The Transport Politic

Chicago’s Plans for a High-Speed Airport Link Revived Thanks to Investor Interest

August 20th, 2010 |

» Mayor Richard Daley hopes for a fully privately funded project connecting downtown with O’Hare Airport, but the city should be sure not to give away too much in the process.

Chicago, perhaps like no other city in the United States, has set itself apart as a center of trade, and recently that has been expressed in the growth of its two airports, O’Hare and Midway. With the resurgence of passenger rail promoted by the Obama Administration, it may be able to reassert its dominance in that field; it will sit at the confluence of three upgraded intercity rail lines already at least partially funded: One to St. Louis, another to Detroit, and a third to Milwaukee and Madison.

Now Mayor Richard Daley (D) is promoting a plan to connect the two modes of transportation via an express rail line between the Loop and O’Hare International. This is only the most recent in a long line of proposals designed to establish quick links between the airport and downtown; it is, perhaps fortunately, no more likely of success.

This week, Mr. Daley formed a 17-member exploratory committee to study options, arguing that private investors from around the world had suggested to him that they might be available to help finance the project. The Mayor promised that the municipal government would provide none of the funds for either construction of operation of the program, though he did not rule out the possibility of demanding state or federal dollars to aid in the investment. The new chair of the Regional Transportation Authority is likely on board, being a big supporter of public-private partnerships.

The previous plan for the express rail link, developed earlier this decade, would have included a “superstation” downtown also connected to the local rapid transit network where travelers could drop off bags before boarding trains. The expresses would run along upgraded Blue Line rapid transit tracks; the fast trains would use new bypass tracks to get around the slower-stopping local trains, providing a 25-minute ride between downtown and O’Hare Airport at a cost of between $15 and 20 dollars per rider. Rapid transit currently requires 40 minutes to make the trip. It is likely that any new project would follow similar principles, but the new committee has obviously yet to determine what plans it will advance. If any private investor is involved, changes are likely.

The superstation, located under the Block 37 project, has been partially constructed after a $250 million public investment. But the station is not completed and does not include track connections between the Red and Blue rapid transit lines, one of the primary goals of the project. Nor does it have the check-in facilities necessary to make the express service feasible at this time.

Mr. Daley’s impulse — to promote a new transportation project specifically without committing the public sector to financing its completion — certainly makes sense considering the city’s limited fiscal reserves and its other priorities, but it may also be unrealistic.

For one, reason puts in question the assumption that private investors would be willing to fund the capital costs of the airport line, no matter the cost customers may be asked to pay to ride along it. There are significant obstacles to putting the project into play, including the purchase of new trainsets; the construction of bypass tracks along an elevated line in dense urban neighborhoods; the expansion of an underground station downtown; and the possible need to create a new terminus station at O’Hare Airport. In other words, airport service of the type that’s been discussed before for Chicago would require several hundred million dollars — of somebody’s money.

Just as important, even if the project does move forward, Chicago has a responsibility to ensure that the new airport express service doesn’t intrude on the daily operations of Blue Line trains, which are arguably more important since they serve tens of thousands of riders a day. With bypass tracks, it would be technically possible to run both services on the same corridor, even as one is providing express operations and the other local ones. But ensuring the express nature of the airport trains without dedicated tracks for them would inevitably mean interrupting Blue Line operations. So even with a privately funded project, there is likely to be some loss in terms of efficiency for the publicly funded rapid transit service. That’s a problem.

Moreover, as Toronto’s recent difficulties with its own airport project demonstrate, investors looking to invest in infrastructure like public transportation may want continuous, year-to-year subsidies even just to pay for operations. Chicago certainly isn’t looking to commit to anything like that.

Image above: Chicago O’Hare International Airport Rail Station, from Flickr user ono-sendai (cc)

Chicago’s Parking Fiasco Fails to Stem Calls for Privatization of Infrastructure

August 19th, 2010 |

26 Comments

» As the United Kingdom encourages investors to pony up billions of pounds for its High-Speed 1 route, Chicago’s sell-off of parking assets comes back to bite.

Who knew an investment in public infrastructure could be so profitable? Or rather, are government entities being bamboozled out of the value of their own property?

