The NYTimes, this weekend reported on better than expected ridership on the Phoenix light rail. The Times points out that the 33,000 average daily riders come primarily from weekend riders looking to get out to the bars and restaurants. This comes as little surprise to me, as many light rail systems, including the one in Denver, far surpassed initial estimates of ridership. This story has played out over and over again in cities like Minneapolis, Houston, and Charlotte. The Overhead has more on these underestimates.
Every time the story is the same: city announces very expensive plans to build light rail system; libertarian groups and anti-tax groups get together and complain that the light rail is too expensive and doomed to fail because we live in an auto-oriented society (sometimes Wendell Cox or Randall O’Toole shows up); light rail opens and surpasses initial estimates (many times by leaps and bounds). AND it ends up spurring investment in the city. According to the Times:
In the first quarter of 2009, downtown Phoenix saw its revenues increase 13 percent, while the rest of the city saw a fall of 16 percent, according to Eric Johnson, a redevelopment program manager for the city’s Community and Economic Development Department. (Businesses along the line suffered greatly during the many years of construction, it should be noted.)
Now the point here is not to argue that transit is good and cars are bad. There is such a thing as a bad transit line. These often involve poor planning, may be highly politicized and actually don’t do anything for the common good. We need to make the debate less about yes or no to transit and more about how to do transit right. We need to carefully and democratically weigh pros and cons and come up with the option that best supports the common good of the community. I am excited that we are gaining more and more American case studies with rich data to build a case for well-planned transit. For too long, we’ve depended on studies from overseas. Now we have places like Houston and Phoenix – some of the most auto-dependent cities in the country – where many people believed transit would never work.
Now for high-speed rail gaining momentum. Recently,the Transport Politic dug up a proposal from the French national railroad operator, SNCF, in response to a call for expressions of interest to finance, design, build, operate and maintain high-speed rail in one of the federally-designated HSR corridors. According to the post, the SNCF proposal is incredibly detailed with the most exciting part being for “the 1,400-mile system it envisions for the Midwest, a network that has never been so fully studied.” Details on the proposal are well covered by Transport Politic, including links to the original documents.
Also very recently, America2050 came out with a report that details where HSR could work best. They use population, the size the local economy, distance between cities (with 250 miles being optimum), the quality of the local transit networks at each end, how bad the highway congestion is both cities, and whether the cities are in a mega-region as variables in the study. While the methodology may not be perfect, it is a great quantitative analysis on how to phase our investment. Studies like this are very important to both build a case and make policy decisions that match up to good planning, not politics. The Infrastructurist has more on this report.
In the past week there have been a number of other articles, op-eds, and reports indicating a building momentum toward the support and funding of smart transit investments. I hope this is part of a trend and not just an anomaly.
Tags: high speed, light rail, phoenix, Planning, Transit