Court says Exel not entitled to reimbursement of light-rail costs
KSTP-ABC
February 23, 2004
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The U.S. Court of Appeals says federal and state officials didn’t have to pay Xcel Energy Inc. relocation costs after ordering the utility to move underground lines to make way for a light-rail line.
The ruling on Friday affirmed an important legal victory for the Hiawatha line, whose $715 million construction budget would have been affected by what Xcel estimated was more than $21 million in relocation costs.
Xcel argued that a franchise agreement with the city provided that the utility should be paid relocation costs. Tim Thornton, an attorney for the utility, said Xcel would review the decision before deciding whether to appeal.
The court said the U.S. Supreme Court had clearly held that under traditional common-law rule “utilities have been required to bear the entire cost of relocating from a public right-of-way whenever requested to do so by state or local authorities.”
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Sound Transit signs light rail contract
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
February 25, 2004
After nearly two months of delay because of a bid protest, Sound Transit yesterday signed a $128 million contract with RCI-Herzog to build the 4.3-mile Rainier Valley segment of Seattle’s 14-mile light rail line.
Attorneys for Rainier Valley Constructors, the company that had sued Sound Transit over its decision to award the contract to RCI-Herzog, did not file a motion by a 5 p.m. deadline yesterday to overturn the ruling Monday of a commissioner of the state Court of Appeals.
As a result, an injunction that had barred Sound Transit from signing the contract expired, and it was free to sign the contract that it had intended to sign in December or early January.
Construction already has started on the first part of the light rail line between the downtown transit tunnel and Beacon Hill. Work on the Rainier Valley section will start this spring. The boring of the Beacon Hill tunnel and construction of the Beacon Hill and McClellan stations is expected to start this summer. And in the fall, workers will begin digging a short cut-and-cover tunnel on Pine Street downtown.
“Sound Transit is moving ahead aggressively to build this important element of the regional mass-transit system that the voters mandated,” said Pierce County Executive John Ladenburg, chairman of the Sound Transit board.
RCI-Herzog is a joint venture of Robison Construction of Sumner and Herzog Contracting of St. Joseph, Mo.
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Rail car maker secures Pittsburg plant site
East Bay Business Times
March 5, 2004
The timing was right for an Italian rail manufacturer to open a plant in Pittsburg — a deal that could bring more than 250 jobs to eastern Contra Costa County.
Breda Transportation Inc., a subsidiary of Ansaldobreda, based in Italy with its U.S. headquarters in Boston, signed a long-term lease this week for 160,000 square feet of a 370,000-square-foot facility in Contra Costa Industrial Park on Loveridge Road. Currently, 40 employees are working to open the plant by this summer.
“This is huge for Pittsburg,” said Brad Nail, economic development director for the city of 61,000. “Approximately 70 percent of our work force leaves Eastern Contra Costa County to go to work. One of our major goals is to create jobs to let people stay closer to home and then, in the long run, reduce traffic on freeways.”
Broker Thomas Cranmer, of Cranmer Associates Inc., handled both ends of the deal by representing Breda and Ziegler Development, the Berkeley company that has owned the property for the past 20 years.
Terms of the lease were not disclosed, but Cranmer said the property was listed for 30 cents a square foot. The deal took about 18 months to nail down, he said. “This is an international company looking for a national manufacturing plant,” Cranmer said. “Morrison Knudsen built BART cars there and then Adtranz Inc. built BART cars. Breda is finishing a contract with San Francisco Muni. The facility was perfectly suited for a train manufacturing company.”
Nail said the warehouse had been empty for nearly 18 months, since Adtranz finished its eight-year contract to refurbish BART cars. Clearly, the plant was a good fit for a company that hopes to land the next BART contract, scheduled to be awarded in 2005. “The time was right, the facility was empty and the company was awarded a large contract to build rail cars for Los Angeles,” said Nail.