About two years ago, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley sold off the rights to 75 years of his city’s public parking meters for $1.15 billion to a partnership of private companies led by Morgan Stanley. Mayor Daley pushed the city council to approve the deal, since it would mean a huge cash infusion into a municipal government facing large budgetary shortfalls. And he argued that putting the parking system in the hands of private enterprise would bring in market-based pricing, essential to improve the circulation and distribution of automobiles in the city’s downtown, but impossible to implement because of a lack of political will.

Bloomberg News, however, revealed last week that the private partnership that bought up the spaces expects to generate at least $11.6 billion in revenues over the course of the contract — producing a potential profit of $9.58 billion, twice what some anti-Daley city council staffers predicted in 2008 the city would lose by selling off the meters (an amount that at the time was considered outrageously high). Chicago, meanwhile, has virtually exhausted the initial funds it received from the deal, having done little to adapt to its local government funding shortfalls.

This situation should put a chill in the spine of those who believe that privatization of public infrastructure will benefit the public pocketbook. And it should be a lesson for politicians who advocate balancing the budget in the short-term through the sale of assets that generate income over the long-term.

Yet the City of Chicago continues to consider the leasing out to private corporations of its Midway Airport. Major candidates running for mayor in Toronto are actively discussing the possibility of privatizing parts of that city’s transit system.

And on the other side of the world, Britain’s new conservative government is hyping the lease-off of the 68-mile High-Speed 1 rail line completed in 2007 at a cost to the government of £6 billion. On Tuesday, between two and six investors submitted their final bids (currently undisclosed) for the 30-year concession that officials expect to bring in between £1.5 and 2 billion, enough to aid the cost-cutting government in reducing its deficit.

Evidence from Chicago suggests that if investors are willing to put up £2 billion now, they are likely to make several times that amount over the course of the contract. In other words, by selling off the rights to High-Speed 1, the British government may get a big boost immediately but find itself yearning for more funds several years out. What makes this agreement particularly galling is that the U.K. already had to bail out the (private) constructor of High-Speed 1 and if the private operation that runs the line eventually faces financial difficulties, the government will likely have to do something similar again, just as it has done repeatedly since the recession began.

That’s because when it comes to public infrastructure, the public seems always to take in the losses even as private companies reap out increasing profits.

Moreover, by agreeing to lease out the line, the government basically abandons any hope of using the program for the benefit of the greater good. Granting control of the infrastructure to a profit-motivated enterprise basically ensures putting existing operators in financial trouble. The infrastructure owner seems likely to demand high usage fees, and these may make the provision of low fares more difficult. Is this in the general interest of the public?

Nonetheless, I do not want to suggest that there can be no appropriate role for private entities in the construction and management of public infrastructure. But it may make more sense to keep for-profit businesses involved only on secondary elements of a project, not have them get directly involved in the transportation element.

And in defense of the City of Chicago, Mayor Daley was likely right when he suggested that only in privatization would the city ever see increasing parking fees. But that fact strikes at the heart of the issue: selling off public infrastructure is too often a response to a lack of political will to get what is needed done.

In Chicago’s case, a politician who has won every mayoral election since 1989 claims he wouldn’t be able to assemble support for raising parking rates, so he would prefer handing out profits on meters to a private group than pushing for his cash-poor city to take the same difficult step. In the U.K., an unwillingness to consider other revenue sources forces a debt-ridden government to sell off its most valuable assets rather than milk them for all they’re worth.

For the average person, privatization probably won’t appear to have changed matters much. But the money they spend parking their cars or taking the train will be going into private hands, not public ones.

Image above: Flyover for High-Speed 1 at Ashford Station, from Flickr user Elsie esq (cc)

Can Bike Sharing Work in Cities With Monofunctional Job Centers?

August 18th, 2010 |

22 Comments

» London’s experience may provide a useful example for American cities looking to introduce large bike sharing systems.

Bike sharing is growing rapidly as the transportation mode du jour; not only have the standardized bikes and their docking stations invaded most major cities across Europe, but they’re now headed towards introduction in a number of American cities as well. Before investing full-scale in the purchase of thousands of new bikes and the installation of hundreds of docks, U.S. planners should be looking closely at previous experience to determine best practices in system design.

Last month, I laid out my concerns that Washington, D.C.’s new Capital Bikeshare doesn’t plot its stations close enough together for the system to be effective, at least based on the manner in which Montréal and Paris have implemented their networks. The lack of station density could prevent easy use by day-to-day users because of difficulties related to finding stations in some neighborhoods.

