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ChineseDaily Transit Links Roundup
Contributed by Fred Camino on April 28th, 2008 at 10:38 am
- “God, deliver us from these high gas prices,” Twyman said.
- L.A. transit doesn’t have what it takes to attract wi-fi service providers.
- Take a look at the Coachella Express and its temporary platform in Indio.
- OMG this traffic totally sux! A native Valley Girl speaks out against L.A.’s car-culture.
- Diehard Metrolink riders just want some basic amenities.
- Plan transit with the future in mind to avoid the mistakes of the past.
- Is congestion pricing a gift to the rich?
Discussion
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
Well, since I pray for a quality mass transit system, I guess I cannot begrudge others for praying for lower gas prices. But I don’t think the latter will happen, and the former will take a sustain multi-year/decade effort.
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Fragmentation is a big problem for both rail and bus. Every transit rider knows those forced transfers at Pico-Rimpau and Wilshire-Westwood need to end. Fixing the Green Line, but extending it to Norwalk Metrolink, LAX (leading to points north on Sepulveda and maybe Lincoln) and the South Bay Galleria should be a no-brainer.
That Rutten column is ridiculous, but the guy appears to have spent approximately 30 seconds researching the issues, so I’m not surprised.
Peter McFerrin:
I think he makes some good observations and some that are a little thoughtless.
I like this:
I dislike the vibe throughout that somehow personal automobile transportation offers “choice” even without pricing and that the mode in and of itself isn’t the true source of inequity between classes. The cheapest new car is the Kia Rio, for $11,000. That’s the entry level price of mobility. Of course used cars can also be bough for significantly less but the hefty cost of ownership remains… our auto-centric transportation is hardly equitable to those for who don’t have the luxury to throw money away.
I don’t see what is so outrageous about Rutten’s piece. He reasonably points out that these toll lanes will be more popular with wealthier drivers, and they hurt the incentives to be a socially responsible carpooler. He also acknowledges that the region’s lack of real mass transit has been a problem for decades.
I think if there were options outside of driving for many of these middle class workers, then perhaps he would be more open to congestion pricing. As things stand, congestion pricing does nothing for the majority of drivers other than take away another lane to be used as a toll road for those who want to pay.
Congestion pricing revenues can be used to finance transportation alternatives. The reason London’s charge was received so successfully following the initial period of opposition was that the revenues were dedicated far, far in advance to improve bus service (the Tube being largely at capacity). If LACMTA announced that the 210 HOT revenues would be used to finance the operating costs of the Foothill Gold Line (which MTA does not want to pay), support for it would skyrocket. Same thing with increasing service on the El Monte Busway (and parallel Metrolink line) for charges on the 10 and eliminating the ridiculous zone charges on the Harbor Transitway using revenue from pricing the 110.
And if you want to talk about inequality, start with transportation sales taxes, which are ridiculously regressive. They’re at least directed toward transit in LA County, but Orange County uses them only for roads and commuter rail (the most expensive transit mode).
By the way, I got a letter in yesterday’s NYT, about the hypocrisy of one of the principal opponents of NYC’s congestion charging program.
Great letter Peter!
Peter, thanks for clearing that up. I had been confused if money was going into or coming out of such a program, and some of the articles in the Roundups last week never specified how toll revenues would fund public transit.
I see now that one of the LA Times news pieces did mention 60 high capacity buses, but not until the eighth paragraph. The outcry that has followed this week (such as Rutten) failed to note that tolls would in fact be funding bus routes along the *same* roads.
The problem comes when the Gold Line manages to become successful. What if it drew away formerly toll-paying drivers onto the train? Obviously, the Gold Line will become dependent on tolls to fund it.
I could understand if the tolls were used to pay for the capital. If the line’s operating costs give us a San Jose-like line, then it’s not worth building it in the first place.
Metro’s already on the Harbor Transitway case. It’s trying to convert it to a Bronze Line; there will only be one service, like the Orange Line, rather than the half dozen services that now run.
The El Monte Busway, on the other hand, doesn’t need encouragement. It’s highly productive on Foothill’s end, though this figure is split between the 400-series commuter routes and the workhorse Silver Streak. The commuter lines have park-and-ride facilities scattered throughout the San Gabriel Valley with BODO* service. Metro has services that are expresses on the busway and locals off of it (484, 485, 487 and 490).
