service quality remains undefined.

In some ways, Toronto will benefit from this revised plan: Commuting times along subway lines are likely to be quicker than on street-running light rail, which even in reserved rights-of-way must deal with traffic intersections. And along Sheppard Avenue, the decision to extend the subway rather than force commuters to transfer to light rail will save people time and effort. But are those improvements enough to justify effectively doubling the cost of the construction program? Does putting the entire 12-mile Eglinton line underground — versus just 6 miles as planned before — justify eliminating plans for expanded service to an underserved part of the city?

Mayor Ford’s insistence on putting transit lines in subways was a response to his concerns about reducing space for automobile users, so the question is whether the increase in costs that it would require to put the corridors underground would produce a corresponding increase in benefits for all users (including those who will not receive new transit lines). Lacking complete data from a cost-benefits perspective, I’ll leave that an open question. One thing it is likely not to do is reduce congestion, since in big cities like Toronto road capacity is absorbed as soon as it is provided.

Removing street space from the purview of automobilists and dedicating it to transit users has produced resistance throughout the United States and Canada, but Toronto’s change of policy is particularly dramatic because construction had already begun on one of the lines, the Sheppard Avenue East light rail. Mayor Ford was elected on a platform of replacing the light rail plan with subways, so this change should have significant electoral support; nonetheless, the lack of funding for significant improvements in the northwest sections of the city will undoubtedly be controversial.

Most problematic is the financing plan Mr. Ford has put forth for the Sheppard extensions. During the election campaign, the candidate suggested that the C$4 billion subway be built mostly with Transit City funds. A limited sale of development rights would produce C$1 billion, of which 30% would be distributed to complete that project’s financing and the rest be devoted to road improvements.

Under the new project, however, almost all of the Transit City dollars would be spent on Eglington and Scarborough lines, leaving a maximum of C$650 million in Ontario funds for the Sheppard line. Would the City of Toronto be able to raise more than C$3 billion from development rights just along the Sheppard corridor? Does it even have that much land to sell?

For a point of comparison, Hong Kong’s newest subway lines use such development rights sales to aid in their financing — but they still require significant public aid to complete the funding package. And that’s in a far denser city where land values are much higher than in Toronto.

Thus the deal today does not actually guarantee the completion of the Sheppard Avenue subway extensions — it only assures the Toronto public that the funded Eglinton Crosstown Line and the renovations of the Scarborough RT will be completed by 2020. A few years ago, that might have been enough to make anyone happy. But after Transit City was announced, funded, and had begun construction, it feels just a little disappointing.

» Census data point to uneven outcomes when it comes to orienting land use changes around transit.

For a brief period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it looked like U.S. cities were back in the subway-building business. The federal government approved billions of dollars in aid for the construction of new networks in San Francisco, Atlanta, and — most significantly — Washington. In the nation’s capital, a world-class system was constructed, radically redefining the city’s landscape and offering its residents a fundamentally new and modern way to get around.

This week, Metro celebrates the 35th anniversary of the opening of its first line, whose construction first began in late 1969. How effective has the system been in re-orienting development patterns?

In many ways, Metro has proven to be an essential element of the region’s mobility system. Ridership, depending on who is counting and how they are doing it, ranges between 700,000 and 900,000 trips a day — adding up to about 340 million trips a year, when you include bus services. That’s slightly lower than initial estimates from the 1970s, which predicted 350 million annual trips in 1990, but it still makes it the nation’s second most-used rapid transit system after New York’s. And Metro’s initial phase, about 100 miles in all, was completed twenty years late — after 2000, versus 1981 as first planned.

Thus Washington’s network is relatively new: Extensions continue to open every few years; a major new line running to and beyond Dulles Airport, in fact, is in construction.

This means that many of the changes that have been hypothesized to accompany heavy rail service, like densification, may not have yet appeared. Nonetheless, in some places, such as along the Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor in Arlington County, Virginia, significant urban redevelopment has occurred. Similarly, in cities like Charlotte, Denver, and Minneapolis, major new construction has begun after the completion of light rail lines.