London, which just introduced its Barclays Cycle Hire system using 6,000 Montréal Bixi bikes and 400 docking stations spread out across 17 square miles of the center city, does not have the same problem, since its stations are tightly packed in a circumscribed area. One difficulty it might have, however, could potentially be even more problematic: Because of London’s land use geography, commuting patterns are overwhelmingly unidirectional, towards the center in the mornings and away from it in the afternoons. This may put a strain on bike sharing, since to work, the concept requires a relatively even pattern of bike pick-ups and drop-offs at every station.

American cities, which feature similar concentrations of office jobs in the inner-city core and distributions of residential areas in peripheral zones, must evaluate how London is handling this problem and develop their own coping techniques before moving forward with a major spending program.

Consider the images below of usage distribution of London’s bike share, products of a mapping system developed by Oliver O’Brien. In the mornings, thousands of people bike from the outside of the Cycle Hire zone into its interior; by the afternoon, this produces a situation in which the majority of stations in the center are full (red) and the majority of those along the edge are empty (blue). In the evening, on the other hand, the movement of commuters from the core and into the periphery produces the opposite situation, where the stations in the center are empty and those on the periphery are full.

*Afternoon – 1:35 PM London Time*	*Evening – 8:55 PM London Time*

Red dot: full station \| Blue dot: empty station

For commuters intending to use the bikes during off-hours, this is extremely problematic. If you want to ride from the London jobs center to the outside of the Cycle Hire zone at 9 PM, for instance, it may be virtually impossible to find a bike; even if you do, you might have a difficult time finding a station at which to dock your bike. The same can be said for a commuter attempting to make the reverse commute at 11 AM.

Perhaps more important, this situation is difficult to handle from an organizational standpoint. Because of the fact that the managers of the system want to alleviate these problems, they have 14 trucks (one of which is pictured at the top) which transfer bikes from full stations to empty ones. Other cities with bike sharing have a similar transportation method, but London’s may be particularly overcharged because of the monofunctionality of many of the city’s neighborhoods.

The worse-case situation seems to be occurring at the bike share docks adjacent to the Kings Cross and Waterloo intercity stations. There, the Cycle Hire management company Serco is simply leaving dozens of non-docked bikes in front of full stations, cluttering up the sidewalks sometimes for hours in anticipation of them being moved elsewhere. There are a few solutions that could be implemented relatively easily, including the hiring of more trucks to move bikes around and the creation of more docking points at places with heavy demand for parking.

But both of these would require a ramp-up in operations costs. One of the great benefits of a well-designed bike sharing system is that the riders can do the moving for you, thereby reducing the onus on the operator to make sure there are an adequate number both of bikes and of empty docks at every station.

Some cities, like Paris and Barcelona, have it a bit more easy, simply because office and residential uses in those cities are not nearly as segregated as they are in London, making the flow of bikes in the sharing system multidirectional. In other words, a mixed-use city is most appropriate for the implementation of a bike share system. It is indicative that the one place in Paris where there is a massive concentration of jobs but few residences — at La Défense, just outside of the city limits– has virtually no access to the Vélib bike sharing network. The city’s planners likely understood that the result of putting docks there would be the same problems as are now experienced by London, and have resisted expanding the system into that business district.

But most American cities have no choice but to include their primary, monofunctional, business districts in their bike sharing plans simply because those business districts are in the center of the city. It will be interesting to watch Washington, D.C. and other cities attempt to cope with the problem of the unidirectional commute as their inhabitants get used to biking to and from work, but London’s experience makes clear what they’re likely to experience.

Images above: London Cycle Hire bikes being moved about the city, by Flickr user Tom Anderson (cc); and Status of London’s Cycle Hire stations (17 and 18 August 2010), from OOBrien.com (cc)

U.S. Announces $8.5 Billion in Requests for High-Speed Funds; $2.3 Billion Available

August 17th, 2010 |

122 Comments

» New applications require state commitment of at least 20% of costs for the first time.