The busway’s age and productivity presupposes that there’s very little benefit to be gained from encouraging transit use, since the people who find a busway service useful are already using the busway. The money collected from tolls is money that has to be spent.
We have a rock-paper-scissors problem: the tolls cannot find an optimal solution for the revenue collected.
Here are some solutions:
1. Fund increased peak-hour service. Problem: Why? If drivers can now pay to drive on the faster bus lanes, they would be driving. Why use tolls to fund seats that go unfilled because people can make the same trip via automobile?
2. Fund increased Silver Streak or local service. Problem: This does nothing for toll-paying drivers. The carless bus riders are by definition already taking the services, and the frequencies are dictated by productivity. We can double 484 service, but ridership would need to double in order to maintain productivity levels. Ample operations data will show this won’t be the case. For all practical matters, bus ridership (demand) does not respond to increased service (supply). That, or ridership behavior shows that riders will gravitate to a service that is faster, more frequent or cheaper than others surrounding it. A 484 rider will just come from a 482 trip, where growth on 484 is offset by decline on 482.
3. Fund increased Metrolink service. The parallel San Bernardino line is the busiest of the network, it’s very fast and it’s seen large ridership increases during non-peak hours. On weekdays it comes very close to offering clock headways. Problem: the fares, not the services, are dictating rider demographics. Low-income riders would tremendously benefit from commuter rail, but commuter rail illustrates how poverty is self-reinforcing. Poor riders value money over time. They will endure very long rides if the fare is lower, because they need the cash more than they need the time.
Here’s a shocker from today’s Times. USC’s Peter Gordon, who’s blog makes me think he went to planning school in the 1950’s likes congestion pricing and Bart Reed doesn’t.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-gordon-reed28apr28,0,2763070.story
Here’s the ultimate answer to all of the Lexus Lane arguments, when polling has been done AFTER HOT lanes are put in, the poor and middle class like them as much as the upper class do.
The case for congestion pricing is a lot better than that made by Prof. Gordon. Also, Bart has completely neglected the revenue stream that congestion pricing generates. Indeed, the revenue generated by congestion pricing is what sells it in the first place: trips priced off the road can be accommodated on transit, which (in the case of buses) will perform better anyway because it will face less congestion.
Looking out really, really broadly, you can’t really address transportation problems without addressing the region’s awful land use policies. The “I’ve got mine, fuck you” attitudes mentioned in the letter I wrote have made the region’s transportation problems a lot worse than they need to be.
Fair enough, and yes, it probably shouldn’t be built anyway. That said, as much as Metro wants to get upper-middle-class riders on the Gold Line (I mean, they were talking about putting WiFi on the damn thing even as bus riders have to suffer through Transit TV), it’s more likely that the people who would ride it aren’t in the demographic of everyday HOT lane users.
It’s too bad the I-405 Sepulveda Pass corridor isn’t part of the congestion charge scheme if and when the northbound carpool lanes are complete. It’s a Catch-22, the pass needs a HOT lane to create a less congested public transit corridor, but it’s not qualified to have one because there is no adequate parallel public transit service (and I’m not talking about the 761). The pass won’t see rail service in our lifetime and high speed bus service would be a great solution. That article about the time it takes transit projects to come to fruition could not be more truer about my feelings of the speed of these rail/transit projects. I’m 28 and I surprise that the Red Line subway’s terminus at North Hollywood was considered in the project plan video in the mid 1980s from the Metro Librarian YouTube videos; I wasn’t even in preschool yet when the plan of the Red Line is pretty much what I have to use today.
My rebuttal: Once again, you have the rock-paper-scissors problem.
Theoretically, congestion pricing would be revenue neutral, essentially removing the tolls from the gas pump and making drivers drop money into the road equivalent of a farebox. The bigger problem is that the money raised must be money spent.
The biggest problem is that once congestion charging is established, congestion becomes the means and end all in one. It is self-reinforcing. The public sector and private sector would be equally bad stewards of tolling, but for very different reasons.
I’ll spare the details of the steps in which both public and private tolling will go to hell, and just get right to the ending. Should anyone ask, I’ll fill in the blanks later.
