Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Days after pitching the Senate environment committee for federal help with expediting his ambitious "30/10" package of new transit projects, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was back on the Hill yesterday meeting with lawmakers as part of a broad campaign for more investment in California infrastructure.

Villaraigosa joined the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and a delegation of regional business owners estimated at 200-strong for meetings with the environment panel's chairman, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), as well as Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and John McCain (R-AZ).

Immigration topped the agenda for the McCain meeting, according to Southern California Public Radio, and the L.A. Business Journal reported that the Southern California group visited with White House adviser Valerie Jarrett. But Villaraigosa's meeting with Boxer focused on the potential for speedier progress on the dozen transit extensions and expansions that make up the "30/10" list.

In his Senate testimony last week, Villaraigosa indicated that existing federal funding programs such as Build America Bonds and the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) could prove helpful for his transit push. However, he also issued a highly relevant challenge to federal officials struggling for new ways to close the revenue gap for the next long-term federal transportation bill:

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Friday was billed as a day to discuss the next long-term federal transportation legislation, but the day turned in to a stirring defense of the Obama administration's economic stimulus law and ended with a commitment from Senate environment committee chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) to do all she could to help turn Los Angeles into a transit town within the next 10 years.

Following a morning press conference by local transportation reformers, labor leaders and environmental advocates, Boxer and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood held their own event, flanked by Metro mechanics and board members at downtown L.A.'s bus refurbishment center. While the advocates were focused on the future, Boxer and LaHood spent much of their time talking about the past, most notably the year-old stimulus law, recent high-speed rail grants received by California, and last week's TIGER grants.

"Stimulus funds are hard at work everywhere you look, from the 405 and on L.A.'s light rail system!" LaHood exclaimed.  The local Gold Line Eastside Extension transit project received nearly $67 million in stimulus funds, while the massive widening of the I-405, the largest highway project funded by stimulus dollars, got just under $190 million.

LaHood also seemed particularly pleased about the TIGER grants, pointing out how well Boxer had lobbied on the state's behalf. He returned to this theme repeatedly, which drew a tepid response from his audiences in the Boxer-Lahood press conference and a later town hall -- probably because Los Angeles County did not receive any TIGER funding.

Most of the day's news was made back at Metro headquarters during the town hall meeting. Boxer outlined a timeline for the next six-year federal transport bill -- which the White House has sought to delay until spring 2011 -- and vowed to do all she could to accelerate transit projects in L.A. County to "vindicate the will of the people," in the words of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

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As transportation reformers continue to wait for the Senate to join the House in offering a new federal transportation bill, Senate environment committee chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood will hold a town-hall meeting at the headquarters of L.A.'s Metro transit authority on Friday, February 19. 

The draft agenda for the day, available via the announcement on The Source, can be found here. 

If this sounds familiar, it's because Boxer held a similar forum downtown back in September 2008, where various officials from around Los Angeles, ranging from Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and then-Metro CEO Roger Snoble, testified about their priorities for a long-term federal transportation bill.

The basics of the hours and hours of testimony can be described in two terms: "new starts" and "ports."  There was no mention of words such as "bicycle," "pedestrian," or even "smart growth."

The key to whether this new town hall will provide a chance to discuss what various transportation stakeholders need and desire in a transportation reauthorization bill will be up to Boxer, LaHood and Art Leahy, the new Metro CEO. Last time, non-VIPs had to wait through hours of presentations by elected officials and bureaucrats before any advocates -- or other people that don't collect a government paycheck -- got to take their turn.

If this is really a town hall, then hopefully all of the stakeholders, including commuters that don't have a paid driver, will get a chance to speak.

The Southern California Transit Advocate's Dana Gabbard agrees:

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You may remember, back in August, economist Ed Glaeser's series on high-speed rail at the New York Times' Economix blog. Glaeser put together a back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis of a hypothetical Houston-Dallas line, which purported to show that rail was a poor investment. You may also remember me responding in detail, and generally pointing out how woefully incomplete and misleading his analysis was.

To give an idea of the errors in his work, Glaeser made no allowance for population growth, and he assumed that the sole land use effect of high-speed rail would be to shift 100,000 suburbanites to the central city in both Dallas and Houston.

But these are absurd assumptions. The Census Bureau projects that America's population will grow by 130 million by mid-century, and the National Academies' Transportation Research Board estimates that America will add anywhere from 60 million to 100 million households in coming decades -- nearly doubling the current number of housing units.