For those searching for evidence that interest in high-speed rail extends beyond the borders of the District of Columbia, look no further than the announcement yesterday by the United States Department of Transportation that it has received 77 applications worth $8.5 billion for the agency’s next allocation of construction grants. States have oversubscribed to a program that only has $2.3 billion in Congressionally approved funds to distribute this year — and have done so after committing to paying at least 20% of project costs.

In January, the DOT released $8 billion in funds to a select group of projects; at that time, states submitted more than $100 billion in proposals. But there was no obligation then for states to contribute to those programs, thus this most recent announcement demonstrates a solidification of state support for high-speed rail.

The federal government is expected to announce the winners of the award dollars on September 30th.

This time around, ten states have submitted applications worth $7.8 billion for long-term, large-scale corridor development and eighteen states have asked for $700 million in construction-ready, relatively small-scale projects. Depending on their specific demands, states have submitted their requests in single or multiple applications. But all states will be required to demonstrate local support for one-fifth of project costs in order to receive federal grants. As calls for Congress to limit spending in the future seem to be increasing, there is a strong likelihood that the DOT will make such contributions mandatory when considering allocations from now on.

The free ride for federal stimulus grants has come to an end. And that’s a good thing, because only states that are investing their own funds should benefit from national dollars. In the past, the U.S. DOT has awarded states only a portion of the funds that they initially request because of a desire to distribute nationwide and a general limitation of overall funds.

States that have applied (the data on the chart above is incomplete, pending more information) generally represent the usual suspects. Florida and California, pursuing the nation’s only two true high-speed rail programs, each have requested more than one billion dollars. For Florida, a full grant award would mean enough money to complete the Tampa-Orlando high-speed project. Though the federal government is unlikely to provide the entire amount requested this fiscal year, the Obama Administration has made clear that it considers the Florida project one of the most important, since it will be the first fully new corridor and represent a milestone for fast train systems in North America. So the Sunshine State will undoubtedly get some money later this fall and the rest of the funds next year.

But California has made a much larger local contribution than its eastern peer, its voters having approved a $10 billion contribution to the San Francisco-Los Angeles corridor in 2008. The state’s $1.58 billion request is relatively minor considering the program’s more than $40 billion total cost and the fact that the federal government has only approved $2.34 billion thus far. But the state is clearly limiting its ambitions; California has asked for $582 million for corridor improvements along existing intercity rail corridors and $1 billion for one of four new high-speed corridors.

California’s move may also be motivated by an interest in pushing away from the state’s responsibility the decision about which section of the full San Francisco to L.A. line to begin with. Four projects “of independent utility” are feasible for a cost of about $1 billion, including the electrification of the existing Caltrain line between San Francisco and San Jose; the construction of new track between Los Angeles and Anaheim; the construction of new track between Bakersfield and Fresno; and the construction of new track between Merced and Fresno. Each of these projects will be necessary for the full program, but if that is put off for years or even decades, these projects will be operable alone.

Yet the High-Speed Rail Authority likely wants to avoid picking one to prioritize since that would make it appear interested in one part of the state more than another; that’s why the federal government is asked to decide, a smart political move. From that perspective, Washington has a hard choice: If it picks one of the former two sections, in the Bay Area or Los Angeles metropolitan areas, it would be doing more for people today on commuter routes; on the other hand, if it picks one of the latter two sections, in the Central Valley, it is more likely to aid more in the completion of the full high-speed program.

New Jersey has asked for $885 million, mostly for the Portal Bridge project that will increase capacity along the Northeast Corridor.

Illinois and Iowa have applied jointly for a $248 million grant to connect Iowa City, the Quad Cities, and Chicago with a new intercity rail route. This project would eventually allow two daily round trips between the destinations with maximum speeds of 79 mph.

Other states have submitted minor applications for less noteworthy projects. New York has a number of small projects on its priority list that would, among other things, replace signals between New York City and Albany; construct new stations in Schenectady and Niagara Falls; and improve track in the Syracuse area. North Carolina has asked the federal government to provide $290 million to improve the main line between Raleigh and Charlotte with new bridges and track improvements for better stations in several cities. Connecticut wants $220 million to match the $260 million it has already pledged to improve services along the corridor between New Haven, Hartford, and Springfield. Michigan has a series of projects worth $385 million (of which the federal government would pay $308 million) to speed operations between Chicago and Dearborn. And Massachusetts has requested $32.5 million to expand its South Station from 13 to 20 tracks.

