Our take on recent news and views in transportation.
As Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff reveals, Recovery Act transit funds have gone not just to track and vehicle repairs, but to new transit stations and hubs, as well as greener repair facilities. Meanwhile, the stimulus’s transit accounts are spending out faster than funds for supposedly more shovel-ready highway projects. Also, the Wall Street Journalrecaps the latest in the race between states, contractors, and Amtrak to win high-speed rail funds.
Future demand for new housing won’t come from people moving from the suburbs to city and town centers, says Ryan Avent, but from the projected 57 million new housing units that will need to be built in the next 30 years for Americans yet to be born. What kind of developments might accommodate them, benefitting from improved intercity rail connections? One example is taking shape in Kansas City.
Yonah Freemark makes the case that price is key to attracting riders to trains in competitive short-distance markets. His number-crunching reveals that Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor trains cost more per mile traveled than high-speed lines in other countries, but are comparable in price on a per-hour-traveled basis. If trains can hold more people and go faster, he contends, tickets will be inexpensive. Getting to the point where speed and equipment capacity on the Northeast Corridor, not to mention other routes in the country, would be great enough to allow for substantial fare reductions will require significant up-front investment. Meanwhile, rising prices for driving and flying will continue to enhance passenger trains’ attractiveness.
A Missouri task force has recommended ways to transform the state’s auto manufacturing sector for the new economy, among them retooling plants for making “high-speed rail cars,” taking a page from Michigan’s Governor. It remains to be seen whether such advice will be translated into real fiscal incentives to produce such a shift. If so, we can hope to see more stories like this in the coming years.
Streetsblog takes stock of the political landscape as the deadlock over the next surface transportation bill continues while the clock ticks towards the current bill’s September 30th expiration date.
LCL: Residents of central Florida have coalesced to push for new high-speed rail line down the median of I-4 from Tampa to Orlando. *** Western state transportation planners organize to expand high-speed rail east from California into the Rockies. *** PBS’s Blueprint America series offers an engaging primer on the state of freight and a look at the realities on the ground that drive current policy debates. *** The challenges of moving rail freight through choked Houston. *** A Louisiana TV station’s op-ed puts the politically-motivated folly of dropping plans for New Orleans-Baton Rouge high-speed rail into a historical context. *** The Grand Canyon Railway sets a green example.
Expert panelists call attention to the burgeoning demand for homes that are convenient to transit and the challenges to making such housing widely available and affordable.
The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) Public Policy Institute, the National Housing Trust and Reconnecting America held a panel discussion at Washington’s Union Station on September 30 on integrating affordable housing with better transportation for more livable communities. It is good to see that people in the various professions that relate to housing, transportation and the design of cities are coming together to address these issues in a coordinated way.
The qualities that make homes near transit lines desirable also drive up their prices, so the need for affordable housing accessible to transit is critical. As you get farther from the center of a city, housing gets less expensive, but transportation costs grow at a higher rate than the cost of a home drops. The opposite occurs as you get closer in. Residents of outlying suburbs who depend on their cars spend an average of 25% of their household income on getting around vs. 9% for those living in walkable neighborhoods with good transit connections. If transportation costs were considered as a factor in the affordability of housing, the whole equation would change in favor of denser, less car-dependent neighborhoods.
Nationwide, only 20% of housing units lie within half a mile of a bus or train stop, but in many larger cities, that figure is over 60%—even in places like Houston, Salt Lake City and Denver. Transit-oriented development doesn’t necessarily mean high-rise apartment buildings. It can also include townhomes and small single-family homes that are close together and laid out well enough to encourage walking.
Availability of affordable, pedestrian-friendly housing means greater independence for older adults who cannot/don’t want to/should not drive and whose personal mobility is limited. Those 65 and older make up over half of the residents of affordable housing units in the US; by 2050, senior citizens are expected to comprise 20% of the American population, up from 12% today.
A major obstacle to transit-friendly, affordable housing is market pressure to turn the existing housing stock into higher-priced condos and townhomes. Currently, there is much more demand for transit-oriented housing than there is supply. Properties in transit-oriented developments are holding their value despite the recession, and are some are seeing values increase. Codes and zoning laws often make infill development, mixed-use buildings, and repurposing of existing buildings difficult. Add to that the pervasive lack of integration of transportation and land-use planning, and you get a sense of the breadth of the challenge facing policymakers.
Rodney Harrell, Strategic Planning Advisor with the AARP Public Policy Institute, noted the irony of transit service cuts even as federal capital funding has grown. In response to this, Congressional leaders’ plans for the next surface transportation authorization include the reestablishment of federal operating assistance to keep the buses and trains that were bought primarily with federal dollars running. Keeping transit accessible and attractive to the entire public also means addressing safety issues and physical obstacles that make it difficult to get to train stations and bus stops, as well as providing better information (including the use of advanced technology) about how often trains and buses run, where they go and what connections are available.
Despite the enormity of the challenge, a sense of progress emerged in the conference room. The Obama Administration was given high marks for its attention to these matters. The rapidly changing American demographic and urgent need for solutions to the energy and climate crises make the transition of the American lifestyle back to one based on more cohesive communities and more reliance on public transportation, particularly rail, all but inevitable.
Real-estate experts acknowledge a shift is afoot, Amtrak raises expectations, and even more advances on the other side of the Atlantic.