This suggests that there is enormous potential ridership growth in growing metro areas and large opportunities for land use shifts. But Glaeser pretends that the world will be more or less static in coming decades.

For these reasons and others like them, I'm not very happy with this week's statement by Brookings' Jonathan Rothwell that "Glaeser’s core approach is sound," and that Rothwell's analysis of high-speed rail numbers "focus[es] on just those aspects of Glaeser’s analysis which merit criticism: the interest rate and the costs per passenger."

This is far too kind to what Glaeser himself said was back-of-the-envelope and which should not be interpreted to "represent ... a complete evaluation of any actual proposed route."

Still, even Rothwell's limited analysis of Glaeser's model (see below chart), using conservative but more appropriate data points for cost per passenger and interest rate, shows that high-speed rail systems are very likely to be worth the investment.

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Ed Glaeser is a very good economist, and his papers are indispensable reading for those interested in the workings of urban areas. But he is also a strident conservative, whose popular writings frequently challenge conventional progressive wisdom (and my own views).

I was interested, then, to read that he would be writing a three-part examination of the economics of high-speed rail (HSR) at the New York Times' Economix blog. I understood that Glaeser would not approach rail from a position of overwhelming support, but I imagined he would provide a fair and rigorous analysis, worth taking seriously.

I hate to pass judgment just one part into the three part series, but so far his effort is highly disappointing.

Let's begin with the first and most obvious complaint -- Glaeser chooses to examine a potential link between Dallas and Houston.

This strikes me as a worthwhile link to have, but it is is notably not part of the administration's announced plan for a first go at construction of HSR systems around the United States. And it is manifestly not one of the top priority corridors for creation of true HSR, running at speeds of at least 150 miles per hour.

Why would he choose this corridor to examine? Why not begin with the most natural place to construct true HSR -- the Northeastern Corridor -- or the state moving fastest toward building its own true HSR network -- California?

Well, Glaeser was able to use Dallas' low share of commuters taking transit to knock the corridor's estimated ridership down by half. Transit's share of commuting in Los Angeles is nearly three times that in Dallas. In San Francisco, transit's share, at 32.2 percent, is more than seven times larger than in Dallas. Presumably this difference had something to do with his choice.

This is a bad beginning for Glaeser, but it actually gets worse. He presents a formula for determining whether the direct benefits of rail are worth the costs:

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The nation's largest metropolitan areas -- which account for 63 percent of the U.S. population and 73 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) -- have received less than half of the surface transportation money allocated so far underthe Obama administration's economic stimulus plan, according to a new report compiled for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

The transportation stimulus report was released over the weekend during the mayoral conference's annual meeting, which lost high-profile attendees to a firefighters' strike in the host city of Providence, Rhode Island.

Its data suggests that cities, while they remain economic engines and shoulder much of the environmental cost of congestion, are getting the short end of the stick from state DOTs that have control over a significant share of stimulus money.

The top 85 American metro areas have received $8.8 billion, or 48 percent, of the $18.6 billion in stimulus aid given to state DOTs by the Federal Highway Administration, according to the mayoral conference's report.

The report found several cities that generate a large amount of economic activity for their states getting a comparatively small share of transportation aid. Los Angeles, for example, contributes 39 percent of California's GDP but received 25 percent of its stimulus money. Indianapolis fared even worse, netting just 4 percent of Indiana's transportation stimulus money while generating 39 percent of the state's GDP.

Using congestion estimates from the Texas Transportation Institute's (TTI) most recent Urban Mobility study, the mayoral conference's report also found that urban areas have not received stimulus money to match their traffic burden.

New York City pays 9.4 percent of the nation's congestion costs, according to the TTI, but has received 3.6 percent of the nation's road-repair money. San Francisco's congestion costs are 3.1 percent of the national total, but its share of FHWA stimulus aid was 0.4 percent.

Whether road-repair money should be distributed primarily on the basis of economic production or congestion remains open to debate. However, the mayoral conference concluded simply that state DOTs "should take into account" the economic production of cities in order to maximize the impact of the stimulus' transportation dollars.

"To do so would prompt states and federal decision-makers to increase their funding commitments to the nation's metro economies, raising the productivity level of their investments," the report concluded.