Breda’s current plant is located at the Port of San Francisco. “Breda had just been awarded an $185 million contract with the city of L.A. to produce light rail cars,” Nail said. “This was the perfect facility to move into.”
Another advantage to Pittsburg is its designation as one of the state’s 40 economic enterprise zones. Pittsburg was identified more than 10 years ago as a city with blighted areas that could benefit from tax incentives to attract businesses.
Enterprise zones allow businesses to deduct sales tax from capital equipment purchased in the state. In Contra Costa County, the tax is 8.5 percent, so companies spending millions of dollars on new equipment can save thousands of dollars in taxes. Another incentive offers credits against the companies’ state taxes if they hire locally and train the employees. One company that hired 20 employees saved more than $600,000 over a 5-year period in state taxes, Nail said.
“Breda is starting with 40 employees and if they (get) additional contracts as we’re all hoping they do and convert to a permanent facility, they would hire 200 to 400,” Nail said. “I’m working with them now to try to find other potential business.
BART is obviously the No. 1 possibility,” Nail said. “Breda’s plan is to be local — all of their competitors are located on the East Coast. What we’re hoping for is if they can get a few more substantial contracts, they will look at making this a permanent facility as opposed to doing the existing contracts and moving on.”
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Streetcar Line Likely Would Extend Along Franklin
Tampa Tribune (Florida)
March 6, 2004
TAMPA — If streetcars ever roll farther into downtown, they likely will do so along Franklin Street. On Friday, a steering committee studying proposed expansion of the TECO Line Streetcar System eliminated the possibility of expansion along Tampa or Florida streets.
The panel agreed to move forward with a comprehensive study of expanding along Franklin Street and also — given requirements to explore more than one possible route — backed a look at a route that would move north along Franklin Street past Kennedy Boulevard, then shift west and travel along Ashley Drive.
The 2.3-mile line now begins in Ybor City, runs through the Channel District and ends at Franklin Street on the south end of downtown. But rail backers support a larger system through the heart of downtown.
An environmental study is the next step toward expansion. The first phase of expansion, from the existing downtown terminus northward a few blocks to Whiting Street, is expected to cost $6 million to $7 million, said Sharon Dent, executive director of the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority, which runs the streetcar system.
HARTline has commitments for about $4.5 million for the expansion, Dent said.
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State says deal reached on mass transit plan; Funds hinge on delegate supporting governor’s bill
The Baltimore Sun
March 6, 2004
Transportation Secretary Robert L. Flanagan said last night that the Ehrlich administration has reached a deal with a powerful Baltimore legislator that could bring $17 million to the city to begin planning for an east-west mass transit route.
Flanagan said the agreement with Del. Maggie L. McIntosh, chairwoman of the House Environmental Matters Committee, is contingent on passage of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.’s bill to provide an additional $320 million a year in transportation revenue and on the Baltimore Democrat’s support for it.
Flanagan said the administration would begin the planning process without deciding whether rail or bus lines would be the best link between Woodlawn and the Canton area. He acknowledged the position is a reversal of Ehrlich’s previous stance favoring a rapid-bus route for the corridor.
Mayor Martin O’Malley, a longtime advocate of an expanded commuter rail system for Baltimore, welcomed Flanagan’s statement. “It’s very welcome news in a very bleak session for everyone who’s been advocating for better public transportation in the Baltimore metro area,” O’Malley said.
An agreement on the so-called Red Line, which would intersect the current Green Line running from Owings Mills to Johns Hopkins Hospital, would give Baltimore lawmakers a reason to support Ehrlich’s legislation despite misgivings over the governor’s proposed funding sources.
Ehrlich rejected an increase in the gasoline tax and proposed an increase in vehicle registration fees as the largest source of new revenue for the Transportation Trust Fund.
McIntosh could not be reached to comment last night. In an interview earlier yesterday, she indicated a willingness to work with the administration despite her disagreement with Ehrlich’s approach. “I’m willing to help the administration to some degree on this bill. It is not what I like or want,” she said, adding that near-unanimous Republican support will be necessary for the bill to pass.