In the end, public management of toll funds would lead in L.A. County to 88 Cerritoses. You know: take the toll funds and parlay the revenues to building an auto square. Take the money from that and build a shopping mall. Take the money from that and build a performing arts center. Take the money from that and build a library. Everything becomes a game of providing residents more city services with more out-of-towners paying for these services.
Private actors, motivated by profit, are no better decision-makers than the great unwashed. The school of thought saying otherwise is a combination of a highly disciplined, well-funded disinformation campaign by the right wing, and economics filling the psychological need for a belief system in otherwise learned people. Once the profit motive is in play, the investors who “own” the tolling mechanism become slumlords. This is either the most rational decision or a regression to the mean.
It’s a rational decision because the investors do not want to take on the risk of increasing supply (adding more lanes in the case of congestion), especially for something which will bear fruit years after the decision to expand supply is made. Also, once more lanes are added, both the replacement costs increase and returns diminish. Investors would expect the corporation to raise and decrease prices to manages the supply of lanes rather than add capital. CSX, a railroad, fell into this trap recently. There’s tension between some investors and the CSX board because the corporation wanted to go on a massive rail and vehicle expansion. The shareholders want CSX to raise prices instead.
The regression to the mean is if you have several companies doing the same thing, but one ugly duckling dares to be different. If most shareholders lean on their companies to raise prices and not commit to capital expansion, but one maverick company wishes to grow profits through capital expansion, that sole company has to win over investors to its model in order to succeed. Perversely, the goal is not to produce a better return on investment. The goal is to create a speculative price momentum. In other words, invest in the investment and not the company or its underlying product or service.
Under either scenario, we won’t be any more mobile than we are now.
The “88 Cerritos” example is amusing and insightful, and the aforementioned King/Shoup proposal is politically dubious. I think there’s a flaw in your rock-paper-scissors analysis, though.
The reason urban subcenters form in the first place is that the benefits of co-locating in the CBD become outweighed by the costs: rents, of course, but also the cost of transportation (in both money and time) that travelers to the CBD must incur. The size of these subcenters, and of the original center itself, is a positive function of the productivity increases provided by geographic agglomeration. Tokyo is Tokyo because Japanese culture makes geographic agglomeration economies so powerful as to outweigh the incredible costs of moving so many workers into and out of such a small area every day. By contrast, most American cities are pretty dispersed because the time and monetary costs of automobility in all but a few cities are very low (by global standards), and the benefits of agglomeration aren’t as high as, say, Japan’s. Dense CBDs like Midtown Manhattan, the San Francisco Financial District, or the Chicago Loop have retained high densities because their host regions have invested enormously in transportation infrastructure to keep the total travel cost into them relatively low.
Where congestion pricing fits into all this is that commuters into dense, congested activity centers are already paying to get there, whether it’s in the form of congestion on the freeways and local streets or of high parking costs. When said payment is occurring in the form of congestion, a properly designed road pricing regime simply converts that time delay cost to a monetary cost. Instead of losing those costs to the ether as lost time, demand-priced roads will generate a revenue stream that can finance improvements in infrastructure to lower the cost of accessing these places. The resulting increase in activity centers’ ability to attract trips will, thanks to agglomeration economies, make workers and firms in these places even more productive and thus increase the size of such activity clusters.
Pete gets to the nub. I have no problem with substituting a monetary charge for the current inefficient time charge. The unfortunate fact is that there is an absolute certainty that the monetary charge is going to be an overlay and not a substitute charge. What pops into you mind when people with guns tell you “Pay us extra money every month and nothing worse will happen to you.”
I will again caution transit advocates against painting themselves into a corner with a policy based upon paying a fair price for transportation consumption.
There is no doubt in my mind that the Gold Line will be extended to Montclair and to Whittier.
At one of the recent MTA Long Range Transportation Plan meetings, the presenter said to me after the meeting that the San Gabriel Valley was VERY organized. The political will is there to create it. Unlike the bridges into nowhere in Alaska, the Gold Line will actually be used. While I would love increased Metrolink service on the half-hour until late in the evening (15 minutes during rush hour), there are issues with freight travel that make that problematic.
There is no political way the Gold Line extensions will be sacrificed for increased Metrolink service.