Good magazine reports on how, with remarkable simplicity, this menacing, marginal streetscape in downtown LA was turned into a welcoming public space (click here for the after photo):

Rather than fence off the trash-strewn lot beside its building -- a stomping ground for drug-users and prostitutes -- one downtown Los Angeles community center added, instead, a few benches and flowers. Soon, neighbors began to hang out there, and the less desirable denizens vanished.

By beautifying the lot, the center transformed its use, and herein lies the vision of the Community Living Room project, run by the Los Angeles-based nonprofit group Verde Coalition: turn grim scraps of public land -- like bus stops, traffic medians, or dangerous street corners -- into welcoming public spaces.

Part 3 in a series on rail and transit-only travel across the United States focuses on the final three cities of our journey. Part 2 looked at the first three and Part 1 presented an overview of our travel. 

San Francisco

Fully restored streetcars, cable cars, buses with and without pantographs, submerged and at-grade light rail, a regional subway and two commuter rail lines all make for a dizzying array of often very scenic public transportation. (Although, with a $5 fare, the cable cars seem more like a tourist draw and less like a form of public transit.) But even in a city that like New York derives much of its appeal from having a walkable, pre-automobile environment, we read about how pro-traffic forces are trying to reshape the city to accommodate more cars. There's apparently a big vote coming up in November on whether to continue transit-first policies or build a lot of parking garages (which would seem to counteract the $159 million San Francisco just won for congestion pricing).

Los Angeles

Making fun of Los Angeles car dependency was already a cliche decades ago. We didn't want to fall into that trap. We arrived in L.A. with open minds, hoping that it just might pleasantly surprise us. It did and it didn't.

L.A.'s Amtrak station is spectacular, way better than ours (not that that says anything). High ceilings, wide corridors and open concourses with a warm, inviting feeling and soft armchairs for waiting. (Wikipedia's photo does it justice.) It was also busier than we expected, serving morning commuters when we arrived but still busy in the afternoon. It's Amtrak's fifth busiest station (scroll).

Then we exited the station and found ourselves feeling like second class citizens walking with our luggage along wide, busy boulevards and buildings that were distant from one another. Pedestrians are actually forbidden from crossing the street right in front of the station, so we had to take some kind of circuitous route to get back to the station, crossing extra streets unnecessarily. Because of a little bit of a snafu that I'll describe tomorrow, we spent less time in L.A. than we had planned: just five hours. We spent most of it struggling with a crossword puzzle outside a Starbucks three blocks from Union Station.

New Orleans

New Orleans is recovering from Katrina. We stayed across the street from a monument to General Robert E. Lee in the Central Business District, three blocks from Amtrak. This area, like the French Quarter, was never flooded and the Quarter was bustling as always on the weekend we were there. Most of the many cyclists we saw in New Orleans were riding one-speed coaster bikes, which is a trend we didn't see anywhere else. There was also a fair proportion of trikes used to haul stuff. But the transportation highlight was definitely the streetcars, which have friendly drivers, friendly fellow passengers, and tall, wide windows that allow you to see the great panorama before you. Their grassy right-of-way does its little part at reducing the portion of our country paved with the impervious surfaces like asphalt, which are so harmful to drinking water supplies. The oldest and longest streetcar line in NOLA, along St. Charles Avenue, is now running as a short downtown shuttle until the rest of the line can be put back into service. Because I love them so much: two more photos of New Orleans streetcars below the jump.

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My wife and I were married last month in Brooklyn. For our honeymoon, we wanted to see as many great American cities as we could. In 19 days of travel, we visited Chicago, Seattle, Portland (Ore.), San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Orleans (and also stopped briefly in Cleveland, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Houston, Atlanta, Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia).

How could two people as obsessed as we are with minimizing our transportation carbon footprints possibly justify taking so many flights for leisure travel? We didn't take any flights. We also didn't rent any cars or even set foot in a single taxi. We learned that thanks to the magic of transit-oriented hotel development (often inadvertent), it is entirely possible to travel this great country from sea to shining sea without any of those carbon-belching modes of travel -- and still have a fantastic time.