McIntosh, a Democrat, leads one of the two House committees that must act on the transportation legislation. The chairwoman of the other panel, Democratic Del. Sheila E. Hixson of the Ways and Means Committee, is a strong advocate of a gasoline tax increase.
The bill still faces significant hurdles in a General Assembly dominated by Democrats.
House Speaker Michael E. Busch said he’s finding little enthusiasm for the revenue package — which includes a variety of fee increases and surcharges on driving-related offenses — in the Democratic caucus.
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Recent trolley talk recalls Ithaca rails of 1880s
Ithaca Journal
March 6, 2004
The proposal of the Ithaca Downtown Partnership to study the resurrection of the trolley system drew negative comments from the workers in the Research Room of the Tompkins County Museum.
They were concerned mainly about cost, but public safety was a strong second. They stressed that the streets were too narrow for trolley tracks to be added to the mix of automobile, truck and bus traffic. What would happen if a fire truck and trolley car met at an intersection?
Listening to the conversation, John Perko, who describes himself as an NBI (native-born Ithacan), recalled with glee his experience as a 10-year-old hitching rides on the back of the trolley cars or eagerly awaiting the appearance of the red ball on a trolley car that indicated the ice on Beebe Lake was safe for ice skating.
Near the end of the 19th century, three developments occurred that encouraged the installation of a trolley system. The first was the invention of electricity, which provided the power for the trolley. The second was the demand to pave the street that could be accomplished at the same time the tracks were laid. The third was the growth of Cornell University on East Hill.
Thomas Edison and Stephen D. Field experimented with electric railways in 1880, followed by their construction in Chicago and Kansas City in 1883. Since they seemed successful, a group of Ithaca businessmen created the Ithaca Street Railways Company in 1884, with electrical power provided by a planing mill on Six Mile Creek at Tioga Street. Two streetcars operated from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily running from the Lehigh Valley Station to the Ithaca Hotel.
In 1891, Herman Bergholtz, an electrical engineer, and Horace E. Hand, a financier, purchased control of the street railway and electric light companies. They constructed a waterwheel plant in Fall Creek gorge to provide power to the electrical lines and extended the tracks up East State Street, to College Avenue, then downtown via Eddy Street.
Ithaca residents lined East State Street to watch the trolley make its first run up the 11 percent grade on Jan. 28, 1893. Many speculated that it would fail; it did not.
Edward G. Wyckoff purchased control of the trolley and electric companies in 1899 as a way to encourage the development of land across Fall Creek that he called Cornell Heights. After constructing the Triphammer Bridge, he extended the trolleyline across the Cornell campus, across the bridge, down Thurston Avenue, across Fall Creek bridge and down University Avenue. Later a spur was added to the intersection of Upland and Hanshaw roads, along Highland Road.
The decline of the trolley company began in 1908 when Wyckoff sold his interest to Albert H. Flint of New York City, who was financially unsuccessful. He sold his interest in 1914 to a group of investors headed by Roger B. Williams, Jr., who formed the Ithaca Traction Corporation. By 1924, another handover occurred. Frank Morse, president of Morse Chain Co., purchased the line in 1928 for $160,000 at public auction. When Borg-Warner assumed control of Morse Chain, the street railway was sold to Sweet and Oster for $25,000. They planned to replace the metal streetcar wheels with rubber tires. However the last trolley rolled through the city on June 22, 1935.
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LIRR takes a step toward East Side
Newsday (New York
March 7, 2004
Workers have dug a 150-foot-deep hole in Long Island City that serves as one of the first steps of the East Side Access project, a multibillion-dollar transit plan linking the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal.
LIRR President James Dermody said that workers have taken down buildings on one city block and dug a pit that will provide access for the railroad to the existing 63rd Street tunnel that will eventually carry Long Islanders to the east side of Manhattan.
