Ride On
- Posted by ryan on March 11th, 2008 filed in In the News, Uncategorized
Mass transit use increased by more than 2 percent in 2007 to the highest level in 50 years, with Americans taking more than 10 billion trips on public transport while the number of vehicle miles traveled was flat in the first 10 months of the year.
And for those of my readers skeptical of the utility of streetcars, there’s this:
The largest area of mass transit growth was in light rail use, which includes street cars and trolleys, with a 6 percent increase during 2007. Commuter rails were second with an increase of 5.5 percent in ridership and subway ridership had an increase of 3.1 percent.
Mass transit ridership is at its highest level in 50 years. Last year, growth in vehicle miles traveled was flat. Tell me again why we spend $40 federal dollars on roads for every $1 on transit?
March 11th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Because people like their cars, people are lazy, and people are idiots. There. I said it.
Also, the “Mass transit ridership is at its highest level in 50 years” is a lot like the “We’re spending more on [whatever] than ever before.” Well, if you spent $1 more than you did last year, you’re spending “more than ever before.”
March 11th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Monkey, I’m not sure I get your second point. Transit ridership fell for a long time after the 1950s. It’s not like this is just due to population growth.
March 11th, 2008 at 11:53 am
The way I see it, more people are living in cities now than in the 1950s, so it’d make sense that more people would be using mass transit. Because mass transit in cities makes sense; for everybody else, it isn’t a convenient enough option.
Putting a subway line in Leesburg makes about as much sense as an “inner Beltway” in downtown DC.
March 11th, 2008 at 11:57 am
>Because people like their cars, people are lazy, and people are idiots.
Nope. Other way around. People drive so much because we spend spend $40 on roads for every $1 on transit. The free market isn’t responsible for this mess we’re in; we engineered it all from the start.
Oops.
March 11th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Tear down the highways, replace them with miles of broken glass smeared with feces, and give them a shiny subway and people will still line up to buy cars with puncture-proof tires and gas masks.
People have been using roads forever and public transit for maybe 250 years. Those roads will be around long after Urban Hipsterville is a smoking crater and Herndon is ruled by road warriors led by Mel Gibson.
March 11th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
120 years ago the road system of this country was in utter disarray, but we had the best rail network in the world. 75 years ago Los Angeles was the streetcar capital of the planet. 40 years ago there were plans to demolish half of the District and build highways around the Mall and through the middle of Northwest. 30 years ago Wilson Blvd looked like Columbia Pike, but today it’s denser and more urbanistically sound than most of the country’s downtowns. These things happen because of planning. The government funds one thing over another, or writes a law favoring one type of development over another, and the people follow.
The suburban lifestyle rules this country because for most of the 20th Century every level of government stacked the deck in its favor. The notion that American suburbia is a result of the free market is one of the most fantastic myths ever perpetuated. The fact is that between tax law, zoning, transportation investments, and an endless list other subsidies backing up the system, American suburbia is one of the greatest feats of social engineering in the history of the world.
All we have to do is stop engineering it.
Granted, that’s easier said than done, in large part because after such a long time of receiving such extensive subsidies, Americans now believe they are entitled to them. But there is absolutely nothing about Americans that intrinsically ties them to cars and suburbs. If we spend the next 50 years subsidizing cities and transit the way we’ve spent the last 50 subsidizing suburbs and highways, I *guarantee* the results will be profound.
March 11th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
If we spend the next 50 years subsidizing cities and transit the way we’ve spent the last 50 subsidizing suburbs and highways, I *guarantee* the results will be profound.
I agree. You\’d have parts of rural California, New York, Illinois, and Northern Virginia talking secession.
I\’d LOVE for DC to have a transit system on par with the London tube, but I don\’t see anybody lining up to make that happen. Is there some massive groundswell of support for mass transit that I\’m missing? Once the highway infrastructure collapses, they\’re going to toss billions at it, not throw that cash at subways.
I don\’t see people going cold turkey on cars. The current surface transit system needs to be augmented so that people don\’t have to take cars on short haul trips (which is what Joe and Jane Sixpack end up doing most of the time). I want to see how the dedicated bus lanes and eventual streetcars on Rt 1 near Potomac Yards works out. If and when it does, that would make a test case for more of the same throughout NoVA.
Now, whether there will be any money is another question.
March 11th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
I decided to take this up on my site.
March 11th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
No one is saying go cold turkey on cars, monkey. The bottom line is this: we’re going to spend hundreds of billions on infrastructure over the next decade. Some of that will go toward maintaining and repairing existing roads and rails. Much or most of it will go toward constructing new capacity. How are we going to divvy up spending on new construction between roads and rails?
There is simply no justification for keeping anything like the current split between roads and transit spending. In a world where high oil prices are holding down vehicle miles traveled, even in places where there are essentially no transit options, it’s ludicrous to spend all our money building new highways.
And monkey, don’t be absurd–you’d have to be blind to miss the latent transit demand. Metro service has been off during the past year and fares have gone up, and yet ridership grows. Despite a stone age mentality at FTA, cities are lining up to apply for funding for new transit systems. Imagine the demand if the federal government actually encouraged transit construction.
March 11th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Alright. I’ll bite. Lets play follow the money. We know who benefits from road construction. What corporations stand the most to gain from renewed transit construction?