Just how widespread are these effects? Have similar changes happened everywhere where new Metro stations have opened in the Washington region?

To examine this question, I have delved into recently released Census 2010 data to consider what has changed since 2000. By considering the alterations in development patterns near stations that opened about ten years ago, we can better understand what has occurred.

On first evaluation, there is no clear connection between the opening of a new station and increased construction — at least on a ten-year timeline.

Between 1997 and 2001, nine Metro stations opened, two of which were in the heart of the city on the Green Line (Columbia Heights and Georgia Avenue) and the rest of which were at the termini of the Red (Glenmont), Blue (Franconia-Springfield), and Green Lines (Congress Heights, Southern Avenue, Naylor Road, Suitland, and Branch Avenue).

Compared to their host jurisdictions, only three of the nine stations saw higher growth in adjacent Census tracts: Columbia Heights, Franconia-Springfield, and Branch Avenue. In the areas around these stations, densification was significant, promoting the theory that transit can be an effective tool for urban regeneration and growth. These changes were particularly interesting at Columbia Heights, where an already pretty dense neighborhood only became more so thanks to rapid replacement of low-lying building stock with taller buildings. Around the other two stops, largely vacant land was replaced with new construction.

Around two other stations — Georgia Avenue and Glenmont — growth was also positive, but it was slower than in Washington and Montgomery County, respectively.

Finally, four of the studied stations saw a decrease in population in the surrounding Census tracts. Each station is on the southeastern branch of the Green Line, which runs through arguably the region’s weakest area from an economic perspective. The presence of transit did not appear to be of any help here: Though Washington and Prince George’s County saw population growth between 2000 and 2010, the specific neighborhoods around these stations did not.

Changes appear to be quite context-dependent. The population of the area around the Columbia Heights station expanded significantly, likely not only because of the presence of Metro, but also because of a growing interest in living in urban cores being experienced nationwide. On the other hand, the poor attractiveness of Prince George’s County, just east of the District of Columbia, likely reduced developer interest in building around stations there.

This analysis indicates that the presence of a transit station cannot provide alone for the kind of urban redevelopment planners often hope to produce when they allocate funds to new rail lines. This does not mean that the opening of the new Metro stations was not an important element of regional growth in Washington, but rather that that infrastructure in itself is not enough to encourage developer interest. In the case of many of these stations, land was not available, zoning was not free enough, and the neighborhoods were not attractive enough to see substantial change, at least over the past ten years.

Transit systems like the Washington Metro are very expensive to construct, so public authorities must make a greater effort to coordinate planning efforts to allow for the creation of more transit-oriented districts to take advantage of such investments.

I would like to note several important caveats: The use of Census tract data in this analysis was meant to provide a neighborhood-level glimpse into development changes. Residents (or potential residents) are likely to see Metro stations as assets, even if their homes are not in immediate proximity. Yet development changes are likely to be unusually affected by that proximity: It may be useful to reconsider these questions at the block level. It is possible, for instance, that the areas directly adjacent to the southeast Green Line stations did see growth, even when surrounding neighborhoods did not.

Image above: A Washington Metro station, from Flickr user Matt Blasi Designs (cc)

» The development of Rosemont, just adjacent to Chicago O’Hare Airport, is indicative of the missed development opportunities that too often plague America’s transit systems.

Being bumped from a flight has its benefits: A few hundred dollars’ worth of free travel, a restaurant certificate, a little more time to avoid getting back to work.

Getting stuck in an airport hotel, on the other hand, is less exciting, especially when it is off-site. Take the fate of those staying in the accommodations of Rosemont, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago just adjacent to O’Hare Airport. I bunked there a few nights ago.

While in theory the town’s cornucopia of hotels are close to the CTA’s Blue Line rapid transit corridor, they are isolated from it perceptually. So is a major convention center, a movie theater, and a performance hall. Walking from the station situated in the median of the Kennedy Expressway (I-190) to the main strip of hotels requires passing under highway and rail viaducts and then along the thin pedestrian way that borders the featureless, six-lane arterial known as River Road. Normal people, apparently, are supposed to drive, park their cars, and then use the area’s skybridge system to get around. Forget the sidewalks.