However, Dermody cautioned that this is preliminary work on the East Side Access project that has yet to be fully funded. “There is some progress being made in preliminary construction, not heavy construction,” Dermody said. “These are the steps you have to take to proceed to full construction and we won’t have full construction until we get full funding from the government. In the meantime you can’t sit and do nothing, because the clock is ticking.”
The East Side Access alignment connects to the LIRR’s Port Washington Branch and Main Line tracks within the Harold Interlocking in Sunnyside, Queens. From Harold, the alignment proceeds through a set of five tunnels under Amtrak’s Sunnyside Yard to a section that begins at the edge of the existing LIRR Yard.
In that section, the five tunnels merge into two tunnels, pass under Northern Boulevard, and meet the existing 63rd Street Tunnel structure immediately west of Northern Boulevard.
Dermody said the current construction project at Northern Boulevard and 41st Street allows crews to get a tunnel-digging machine below the surface and eventually crews will tunnel east toward Harold Interlocking.
Workers are also building a yard and a shop on Arch Street to handle the railcars to be used for East Side Access.
The project is expected to be complete in 2012.
But costs in recent months have continually increased with the price tag of the project now at $6.3 billion. President George W. Bush has allocated $75 million in this year’s budget and $100 million in next year’s proposed budget, the single largest project approved in transportation.
Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) said he’s optimistic the project will be fully funded. “There has been work going on for years at the work site and now there is new work,” he said. “Certainly the MTA is going forward with its plans anticipating it is going to be done.”
Also, the railroad is in negotiations with Amtrak as it needs to work out agreements with the rail provider. The LIRR needs easements to go under Sunnyside yard and must modify the track at Harold Interlocking.
“Those negotiations are moving,” said Dermody, who is the lead negotiator in the talks.
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Station art to rival river view; The 34-mile route’s 20 stops were the palette of three artists.
Philadelphia Inquirer
March 7, 2004
Though critics gloomily predict that the new Camden-to-Trenton light-rail line will fail to garner loyal riders, the curious will surely climb aboard in the opening weeks. Cheap introductory fares and the sight of ultra-modern railcars whipping along a sleepy landscape will whistle to them.
The River Line has been the talk of the region for a decade. Next Sunday, if it opens as expected, it will become the thing to do. There will be scenes to soak up, rail curves to experience and places to visit, all for $1.10.
But don’t neglect the nonmoving segment of the journey.
The 20 open-air, red-roof stations along the 34-mile route were the palette of three artists who were paid a $525,000 commission to create sculptures, tile art, and gaily painted local scenes. Under the state’s Arts Inclusion Act, up to 1.5 percent of a publicly financed project must be spent on aesthetics. The River Line project cost more than $1.1 billion to build.
Tom Moran, who heads the state Council on the Arts, said the three artists were culled from 178 candidates. They are Katherine Hackl, 34, a ceramic artist from Lambertville; Marilyn Keating, 51, a sculptor from Gloucester City; and Hiroshi Murata, 63, a mosaic tile artist and sculptor who
recently moved from Frenchtown to Santa Fe, N.M.
The trio — who had not met before — spent three years designing and creating River Rail Revival, a comfortable, folk-art ambience at the station entrances and on the pillars and the backdrop panels.
“We went to public meetings and the community wanted the art to be there but not shout. So, it’s sort of low-key,” Keating said. “The recurring themes are the revival of the area, local history, rail history and the environment.”
The mosaic color schemes — deep blue, teal, greens and lavender � evoke an aquatic feel. The patterns are dense at the River Line’s end points and become less geometric and abstract toward the middle.
Much of the artists’ flair unfolds at the picturesque Bordentown station. It is the only spot from which you can see two dramatic bends in the track against an unhampered view of the Delaware River. At the station entrance, Keating built four 20-foot-tall directional posts with bright, whimsical sculptures on top.