Our intercity travel consisted of 33 miles on Metro-North (because we couldn't allow ourselves to depart for such a historic trip from Penn Station), 48 miles on CalTrain, and 7,840 miles on our underfunded national railroad, Amtrak. To travel about in town, we rented bikes in Portland but mostly used an amazing variety of light rail, bus and subway transportation, including trips on Chicago's El, Portland's TriMet light rail, San Francisco's Muni and BART and New Orleans' streetcars. All of which worked perfectly well for our purposes.

Despite the large number of transit providers, it was Amtrak that did the heavy lifting and made our vacation possible. Amtrak employees are painfully aware of the railroad's reputation as habitually late. They desperately wanted to provide an on-time, high quality service, but were demoralized when the trains ran late and frustrated because it was almost always for reasons beyond their control.

We took six Amtrak trains more or less through the entire length of their routes: The Lake Shore Limited, the Empire Builder, the Cascades, the Coast Starlight, the Sunset Limited and the Crescent. All of these trains left their departure stations on time to the minute. It wasn't until we got moving that delays occured, and these were caused by chronic underinvestment in rail infrastructure that has left many lines with just a single track. The lines are owned by freight railroads, which Amtrak pays for the rights use. The freight railroads are in increasingly intense competition with one another for customers, and have a habit of having passenger trains wait at a siding while freight trains roll through. Despite this, the Empire Builder managed to travel 2,206 miles from Chicago to Seattle and still arrive 38 minutes ahead of schedule. If our national government invested in rail improvements just a fraction of the billions of dollars it spends annually on highway maintenance and widening, Amtrak would run on time and more people would ride it.

As gasoline prices have gone up and congestion at airports has increased, Amtrak has had record ridership for multiple years in a row, despite being starved by the Bush administration, which wanted to disband the railroad, and the Republican-led Congress. Many threats remain. On the day we rode rode the Sunset Limited across Texas, a Republican congressman from Texas introduced legislation that would have eliminated the Sunset Limited. (It was defeated with the help of our region's congressional delegation by a vote of 299-130.)

But the trains are still running and we had the time of our lives on this trip. Even if its running late, and even if they've replaced the chefs in the dining car with microwave ovens, there remains something inherently enjoyable and relaxing about riding on a train across vast distances. You have time to yourself to sit and watch the world roll by, completely stress free, and sleeping in a real honest-to-God bed while rolling along through the undulating darkness is just incomparable to anything else experienced in travel. Now with the addition of laptop computers, you can watch a DVD or play tetris to pass the time, but I prefer to leave the screen off and look out the window.

This is the first part of a five-part series on our travels to run this week. Parts two and three will focus on the cities we visited, with brief updates on their struggles for livable streets. Part four will describe in greater detail the trains we rode and the sights we saw. Part five will compare the cities to one another in terms of livable streets, pedestrian-friendly development and intermodal transportation.

The great American poet Robert Hunter has written that he and the other members of the Grateful Dead had the greatest time of their lives aboard a train across Canada that carried themselves, Janice Joplin, The Band and many other musicians. That's high praise from people who spent their lives rocking out. The trip inspired Hunter to write some lines that became the motto for our honeymoon:

No big hurry
What do you say
Might as well travel
The elegant way

UPDATE: Here are the other entries in this series:

• Part 2: Chicago, Seattle, Portland
• Part 3: San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans
• Part 4: The Trains
• Part 5: Wrap-Up

James Howard Kunstler's Eyesore of the Month of July is the nation's first LEED-certified, "sustainable solar-powered parking structure." Yep. Only in California. Kunstler writes:

Apparently nobody informed these idiots that happy motoring is not a sustainable activity, and neither is the parking that necessarily attends it. This is apart from the sheer appalling monumental ugliness of the building. The official PR handout is a prime example of how America is blowing green smoke up its own ass:

The six-story, 882-space structure at the Civic Center features photovoltaic roof panels, a storm drain water treatment system, recycled construction materials and energy efficient mechanical systems.

The $29 million structure -- which sits near the entrance and exit ramps at the end of the 10 Freeway -- also features ground-floor retail, art works on every floor and sweeping city and ocean views.

City officials hope the 290,000-square-foot-garage will become the nation's first parking structure certified by the U.S. Green Building Council Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).

The structure's photovoltaic panels -- which cost $1.5 million -- will pay for themselves in 17 years by generating $90,000 a year in electricity," said Craig Perkins, director of Environmental and Public Works Management for the City.

Ground control to Santa Monica: in 17 years the automobile age will be over.

Photo: !architect4!/Flickr