What the transit user — usually a pedestrian — experiences is an automobile-dominated landscape that is far from the ideal transit-oriented development planners often argue is necessary to take full advantage of the millions spent on public transportation investments. Too many other Chicago neighborhoods, and many others around the country, suffer similar fates. It doesn’t have to be so.

Though the Rosemont Station, which is the penultimate stop on the Blue Line before it reaches its O’Hare terminus, was completed in 1983, planning for the line out to the airport began decades before. In the 1960s, Chicago went on a rapid transit construction binge, building more than twenty miles of new rail routes. Unlike the earlier elevateds that made the city’s transit system famous, however, these new lines were mostly built along highway routes: South along the Dan Ryan, west along the Eisenhower, and northwest along the Kennedy, each of which had land reserved in their medians for the trains to run.

About the same time, the village of Rosemont began to grow quickly thanks to the 1960 opening of the Kennedy Expressway and the continued expansion of O’Hare Airport. By 1969, Hyatt had opened a massive John Portman-designed hotel just next to the road. In 1975, the Stephens Convention Center commenced operations next door. Over the next 35 years, dozens of other hotels, office structures, and other facilities filled the land within a half mile of the rail station.

Peculiarly, though, taking up more than half of the developable land within half a mile of the Blue Line stop are surface parking lots or garages, as shown in the above image. How can this be possible with a transit station offering 24-hour service at high frequencies so close by?

One might suggest that the developers of the new buildings were simply responding to market reality: Americans like to drive, so rail station or not, automobiles will dominate. Indeed, the fact that there is so much parking there implies that the vast majority of people using the area’s facilities are driving there. But Chicago is a transit city, and the Blue Line offers convenient service downtown and to the airport much more reliably than does the frequently traffic-jammed highway. What gives?

Call Rosemont a case study in the importance of well-designed transit stations.

The transit authority made the first mistake by placing the stop in the median of the highway, a location that significantly limits the appeal of transit for people who have a choice. Nobody wants to have to stand on an open platform waiting for a train in the middle of a roaring expressway. Nobody wants to have to walk under or over said road just to get onto the train.

Even worse, the Rosemont stop is in the middle of a cloverleaf intersection, a site that effectively makes it impossible to develop any of the land directly abutting the line. It also forces people walking to and from the station to navigate the no-man’s land that makes up the “beautified” area of the highway off-ramps. Finally, the Rosemont station only has an exit to the north, forcing people who want to go to the more developed areas to the south to go under the road again. It is not a pretty situation, and it is shared by the Cumberland station, one stop east on the Blue Line, though at least that stop has exits on both sides of the highway.

Bad design has its consequences. At Rosemont, developers have constructed their buildings as if unaware of the nearness of transit. No restaurants or retail activity is designed to face the street; sidewalks are minimal; signage is clearly oriented towards the driver. Are people expected to ride transit in this environment?

For those like me bumped from flights and stuck in Rosemont’s airport hotels, this landscape limits accessibility significantly. One can brave down the arterial to the transit station (which I did, despite a hotel receptionist’s apparent ignorance of the Blue Line’s existence) or take a hotel bus departing once every 30 minutes back to the airport. Though I spent my evening patronizing a cafe and a restaurant in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, I have a feeling that, finding themselves in similar situations, many others — all without car access — would choose to simply remain in the hotel.

The position of the station and the poor consideration given to it by the design of the development around it are limiting transit use and, perhaps more importantly, diminishing economic activity in the Chicago region in general. Those thousands of people bumped from flights every year at O’Hare Airport could be eating at a restaurant in Wicker Park or shopping downtown, but most of them are probably stuck in their hotels.

» $5.5 billion, automated rail corridor is expected to attract 100,000 daily riders once it is completed in 2019.