We need to pick our battles. Since the Gold Line is going to happen whether transit wonks want it to or not, I see the Gold Line as the opportunity to get the political leverage to fund the Purple Line to Santa Monica. Telling the San Gabriel Valley they have to make due to with expanded Metrolink, oh but please fund the Purple Line to the westside is just going to hold up the Purple Line.
The Gold Line is not a subway to Lancaster. It will be used. We should be thinking how we can leverage the desire of SGV for the Gold Line into funding other projects like the DRC and Purple Line.
A rising transit tide lifts all boats.
*God* will not deliver you from high gas prices.
*God* is *punishing* you for your auto-centric lifestyle.
SpAnKsPaNkSpAnKsPaNkSpAnKsPaNkSpAnKsPaNk
sPaNkSpAnKsPaNkSpAnKsPaNkSpAnKsPaNkSpAnK
SpAnKsPaNkSpAnKsPaNkSpAnKsPaNkSpAnKsPaNk
sPaNkSpAnKsPaNkSpAnKsPaNkSpAnKsPaNkSpAnK
– God.
cph:
It invites the question, What Would Jesus Drive?
Does Montalvo have any of those amenities?
Pete, what I meant by the rock-paper-scissors problem was focused more on the decision-making process, independent of the urban form of metropoles. Your explanation of urban agglomeration is excellent and appreciated.
It would affect congested CBDs, but it addresses the congestion problem rather than urban form.
You’d probably know of a more academic definition for it, but I called it the rock-scissors-paper problem because it’s a term that everyone is more familiar with, and it serves as a good analogy.
Rock-paper-scissors is a simple game based upon the rule that each one of the three choices has both one winning and one losing option, with equal opportunities for a winning outcome. Rock defeats scissors, scissors defeats paper, paper defeats rock.
Under a congestion pricing scheme, let’s say there are three strategies for determining what to do with toll revenues.
Paper would be increasing the revenue stream of tolls, either to increase the supply (more lanes) or raising rates as the roads become more congested.
Scissors would be funding of a demand reduction service, such as complementary transit service or vanpools, to enhance productivity of a lane of traffic.
Rock would be to build a parallel transportation network that would have the functionality of automobiles and roads.
Scissors beats paper because demand reduction makes more economic and engineering sense than increasing lanes or revenues. Adding lanes demonstrates the law of diminishing returns, as more lanes cost more to add and replace and result in lower toll yields. Revenues raised must be revenues spent because interest groups organize to collect any unused money left on the table. It’s far easier and more effective to increase the passenger loads per vehicle to move more people, and the money could be targeted to reduce congestion during the most crowded times.
Rock beats scissors because demand reduction is ultimately very limited in scope and span of service. Demand reduction is really another term for congestion displacement. A car that is not used for 9-to-5 work trips will be used at other times of the day for other destinations. These other trips — shopping, school, medical appointments, recreation — create two trips: one by the consumers and the other by the workers. These uses don’t lend themselves to bankers’ hours, and a parallel system is better able to handle all trips at all hours better.
The catch, though, is that the more effective the rock is, the more money it has to lose. Plus, to build the system, it needs money to come from somewhere. Tolls would be logical, since the rock both increases supply and decreases demand. The bad news, though, is that the rock has to depend on paper or become paper itself.
Paper defeats rock because the toll revenues (paper) help build — and moreover maintain — the parallel system (rock). Rock depends on people paying their tolls to fund an empty system, or the rock — like highways — must also figure out ways to reduce demand because it would be cheaper and better than increasing supply. That’s how rock becomes paper.
The rock-paper-scissors problem is not meant to be construed as endorsement or dismissal of any road or transit project. The analogy is apt because there is no right or wrong strategy to winning the game, and success depends on either luck or observation of the other party.
Riders are already afraid that adding station comforts will mean higher ticket prices, Potter said.
Whatever happened to beggars can’t be choosers? Do these people honestly not understand just how expensive a public resource they consume? I’d love a rider survey that asks how muh riders think they are paying.
I’ve seen many a BRU recruit testify against fare hikes on the grounds that MTA is using its monopoly power to gouge profit off the riders.
Do the Metrolink riders think the diesel electric engine (in the back where it is safe from damage) is actually powered by fairy dust?
How ignorant of them. An educated person would know that those Metrolink trains are actually powered by gold ingots.