The well-regarded annual Emerging Trends in Real Estate report for 2010, after a survey of over 900 industry experts, determined that outer-fringe suburban developments “have no staying power” and that all the smart money is being invested in transit oriented development and housing that is convenient to non-auto transportation, job centers and 24-hour amenities—showing once again that the kind of lifestyle that is most in demand can only be sustained by a strong passenger train network.
An Amtrak spokesman tells the Train Riders Association of California (TRAC) that Amtrak will make a “dramatic and bold” announcement on new equipment purchases in January, reports NARP Council member Jim Loomis. We should expect nothing less.
European countries are leaping even farther ahead of the US on the passenger rail front, writes Arthur Frommer in the Cape Cod Times. New high-speed lines are being built from Amsterdam to Brussels, Florence to Bologna (Italy), and Helsinki to St. Petersburg. Frommer also highlights changing demographics that contradict the low-U.S.-population-density argument, and plugs NARP’s vision for America’s future mobility. Meanwhile, British cities are organizing a push for escalated high-speed rail development.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood talks up rail at a major transportation policy symposium, saying “this Administration will not leave the future of railroads in this country to chance,” adding that he wants passenger and freight trains to be just as relevant to the US economy in the future as they were in the 1800s.
Once again, Ryan Avent says it well: “If you think there’s no substitute for the automobile, then the decline of the auto industry looks like running headlong off a cliff. But in reality, there is something just fine on the other side of the transition: a world in which people drive less and don’t mind it.”
The Midwest High Speed Rail Blog highlights two ways that passenger railroads are, and should be, generating more interest in train travel: by transporting popular sports teams and taking advantage of movie tie-ins.
A head-to-head comparison between living in Almeria, Spain (a country where trains have the lion’s share of the intercity air-rail market), and Milwaukee: in the former you see people out and about; in the latter you see an overabundance of “access roads, parking lots, highways and bridges.”
LCL: Light rail may be on its way to Monterey County, connecting it with regional rail in the San Francisco Bay area. * * * Take a ride in the cab of a Eurostar high-speed train from Paris to London, in 12 parts on YouTube. * * * Speakers at Wisconsin’s “Freight Rail Day” offer lobbying advice.
Solid majorities of American voters think greater investment in trains and buses will be more effective at reducing congestion, pollution and oil dependence—and enhancing our quality of life—than building more roads, and are willing to pay higher taxes for it. These findings, based on a survey of 800 registered voters in all 50 states and DC, were released today by Transportation for America (T4A), a broad advocacy coalition of which NARP is a member. In another indication that train advocates’ goals are broadly shared, the sentiments respondents expressed cut fairly evenly across geographic, income and party lines. The main reason respondents gave for why they don’t use transit often, if at all, is that it is not available or convenient where they live, not because they are wedded to their cars or averse to using transit.
Also from T4A: Despite the higher sticker price on housing closer to city centers, urban living is actually more affordable than auto-oriented suburban living when transportation costs are factored in, according to a Center for Neighborhood Technology study [PDF]. This phenomenon, called location efficiency, doesn’t just occur in large cities: it can be realized in suburbs and small towns that are walkable and oriented around transit nodes. This reinforces the message from a 2000 Surface Transportation Policy Project report, “Driven to Spend: The Impact of Sprawl on Household Transportation Expenses.”
Following on the heels of West Virginia, Kansas Governor Mark Parkinson (D) signed into law a bill mandating the state’s Department of Transportation to begin a passenger rail program, giving Kansas a better competitive position in the scramble for future rounds of high-speed and intercity passenger rail (HSIPR) grants. Another enacted law creates the Midwest Interstate Passenger Rail Compact, formalizing cooperation between Kansas and its neighbors to advance passenger service. This, plus federal grant approval announced last week, is aimed at making the Northern Flyer a reality. NARP congratulates our newest Council Representative, Deborah Fischer Stout (President of the Northern Flyer Alliance) for her tireless efforts to make this happen!
In a sign of support for an expanded long-distance network, two of President Obama’s nominees for Amtrak’s Board of Directors wrote Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) indicating they would press for refined cost estimates for restoring the Salt Lake City-Portland Pioneer. The two nominees, plus a third pick, have been approved by the Senate Commerce Committee and are awaiting a confirmation vote in the full Senate.
New high-speed train service between the central Chinese cities of Zhengzhou and Xian is so popular that all airlines have ceased flights between the two locales. The train takes less than two hours to traverse 314 miles (comparable to a trip from Washington, DC to New Haven, CT). The Chinese government is steadily moving towards its goal of having more than 8,000 miles of new high-speed railroads built by two years from now, a feat often cited by President Obama and other leaders to show how far behind the US is in terms of modernizing the national rail network.
LCL: Support for a major rail freight mobility project—with potential benefits for passengers—is bringing the governors of some affected states together, 3 Republicans and 2 Democrats. * * * The gears have been set in motion for the electrification of the Caltrain commuter line from San Jose to San Francisco—meaning faster, greener trains in five years—upon the completion of ten years of study. * * * Amtrak ridership from the 4-month-old station in Leavenworth, Washington, is 11% higher than Amtrak’s original estimate, with visitors from the Puget Sound area opting to take the train rather than drive to the Bavarian resort town. * * * Despite a host of other budget cuts made in the same bill, an amendment to withdraw $8 million in state operating grants to Amtrak was thankfully defeated in the Missouri House of Representatives. * * * Amtrak stations in California will soon get new electronic displays showing real-time train departure information and announcements.
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