A week after the Federal Transit Administration recommended it for New Starts funding, Honolulu’s rapid transit project took a step forward today with a ceremonial groundbreaking. The massive scheme, which will extend 20 miles from downtown to East Kapolei once construction is finished in 2019, will radically redefine transport on Oahu, offering residents a true alternative to traffic-plagued surface streets and highways.

Honolulu and the surrounding municipalities — incorporated into Honolulu County — are hemmed in by a geography whose natural barriers make the tropical metropolis practically ideal for fixed-guideway transit like the system that is now being designed. With mountains to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south, there is little room for the city to expand, so the only place it can go is up. The “Manhattanization” of downtown and nearby Waikiki over the past few decades is representative of this trend. And transit is a popular way to get around — The Bus, the local transit agency, carries 236,000 daily riders, and the city has a transit work commute share of more than 10%, which is the highest of any major city without rail in the United States and about the same as the City of Portland.

Honolulu is not enormous: The city (officially, the Census-designated place) has about 375,000 residents while the island as a whole has 900,000. But the deficit of space means there is no room for expanded roads infrastructure, and the lack of adequate public transit infrastructure operating in its own guideway poses a serious threat to the health of the region. Without better transportation, the city will not be able to densify further. Current decentralization trends, pushing habitation into previously untouched parts of the island, will be unstoppable.

Thus the likely commitment of the federal government to the rail project sometime in the next year or so is good news for Honolulu and Hawai’i as a whole, since the city serves as the state’s economic engine. Of $5.5 billion in construction costs to cover the 20 miles and 21 stations, Washington proposes to contribute $1.55 billion ($250 million in Fiscal Year 2012) — as long as the New Starts program continues to be funded. The city, which introduced a 1/2¢ sales tax in 2005, will cover the rest. Real construction activity will not begin for several more months.

The alignment, which roughly parallels the curve of the south Oahu coast, hits most of the major destinations in the metropolitan area, including downtown, the airport, and two institutions of higher learning (including one now being built). Especially when considering already high ridership along similar routes, the 2030 estimates of 116,300 daily riders do not seem impossible. And relatively short extensions west into Kapolei, northeast to the University of Hawaii-Manoa, southeast to Waikiki, and north into the Salt Lake neighborhood would make the line even more desirable if they are ever funded and built.

Despite the clear need for improved transportation systems in Honolulu, however, the project’s gestation has been difficult. Previous rail transit proposals were cancelled in 1981 and 1992 and a planned bus rapid transit line was abandoned in 2004. The arrival of Mufi Hannemann in the mayor’s office in early 2005, though, brought significant political support for a new rail line. The mayor pushed through the transit tax and won a hard-fought election against a rail opponent in 2008, as well as a voter endorsement of the project. A fight with Governor Linda Lingle, who argued that the project was too expensive to justify its costs, ensued.

Yet the recent election of Governor Neil Abercrombie and Mayor Peter Carlisle, both of whom assumed office in 2010, represented a major step forward, as each have been solid defenders of the project. As construction moves forward, the city will benefit from this show of support from the municipal and state governments.

It is true that the project remains under debate on both aesthetic and land use grounds.

The elevated nature of the system has a number of advantages: It will allow trains to run much more quickly between the ends of the island (at almost 30 mph on average) than would be possible with an at-grade light rail corridor running through intersections, and it will offer automated trains, allowing high frequencies even off-peak (6 minute maximum) and lower labor costs because of the lack of train drivers.

Nonetheless, the elevated guideway will not be a particularly beautiful addition to the Hawai’i landscape, and in some places it could represent a barrier between the city and its waterfront. The alignment will require 20 residences and 66 businesses to be bulldozed. It is also expensive: A ground-level light rail line or a busway could probably be built for fewer funds. Yet neither would provide the kind of mobility benefits the automated rail line would.

Moreover, opponents of the project suggest that its appeal — fast transit times from downtown to the far west side of the island — will encourage sprawl in areas around the planned university and in Kapolei. Indeed, there are already proposals on the books for a giant project with thousands of homes that will shift patterns of house-building activity to this area. Is it worth paving over now-agricultural land for the purposes of building park-and-rides with the assumption that in the future these areas will become transit-oriented cities of their own?

