New VTPI Report on Energy and Emissions Strategies

An excellent report just posted by Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute (“Comprehensive Evaluation of TransportEnergy Conservation and Emission Reduction Policies”) provides some timely help for those of us struggling with policy choices in this area.  As usual, Todd wades into complex and often controversial issues with a reasoned analysis and solid scholarship. 

The gist of this report is the conclusion that many studies overrate “cleaner vehicle” strategies as opposed to “mobility management” strategies (VMT reduction) because they do not use comprehensive evaluation techniques. 

Without repeating the whole argument, I’ll just mention a couple of the points I find particularly powerful:

·      A “liter of fuel conserved through vehicle travel reductions provides about four times the total benefits as the same fuel savings provided by cleaner vehicle strategies, due to additional benefits such as congestion reductions, road and parking facility cost savings, consumer savings, and traffic safety” and

·      The benefits of transit investments tend to be undervalued, and … “Even larger benefits can result if public transit improvements leverage additional vehicle travel reductions by helping create more compact, multi-modal communities where residents tend to reduce their vehicle travel and rely more on walking, cycling and public transit.”

Maryland Goes for the Gas Tax!

Congratulations to Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley for having the courage to go directly for a gas tax increase to keep the state’s transportation trust fund solvent and moving forward!

Technically it’s not an increase in the excise tax but imposition of a 6 percent sales tax, phased in over 3 years.  The recently introduced legislation (SB 971 and HB 1302) also includes a “braking mechanism” to defer increases during gas price spikes and various provisions to increase the integrity of the fund.

The legislation is based on the report of a Blue Ribbon Commission issued last fall.  A couple of provisions in that report (not in the pending legislation) that I found of interest:

·      The Commission recommended that MDOT incorporate a Strategic Framework for Transportation Investment Decisions into its planning process to reinforce the state’s Smart Growth policies.

·      They also devoted considerable space to encouraging innovative financing.  An idea I had not seen before is the proposal to develop a Value Capture Analysis system that would be added to the department’s project prioritization scheme.

At any rate, Maryland DOT and state government have done, as I always expect, a first-rate job in putting this proposal together.  Good luck Maryland!

Funny Maps and Fragmented Jurisdictions

Kaid Benfield’s recent blog on fragmented borders in Belgium and the Netherlands is a funny look at how some medieval jurisdictional lines have survived into the 21^st century.  It’s somehow comforting to know that not all the ancient eccentricities of geography have been “reformed.”

I have just two thoughts to add – one on the light side, one more serious.

On the light side, anyone really interested in imagining the complexities of living in a place with confused and overlapping boundaries needs to read China Mieville’s novel The City and the City – where citizens can be “grosstopically” in two cities at once but officially only in one!  It’s great fun!

Less fun is dealing with fragmented jurisdictions in the real world.  All of us in the transportation planning world have had to deal with.  One problem I’m chewing on now is – I think – pretty peculiar to New Jersey and Pennsylvania: small town centers (“boroughs”) surrounded by suburban “townships,” often leading to bad planning decisions in both jurisdictions.  Maybe we should have a field trip to that sidewalk café in Baarle-Nassau (or Baarle-Hertog?) and mull the problem over a Belgian (or Dutch?) beer or two!

Thoughts While Wandering through Suburban Station in Philadelphia

I have occasion to visit center city Philadelphia pretty often and almost always use SEPTA’s very convenient and reliable regional rail service.  Normally I use the Market East station, but a few days ago I got off at Suburban Station, one of the other center city stations (the third station being the monumental Thirtieth Street Station, the Amtrak stop).  If you have never been there, Suburban Station is quite an interesting place.  It’s an underground station with a 1930s office building overtop (art deco, built by the Pennsylvania Railroad) in the center of blocks of modern office towers.  Even underground it retains a certain elegance (unlike the ugly warren of New York’s Penn Station) and convenience.

However, a few critical (hopefully constructive) thoughts:

·      Signage is pretty weak.  I think this is pretty common for stations that cater mainly to commuters, where 99.9 percent of people follow the same path every day.  You can spend a lot of time wandering around if you don’t know where you are going.

·      There is only one restroom in the entire complex, that I could find, and the men’s room was shut down.  I suppose that reduces the homeless population (the reason behind it?) but it’s very inconvenient for out-of-town visitors.

·      Although the Suburban Station underground area is fairly nice, the tunnels leading to other transit connections look pretty sketchy, with low-end shops and a heavy police presence. 

·      Good luck if you don’t know Philadelphia and you’re walking around the neighborhood looking for the station.

My biggest takeaway, however, is a reminder that the Center City Commuter tunnel that was built in the 1980s, tying together a tangle of regional rail lines and funneling them through the three center city stations, was a tremendously successful and underappreciated transportation project.   Could it be built today?  Will we someday soon be able to build the other projects like that that should be built to make our cities and our country succeed and prosper?