And why have they been missing in action? Vast monolithic right-wing conspiracy akin the to streetcar conspiracy? Or rural votes and rural money demanding rural solutions? Because it’s rapidly approaching a level where it’s no longer a suburb-vs-urban-funding situation. The roads are choked with suburb-to-suburb commuters and that’s where the competition for funding will be. How does transit improve the commute of someone who lives in Quantico and drives to Tysons, and will it show up just in time for him/her to retire?
March 11th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
What corporations stand to gain the most? Ask the businesses in Tysons Corner, which were lobbying hard for the Silver Line.
Look, the largest concentration of employment in the region is downtown Washington. Many of the other employment centers here are also connected to Metro: Rosslyn to Ballston, Pentagon and Crystal City, Bethesda, Silver Spring. Those that aren’t are working hard to get themselves connected to the transit network.
Maybe transit won’t help the guy who drives from Quantico to Tysons every day. We can’t connect every home in the distant exurbs to every employment center via transit. But Washington isn’t done growing. Not by a long shot. Building new transit capacity is key in determining where new businesses locate, and where the people they hire locate.
In 2007, both Arlington and the District approved more new homes than Fairfax County did. There is demand for growth in the center. That’s demand we should be accommodating.
March 11th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Monkey, transit doesn’t serve suburb-to-suburb commutes that well. It all depends on context, but that’s not usually a strong source of ridership.
What you’re missing in your question, however, is the connection between transportation and land use. If you only approach transportation investments as a reactive process to patterns already established, you’ll never solve any of the problems around today. This kind of mentality is what created a great deal of the problem in the first place.
There’s a disconnect there between exurban voters and the people best served by transit, no doubt, but there isn’t much help coming for those exurban people anyway. Congestion, gas prices, declining values will all take their toll, and will slowly erode away the benefits of living there. Trying to placate those people is not a good public policy.
March 11th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
It wasn’t so long ago that the US had the world’s most successful train-building corporations. American-built PCC trolleys are *still* running on streets all over the world.
Those companies left when we decided to prop up the suburban lifestyle and killed the industry, but guess what: They’re already coming back.
Your mistake, Monkey, is continuing to think that the suburbs happen naturally and therefore drive policy. They don’t. It’s the other way around. Policy creates suburbs out of natural conditions that don’t at all favor them. Where policy exists that favors urbanity and transit, such as in Arlington, urbanity and transit boom with every bit as much zeal and suburbs.
Some percentage of the population will always choose suburbs, just as some percentage of the population always choose the city even during the height of its downtrodden years. But the vast moderate majority doesn’t think about it and simply follows the path of least resistance. For decades in the US that path has been suburban, but it isn’t in other first world countries, and it doesn’t have to be here.
March 11th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
But the biggest impediment to what you’re talking about (dense infill development and transit expansion) are the nimbys who supposedly have the most to benefit. They Feds didn’t really kill the Silver Line. Who kept the Tysons Tunnel movement alive long after it should have died? The businesses didn’t want a tunnel; they wanted ANY Metro ANY way. Ask Tenleytown about dense residential construction and they’ll look at you like you’re nuts. They moved to Tenleytown to get AWAY from density. Talk to the Chevy Chase Country Club about light rail to Silver Spring and they’ll reach for their five irons. Talk to Old Town residents about expanding dedicated bus lanes through Route 1 and they’ll complain about all the noise it will bring. How will they make it through their mid afternoon naps? Hell, ask them why they didn’t build the streetcar down King Street connecting the Metro with the waterfront. “We don’t want to lose our parking spots!” This isn’t West Virginia real estate we’re talking about. This is people who want to preserve an upscale suburban lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed. You got your work cut out convincing these people that density and mass transit will IMPROVE their lives.
They wanted their roads. They got their roads. They like their roads. Now, they get to die on their roads.
March 11th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Uh huh, and yet even in ultra suburban Fairfax County there are hundreds of thousands of people living in townhouses and apartments.
Did you know that Gaithersburg - far afield Gaithersburg - has a larger percentage of its population living in attached housing than in detached? Check the census. It’s true.
Let the NIMBYs in single family houses have their single family houses. Forget about them. The existing demand for dense housing is overwhelming and isn’t going anywhere. Nevermind the increasing popularity of new urbanism even in the suburbs, focusing strictly on people who are *already* living in dense conditions, the percentage of our population living urban lifestyles could probably be tripled if we’d remove the barriers and let it happen.
We’re not talking about forcing people out of the suburbs here. We’re just talking about removing the existing barriers to urban living, and letting the market do its thing.
March 11th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Which kinda forces the question: how did those barriers get there in the first place and why are they still there? At least in the case of DC, you have building codes and height restrictions and zoning laws that benefit one group (businesses and landowners) at the expense of another (lower income renters and small businesses).
Creating a sustainable “living downtown” involves a lot more than tax credits for swanky clubs and upscale eateries. Yet that remains the coin of the realm. And if it were up to the market (and the DC government for that matter) downtown would be nothing but a monoculture of affluence. Hey, they can afford it, right?
March 11th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Barriers got there in the first place because we put them there, hoping to build better cities. Suburbia was a great experiment with noble goals. It just didn’t work out the way we’d hoped it would.
The good news is the last decade has been an absolute revolution in the way city planners think. In that time a lot of the barriers have come down, and more still will come down in the coming years.
It just takes time.