Other projects have been submitted for funding as well but I do not have information on them at this time.

With the exception of Florida and California, each of these applications represents steady but not radical improvements in the nation’s existing passenger rail system. All of them are reasonable investments, especially since states have committed to paying some of the costs, but funding limitations at the U.S. DOT will continue to be an obstacle in the way of real advancements towards true high-speed rail.

Map updated 28 August

Weekend Links

August 14th, 2010 |

9 Comments

» This week’s big news. Open thread in the comments.

Follow my Twitter account (@ttpolitic) to get news in real time.

On The Transport Politic:

New Directions for the Old South series on Next American City:

Politics

Setting a different tone, Ohio Senator George Voinovich (R) calls for an expansion of the federal gas tax for transportation, describes Robert Cruickshank on California High-Speed Rail Blog. Of course, virtually no one else in power agrees with the plan and Voinovich will retire early next year.
Transportation can play an important role in electoral politics. Joe Sestak (D), running for one of Pennsylvania’s Senate seats, promotes high-speed rail as a campaign initiative. Governor Martin O’Malley (D), running for re-election in Maryland, argues that two transit lines set him apart from his competitor.
Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, who has promised his constituents a vote on the expansion of light rail service to West Seattle, will likely not be able to stage a referendum next year. Opposition from City Council is causing problems.

Big Things

Chinese authorities announce that all of their high-speed rail lines will eventually be operationally profitable. The first corridor, from Beijing to Tianjin, will set the precedent later this year.
Stuttgart’s €4 billion project to reshape the way intercity trains move through the city gets underway. The program has met lots of opposition because it requires the demolition of part of the existing terminal for the construction of a huge underground concourse.
Dallas provides a beautiful visualization of its airport light rail connection, now finally funded according to news this week. On a far smaller scale, the expansion south to downtown Bayonne of the Hudson-Bergen light rail line in Northern New Jersey is planned to be completed by this fall.

Image above: Nashville’s Music City Circuit stopped at waterfront rail station, by Yonah Freemark

Overselling the Benefits of High-Speed Rail

August 13th, 2010 |

26 Comments

» Richard Florida proclaims high-speed rail the economy-maker of the 21st Century. But he’s promising too much.

I write about transportation every day, and in doing so I try to emphasize its importance in defining not only the way people get around but also how they live. On this site and on others I have repeatedly extolled the value of high-speed rail; I truly believe that its full implementation the United States would represent a significant improvement in the lives of a large percentage of Americans. Yet I have tried to avoid portraying it, or any transportation mode, as being in itself a radical bearer of change.

Thus I cannot help but be skeptical of Richard Florida’s most recent article in The New Republic, in which he asserts that high-speed rail is the engine of the next “great reset” in the economy. Florida, of Creative Class fame, is no stranger to hyperbole, but can we truly be expected to believe his contention that high-speed rail will be the fundamental factor in producing the “spatial fix” necessary to redefine the economy for the next generation? Just how seriously should we take his argument that “High-speed rail… is the only infrastructure fix that promises to speed the velocity of moving people, goods, and ideas while also expanding and intensifying our development patterns“?

Florida’s essay is framed around the idea that in the post-World War II era, “Home ownership provided a powerful form of geographic Keynsianism;” the association between the car and the single-family house, the author argues, was the fundamental economic principle that defined the way the U.S. advanced as a society and brought to it the tremendous material wealth it enjoys but also the “Over-investment in housing, autos, and energy” that plagues it. Extending the conclusion that well-designed infrastructure begets progress, Florida asserts the importance of the megaregion as the next tool — the “New way of life and a new geography” — for framing economic growth, and suggests (as has been done many times before) that high-speed rail is its ideal companion. He argues for a much larger national commitment to its development.

Setting aside the positives and negatives of fast trains for now, my biggest qualm with Florida’s argument is his sense that the megaregion will produce the “Concentration and clustering [that] are the underlying motor forces of real economic development.” He cites the Boston-Washington and Char-lanta regions as examples of these megaregions, which he says “Will do more than anything to wean us from our dependency on cars.”