More EV trucks are rolling!

Many of us have spent a lot of time working on ways to speed the introduction of electric vehicles in this country – which is important given the significant benefits they provide in greenhouse gas emission reduction, energy security, and general modernization of the transportation system.  Most of the time we are focusing on passenger vehicles, but we shouldn’t forget that EVs include trucks too!

I recently shared a panel (at the Greater Long Island Clean Cities Coalition EV workshop) with Brett Gipe of Smith Electric Vehicles, who gave a very encouraging account of the market growth in commercial electric vehicles.  Smith, for those of you who haven’t heard of it, is a British-based company who are now expanding rapidly in the U. S.  They manufacture a variety of delivery-van-type vehicles and have become a real force in local delivery in New York City, where their customers include distributors of seafoods, drugstore supplies, snack foods, and various specialty goods.  They have done so well in the city that they have announced that they are opening a manufacturing facility in the Bronx!  They are also expanding into other cities and into other markets, including schoolbuses and parcel delivery.

Smith says that although their products have higher sticker prices they save so much on operating costs that total cost of their vehicles is significantly lower than comparable gasoline and diesel units.

It’s great to see EV use expanding in these markets, where the benefits appear obvious.  The trickier question will be how we can increase electric propulsion in the larger supply chain, which is overwhelmingly dominated by diesel tractor-trailers.

Down by the River (Line)

Eric Jaffe has a piece on The Atlantic Cities about New Jersey’s River Line and the influence that the perception of crime has on transit and economic development.

I happen to have visited some of the River Line towns recently – and know a bit about the tangled history of the thing – so I thought I would share a few comments.

First, a bit about the history.  The River Line was not built as a typical transit “new start,” with years of planning studies, alternatives analyses, environmental assessments, and public outreach sessions behind it.

The River Line was born of four circumstances:

1.     The political leadership of New Jersey felt they “owed” a transit project to South Jersey, the less populated (and to them, underappreciated) part of the state.

2.     The towns along the route of the obvious choice for fixed guideway transit, a light rail line from Mount Holly to Moorestown to Camden, rejected it.

3.     Conrail put its old freight line from Camden to Trenton up for sale.

4.     The political establishment of Burlington County, with ties to landowners and developers in the northern part of the county, thought the River Line might work for them.

There was no way this process would meet the tests for federal New Starts funding, so the New Jersey Legislature agreed to fork over state money.

The result of these unorthodox steps (or shenanigans if you prefer) has been a line that has been remarkably successful as a transit line, although it has yet to be successful in reshaping land use and stimulating sustainable economic development.

Some of the towns along the route, including Burlington and Bordentown, have some decent redevelopment happening near the station.  Others…not so much.  Riverside, a promising little town with some historic architecture, looks to me like it’s actually gone downhill in the past few years.  (It was at the Riverside station that one of the locals said to me: “So, are you going to ride the Crime Line?”)

By the way, Eric Jaffe says the River Line is a light rail line with some of the properties of a commuter rail line.  A better way to put it is that the River Line represents a new incarnation of an old transit form: the interurban line!

Fixing local roads vs. expanding state highways in Wisconsin

There’s a battle going on in Wisconsin.  No, not the one you’re thinking of (although not unrelated).  There is a debate over spending more money on local road repair vs. spending more money on widening state highways.  Without getting into the local specifics, I pass along a few thoughts on the topic I have shared with my friends in the Badger State:

A few key points on local roads (fix-it-first) vs. highway expansion:

·      Local projects tend to use local contractors, while big projects may attract large contractors from farther away.  Generally, the smaller the contract, the more likely the money "stays home" with a local contractor.

·      Similar point: Local, small projects tend to use small, local contractors, such as asphalt pavers.  Big projects usually have large contractors (with larger overhead) and specialist subcontractors from farther away.

·      Related to the above effects, money spent on local projects tends to go out the door and into the economy very quickly, maximizing stimulus effect.  Big projects by their nature take longer and the pay-out may take years.

·      Local projects have a higher proportion of payroll costs.  Bigger projects have more non-payroll costs: materials, equipment rental, and especially right-of-way (land) acquisition.  This again has a direct impact on economic stimulus.

·      On the question of long-term economic development there is no consensus in the field.  Economists will tell you that minimizing the time consumed in transporting goods has a direct economic impact.  On the other hand, commuters tend to value improved reliability over reduced time consumption, which argues for a state of good repair.

·      Failure to keep up with a state of good repair also dramatically increases cost liability over time.  It's a lot cheaper to repair and resurface streets on a regular basis than it is to let them fall apart and have to rebuild them.