Posted on 12/09/2003 8:26:49 PM PST by WOSG
It never ceases to amaze that people are willing to have others do what they want, but seem less inclined to actually change their own behavior.
The Onion satirized this impulse two years ago when they joked that: "A study released Monday by the American Public Transportation Association reveals that 98% of Americans support the use of mass transit by others."
A good example of local life imitating satire is the results of the latest "survey" done by Envision Central Texas, where self-selected citizens responding to a questionnaire declared their preferences for how and where all of us in central Texas should live in future decades.
This exercise in poll-aganda suffers from enough methodological flaws it shouldnt be called a survey; it's more of a group SimCity exercise. One issue is the self-selection bias where Austin's SOS supporters and other environmental activists signed up to push the answers in a way to their liking. Another survey bias was the presumption in the choices that suggest a dichotomy between mass transit or sprawl. The choices given to the responders showed mass-transit proposals in the best possible light by assuming people would live in the 'right' places that would make them cost-effective. So given a scenario where people somehow live in ways convenient for the transit system, 47% of people who choose to answer such questions said they wanted people to live in those places.
Okay, who volunteers to move first?
Asking what we want of other people is the wrong question to ask. We could make a Disney Fantasyland if we could wave a magic wand on people's behavior: What percentage of people should never cut you off in traffic? Should be polite? What percentage should be divorced? single? Should smoke? Should always be truthful? Should go to church? What percentage should never cheat on taxes, steal from 7-11s, or start fistfights? If these questions seem absurd as helpful for making policy, consider then if its useful to ask people what portion of the population should commute on a bike, or live next to a train station or live in a townhouse or apartment. Won't it be up to people to make their own choices?
The right questions for residents, especially the kind that fill out such surveys, would be: Do you want to live in a house, apartment, townhouse or condo in 10 years? Do you want to prevent others from living in their preferred choice through strict zoning? How much land would you like to own? Would you like the freedom to do on it what you wish? How much extra time in a commute are you willing to tolerate to get out of a car and onto a bus or train?
We dont need a survey to figure many such answers out. Most light rail systems in the US have been boondoggles with high costs and low ridership. The problem with light-rail in most cities is that people do not live in exactly the right places to make it cost-effective. Even light-rail itself isnt enough to change patterns. The experience of most cities Austin's size or somewhat larger is that traffic and living patterns dont work with rather slow and low-capacity light rail systems.
The survey promulgates myth when it suggests that light-rail would somehow solve transportation needs more cost-effectively than roads. This defies the common experience of several dozen light rail projects, many of them fiscal disasters that have effectively destroyed mass transit for many cities. Light rail boondoggles and disasters have included the near zero ridership South Jersey's $1 billion light rail project; San Jose, which has a mere 0.4% of passenger miles on light rail; many cities end up having costs per ride of $5 to $15, more expensive than ordering taxis for each rider. And while construction costs are ten times per mile that of highways at about $25 million a mile, even dense cities such as Boston see ridership far below the capacity of equivalent highway lanes. Dallas is called a light-rail success, and yet the Dallas Business Journal reported that "fewer people ride DART today than before spending $1 billion on light rail."
Portland's touted light rail, averaging 19 miles per hour, also lost mass transit riders from before the era of light rail. Sacramento had the same experience: one transportation planner wrote about it: "We have spent over $200 million on a light rail system and lost more than a million passengers a year. Reports on passenger mileage suggest that virtually all of the ridership on light rail has been drawn from the pre-existing bus system. There's no evidence that the trolleys have taken any vehicles off those highways." (5)
Despite all this, there is still this insistence on light rail and this superstition that somehow it represents a positive piece of the transit solution. Pity, since as long as we are blue-sky dreaming of our ideal city, I'd ask for the monorail-style Personal Rapid Transit with Smart Cars that can drive themselves on or off the PRT.
Back in the real world, while the planners dream of imposing a light rail solution the voters rejected, NIMBYs keep development in central Austin and neighborhoods from being effective for high-growth. One suspects that if central Austinites wanted Austin to be Manhattan, many of the residents would up and move there. So instead of new high density high-rise buildings going up, we find housing prices go up, and people head for the suburbs for more space and better living.
It is one thing to support the popular scenario that would require massive infill development, obliterating many old neighbors to create more density (Tarrytown becomes Apartment City). It's another to agree to a high-rise apartment replacing single-family homes in your neighborhood as the 'price' of high-density growth.