While I don’t dispute the claim that has been made by organizations like Brookings in the past that the vast majority of growth in the U.S. economy will come from within ten or so of these megaregions, I do question how one can conclude that their further development will upside the existing reliance on automobiles and single-family homes. Indeed, the Boston-Washington megaregion already exists as such, and with the exception of a few vibrant city-center cores, the preponderance of growth within them over the past six decades has been in the form of suburban sprawl.

Assuming that we agree with Florida that higher density living is an essential part of defining future American land use, megaregions are arguably not the path to get there.

Though there was been an increase in the number of residents living in the dense cities along the corridor (those that Florida implies need to be reinforced to meet the demands of the next century), that expansion is minor compared to the increase in the number of residents living in not-so-dense areas. It is true that the interconnections between cities in the Northeast have led to strong intercity rail ridership compared to the rest of the country, but the true success, especially of the New York metropolitan area, has been in maintaining urban and commuter rail ridership, which represents a far larger quantity of users and which has nothing at all to do with the presence of the greater Boston-Washington megaregion. The megaregion in itself, in other words, cannot be directly correlated with the notions of higher density.

Moreover, there is some evidence that the megaregion actually produces relatively higher rates of automobile use than other development patterns. The Boston-Washington corridor has morphed into one continuous band of development — this is the definition of the megaregion — and the result is that people who don’t live in places directly adjacent to rail are likely to drive to get to other places in the area, and this will remain generally true no matter how fast the trains travel. Other development models based around high-speed rail, such as the French scheme which enforces urban cores separated by dozens or hundreds of miles of countryside, seem more likely to produce a switch from automobile use since there is simply put nothing for most people to see or do between the cities, and that’s where fast trains really show their benefits.

So even if high-speed rail enforces the megaregional form, are we sure that we want it?

Returning to a discussion of high-speed rail in general, Florida’s focus on the mode isn’t badly conceived per se; I agree with the argument he has made in the past that this form of transportation will reduce commuter travel time and congestion even as it cleans the air. When compared in the long-term to other transport modes under the assumption that “the cost of doing nothing is not zero,” it comes out as the most effective travel mode for intercity travel distances of up to six or seven hundred miles.

But the mode does have its downsides if improperly implemented, and it does not bring the “great reset” Florida attributes to it. There is evidence that in some places high-speed rail has led to further dispersal and in some cases increasing suburban sprawl. Faster travel times allow the creation of geographically larger commute markets. Just as important, fast trains have been around for decades in France, Japan, Italy, and Germany; whatever their merits, are those countries “more ready” for the 21st Century than the U.S. and other non-high-speed countries?

Moreover, a commitment to high-speed rail may change the way Americans get between their cities, but it will not do much at all in altering the way they move within them — and the vast majority of travel is between destinations within a dozen or so miles, not several hundred. Without a comprehensive change in the way the entire transportation apparatus is funded in the U.S., high-speed rail will result in few of the “spatial fixes” Florida highlights as his future goal. Indeed, there is no immediate connection between intercity rail use and giving up private cars; I have argued before that fast trains do not automatically mean an increase in public transportation use to and from stations, in the same way as different airports have different percentages of commuters using cars to get to them depending on the travel offerings available.

While there will be increasing dense development around stops, the fact of the matter is that fast train systems by definition have few stations, certainly not enough to encourage the brunt of overall nationwide development, even if implemented at a vast scale. That’s because, unlike the auto and single-family home model of the previous century, high-speed rail assumes dense, walkable development that falls off after a mile at most. One high-speed rail line cannot produce the same amount of geographic development as one highway.

Yet most problematic about Florida’s argument is his inability to identify improved fixed-route urban transit as the more efficient promoter of the anti-sprawl. While they are not as sexy as fast trains, rapid transit in the form of buses, subways, and light rail more directly allows for the creation of dense urban zones that do challenge the hegemony of the automobile and single-family home. If Florida’s intention were to do the most with a limited amount of funds to increase the number of livable, walkable neighborhoods, for instance, he would do best by encouraging the construction of these inner-city lines, combined with a focus on dense construction around their stations. From that perspective, high-speed rail is of secondary importance.

I write this piece with some reluctance — I do not want to come across as a high-speed rail skeptic, since I appreciate the mode’s benefits and its general importance, and I am in favor of a major ramp-up in public spending to support it. But there is value in being honest about what it can and cannot do.

Update: Richard Florida has responded briefly to this post, mostly in agreement, on his CreativeClass.com website.