But Doug Carlson, writing on his site, poses a different question: Does Honolulu have any choice? Given that the city will continue to increase in population, the number of automobiles running up and down its highways will only ramp-up as well. Assuming that growth is inevitable, the city might have no option but to promote new communities designed for commuting by public transit. In that case, this rail project seems completely justifiable.

» A new stop at West Dublin/Pleasanton could attract new riders and transit-oriented development without requiring further line extensions.

With 104 miles of track and just 43 stations, the San Francisco Bay Area’s BART system may have the most widely-spaced stopping pattern of almost any rapid transit system in the world. One wonders whether those huge inter-station distances reduce ridership by making it too difficult for people to get to and from stops by foot. Washington’s Metro, which was built in essentially the same period, has almost the same track length but twice as many stations — perhaps that is one of the primary reasons that it also has nearly twice as many daily riders?

Today, BART has taken a step forward to remediate the matter, opening a new stop at West Dublin/Pleasanton in the median of I-580, near the freeway’s junction with I-680. It is the first infill station — a stop constructed along an operating rail right-of-way — for the system and fills what had been a 10-mile gap between Castro Valley and Dublin/Pleasanton stations in the far southeast section of the region. The station cost $106 million to build and is expected to attract 4,300 daily users. $20 million of the construction funds were sponsored by Jones Lang Lasalle, a developer that plans 210 housing units, office space, and a hotel within walking distance.

The station was originally planned as a part of the Dublin/Pleasanton Extension, which opened in 1997, but implementation was delayed. The project also added 1,200 parking spaces for the large car-commuting population expected to use the stop. Reverse commuters, however, may also be expected to use the stop: It is within close distance of the Stoneridge Shopping Center and the Safeway Grocery Store headquarters.

Like Washington’s New York Avenue Station, which opened in 2004 — 28 years after the rail line on which it is located was constructed — the West Dublin/Pleasanton Station represents a new way of thinking about the right way to plan transit investments. Though BART continues to focus on suburban extensions — projects to Livermore, San Jose, and Antioch are either under construction or planned — it has plenty of room for infill stations.

These have a number of significant advantages over line extensions. For one, it costs less money to build a new station along an existing corridor than to extend the same line further out. In addition, by adding service to a neighborhood that has been overlooked by initial investments, the new station can encourage new transit-oriented projects in-town instead of encouraging further suburbanization. When done right, these sort of infill projects can bring welcome improvements for neighborhoods that suffer from a dearth of walkable urban areas — and they can be very popular, as has been proven by the new construction around the BART Fruitvale Station in East Oakland.

From an investment perspective, building infill stations could be an appropriate response to limited funding for new transit capital projects, especially since it appears private developers may be interested in helping to chip in for construction costs. There are good reasons to build new transit lines in dense sections of the Bay Area, but especially in the East Bay, there are plenty of opportunities for infill stations to fill the 2 or 3-mile gaps between stations. Though these would marginally slow down services from the far suburbs, they would more than make up for that loss by greatly increasing the number of people living in already developed areas within easy walking distance of rapid transit.

It is too bad, however, that apart from the West Dublin/Pleasanton Station, BART has no infill stations planned. Nor is it alone on this matter: Cities with extensive commuter rail and subway networks in the United States, including New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, have been more interested on extending their lines out into the suburbs than filling them in. One notable exception is Boston, where four new stations are planned to be added to the Fairmount line to add to the transit options for people living in underserved neighborhoods south of downtown.

Image above: BART’s new West Dublin/Pleasanton Station, from BART

» New rail tunnel between New Jersey and Manhattan, left for dead a few months ago, comes roaring back as the Gateway Tunnel. Yet it now faces competition for limited funds.

Amtrak will not allow itself to miss the train for President Obama’s effort to “win the future.” Two weeks after the State of the Union address, in which Mr. Obama announced his intention to promote a high-speed rail system that connects 80% of the country’s population, the national railroad has made its first move.