What looks good playing SimCity may not look good when it's your life and your neighborhood. How much say do you want in where you live and how your property should look, and how much say should be given to the social engineers? If we are not careful, Austin will have a draconian social engineering approach imposed on us akin to the 2040 plan that Portland planners have adopted. But dont get cowed into thinking we 'asked for it' for ourselves. We didnt.
2. Dallas Light rail In 1990, approximately 40,000 people rode transit to work, all on buses, in Dallas County on a daily basis. By 2000, workers using transit had dropped to 36,900 -- a decline of 3,100. http://dallas.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2002/06/17/editorial4.html
3. San Jose, Phoenix light rail http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/article.php/367.html 4. Portland http://www.ti.org/FS3.html 5. Sacramento light rail quote http://www.rppi.org/ps245.html#fnB23 6. Portland's 2040 plans: "This will require massive increases in the population densities of many centers and corridors. On the average, densities in the centers will double or triple while corridor densities increase by about a third. To obtain those increases, Metro will give each local jurisdiction population targets which they must zone for. The concept also specifies where new jobs will go, and local jurisdictions will also have to zone for those jobs."
WFTR
Bill
How did you manage to miss Vermont's dalliance with a commuter railroad?
It was dreamed up by our current frontrunner in the Democrat presidential race who must have been deprived of a set of electric trains as a boy.
After years of the voters telling him they didn't want it, he built it anyway with federal money paying most of the cost.
A year later, with ridership at unbelieveably low levels, it was shut down by his successor.
Having lived in the Central Texas all my life when I wasn't in the Air Force, I feel like I'm an antique - somebody who lived in Austin before 1990, or even 1980. That said, there are three problems with your proposition :
1)With Austin's current rate of growth any new roads will be filled with more traffic when they are completed years from now and so your back to square one (although I doubt new roads like what you want could be finished within five years, even if they were, five years from now 10s of thousands more would have moved in, filling them up).
2)If you haven't noticed, Austin is pretty developed and dense in areas, and you cannot throw down a bunch of roads without taking a lot of property away from a lot of people and businesses which gets expensive and gets intrusive. I notice many people don't care as long as it's not their house being torn down.
3)We are not Houston or Dallas - we don't need to become another concrete jungle nor do we want a lot of continuous major construction (going back to the 1980s, it seems like a large portion of the freeways in Dallas have been under construction for decades).
My proposal? Kick out anybody who hadn't lived here before, to be nice, we'll say 1995. ;-) Okay, not a very friendly proposal.
The way Austin is laid out and maybe using current city/railroad land, they could probably run a light rail system north/south and have the buses feed into it from east/west. That's just a guess on my part.
I've lived in places where mass transit works and works well (Europe) and I've seen it work well here (Chicago and NYC), however a lot of that infrastructure was laid out when the cities were growing and perhaps the cities grew around the mass transit, I don't know, but not having to go into an area already developed (Houston, Dallas, Austin, etc.) helps a lot.
I was talking about Austin (your original comments I responded to were "Austin's ONLY problem is a refusal to build roads"), not "open undeveloped areas W of Austin" as you are now talking about. I am concerned with the fact that what would have taken me 10-15 minutes to drive 10 years ago now takes half an hour at minimum, and that more roads inside of Austin won't do much good.
Flaming me as being "anti-American", etc. when you can't come up with a half-decent rebuttal and changing the locations in between posts serves no purpose and is just a distraction from the major issues.
Either we are talking about inside of Austin or we are talking about undeveloped areas that are not a part of Austin (and which do not contribute to Austin's traffic problems and/or solutions at this time), please make up your mind.
If you want to talk about "open undeveloped areas W of Austin" then I have no problem with that and would love to discuss it, or we can discuss Austin as you originally mentioned and that I responded about. I hope that a serious traffic study is done soon for that area (west of Austin), and that some kind of regional planning goes into effect before those undeveloped areas become developed.
If something isn't done now as far as planning/development, we face adding the future traffic problems from those undeveloped areas to the already-existing traffic problems with Austin and perhaps (depending on the areas you are talking about) the Austin/San Marcos/San Antonio I-35 corridor in general.
To get back to my point about roads and Austin, even projects like Texas 130 being built east of Austin won't help Austin out. When Texas 130 is built (not "if" anymore, Texas 130 will be built), it will relieve some traffic off of I-35 (and by proxy - relieve traffic in the Austin area as I-35 backing up does flood over onto Austin streets). The flip side is- by the time it is up and operational, the region will have grown enough to fill it up as well - the NAFTA 18 wheelers and people willing to pay the toll to get north a little faster, that Texas 130 will hopefully pull off of I-35, will have their spots on I-35 taken by incoming residents, and the problem of you or I getting around Austin still won't be solved.
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