This morning, Amtrak President Joseph Boardman and New Jersey Senators Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez headlined a press conference in which the railroad articulated a basic framework for a new rail tunnel into Manhattan. The connection — named the Gateway Project — would generally follow the alignment of the Access to the Region’s Core project, a $10 billion link that would have carried New Jersey Transit commuter trains into a new terminal before it was cancelled last October by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who cited state budget concerns for his decision.

In connection with the replacement of the moribund Portal Bridge just west of Secaucus Station, the Gateway Tunnel would represent the first, $13.5 billion, step in Amtrak’s $117.5 billion plan to upgrade the entire Northeast Corridor from Washington to Boston to 220 mph speeds. Completion of this stage is proposed for 2020.

Though the necessity of a new rail link between New Jersey and Manhattan has been evident for years because of increased passenger traffic and decaying infrastructure, the decision by Mr. Christie appeared to have put any such project on hold for a decade or more, since funds committed to the project — $3 billion from both the Port Authority and the Federal Transit Administration — would be redistributed. But this announcement from Amtrak changes the equation significantly. In light of the President’s active support of high-speed rail and House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica’s excitement about the Northeast Corridor, it may well be a viable program.

No funding is currently available for the project, even the $50 million necessary to kickstart engineering studies. In addition, the Gateway Tunnel faces competition that has arisen since ARC was cancelled: A potential extension of the New York Subway’s 7 Train, a project that Mayor Michael Bloomberg has endorsed in recent months.

That project could arguably be constructed for fewer funds, since it would require little new tunneling under expensive Manhattan real estate. In addition, the Subway link would have the serious advantage of direct service to Grand Central Terminal and Queens, 24 hours a day — something neither New Jersey Transit or Amtrak will be able to offer. (Amtrak proposes to loop the 7 Train east along 31st Street to serve the station, a questionable proposition.)

Nonetheless, the Gateway Tunnel would service to reinforce the Northeast Corridor intercity rail system far more significantly, and even more than ARC would have. That’s because, unlike ARC, the Gateway Tunnel would be connected to Penn Station, allowing Amtrak trains running from Washington to Boston to use the link. Several new dead-end platforms would be constructed just south of the existing station, forming a new terminus for New Jersey Transit and opening up more space in the existing Penn Station for Amtrak and potentially Metro-North trains from Upstate New York and Connecticut.

ARC would have dead-ended into a cavern far underground, making it both incompatible with the existing rail network but also deeply inconvenient to its riders, who would have had to ride long escalators to the top.

The new tunnel’s capacity would be split between Amtrak and New Jersey Transit, with 8 intercity trains and 13 commuter trains per hour (added to 12 and 20, respectively, today). This represents a decrease from the 25 additional hourly commuter trains ARC would have provided. The plans to connect the Bergen and Passaic lines to ARC to allow for direct service to Manhattan have been abandoned.

Yet the advantages of allowing through trains to use this facility ultimately mean Amtrak will not have to build yet another link under the Hudson in the coming years, as it had planned. In addition, the Gateway Tunnel would provide a vital backup in case something goes wrong with the 100-year-old tunnels currently serving trains between Manhattan and New Jersey.

Amtrak will have to construct a very careful case for its project in order to assemble the necessary funding, especially in the context of a Republican Congress that has made cutting national investments its major priority. Unlike ARC, Gateway would serve intercity as well as commuter traffic, so it is unclear whether the Federal Transit Administration would agree to sign up to aid in sponsoring it. On the other hand, the Federal Railroad Administration, which administers high-speed rail funds, might want to get involved — but this project would do nothing to speed up trains, since it would simply duplicate a service that already exists.

Ultimately, the national railroad’s best argument for the project is that it would serve national economic growth objectives, providing just the sort of infrastructure repair that the President has so forcefully recommended. It would be difficult even for conservative Republicans to argue that this project does not fulfill Washington’s mandate to improve the nation’s transportation systems, since it is of course at its core a connection between two states.

Images above: Amtrak Gateway Project Maps, from Amtrak