A quirky Lucy the Elephant landmark points east. A teal bridge � with the inscription “Trenton Makes, The World Takes” — arches north. A blue diamond-scaled fish reminds visitors of Camden’s aquarium to the south. A brilliant yellowy-orange hen points west. “That chicken is the only one we can’t figure out,” two construction workers said recently.
“The hen points toward farmland, toward the Columbus Market,” Keating said with a laugh.
This spring, Keating is hoping that her three jumping fish — five-foot-tall sculptures that leap from a concrete vase and bend toward the aquarium -will be installed at the station in Camden. The piece is in storage.
At each end point, in Camden and Trenton, Murata created a 20-foot-high steel obelisk, into which he carved a series of fish. At night, spotlights inside the structures create beacons.
Fish represent the aquarium and the river life along the rail line, a place where nature and technology coexist. Likewise, a pair of cast aluminum and steel egrets perch atop each station’s red canopy roof.
In each town, Hackl created tiles that form a narrative of local landmarks, history, flora and fauna. There are bluebirds, dragonflies, red crabs and yellow stingrays. In Camden, a tile depicts Walt Whitman’s mausoleum. In
Bordentown, there is an image of the John Bull Steam Locomotive, manufactured in England and reassembled in Bordentown in 1831. In Burlington City, the John Fitch steamboat appears. In Riverton, there are nautical knots and a “Sail Rail,” a railcar with a sail on it; it ran only with the wind, so was short-lived.
A Rockwellian tile at the Palmyra station focuses on a cozy river house and a Tacony-Palmyra Bridge opening, a pretty scene but the bane of commuters. On another tile the artists wanted to paint a Japanese beetle because the borough was the insect’s first home in this country. But local officials nixed that idea.
The artists, Murata said, were well-aware of the criticisms of the controversial light-rail project during its planning stages. They decided to weigh community sentiment when designing their artwork. “We were happy with the end result,” he said. “Hopefully, the public will be happy with it, too.”
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Taiwan set to roar into high-speed rail era
Agence France Presse
March 7, 2004
After years in the planning, Taiwan’s multi-billion-dollar high-speed railway network is finally nearing completion — but not everyone is happy.
The railway network, which authorities first began drawing up plans for in the early 1990s, is seen by officialdom here as an attempt to modernize Taiwan’s outdated infrastructure to prevent it from dragging down the economy.
The Japanese-built ‘bullet train’ project is due to be completed in October next year and will be designed to carry up to 100 million passengers a year at about 300 kilometers an hour (186 miles an hour), a speed impossible on the island’s existing railway network.
The service is set to cut journey times between the capital and Taiwan’s second largest city, Kaohsiung in the south, from about four hours to an hour and a half.
The island’s domestic airlines and existing railway operators, however, are crying foul about government assistance for the high-speed rail project’s developer Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp. (THSRC), which they claim has threatened their existence.
TransAsia Airways, Mandarin Airlines, UNI Airways Corp. and Far East Air Transport Corp. met last month to discuss a possible merger, but claim even that faces legal problems.
“The government provided low interest loans to the high-speed rail developer… competition will be unfair,” a spokeswoman for Far East Air told AFP this week. She added the airlines are willing to merge but need help from the government, such as an easing of restrictions to allow any such deal to go through.
While the results remain to be seen, the domestic airlines and existing rail operator Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA) are predicting stiff competition from THSRC, with fares for the high-speed train expected to cost 20-30 percent less than air tickets.
In a report to parliament recently, Transport Minister Lin Ling-san said about 60,000 passengers per day may switch from the domestic airlines and TRA to the high-speed rail when it initially starts operations. “The existing railway is expected to be hit hardest,” particularly its long-distance services, Lin said, urging TRA to increase its inter-city services.
The meeting between the airlines came just two weeks after the first bullet train being built for THSRC rolled out of a factory in Japan. The first train is scheduled to be shipped to Taiwan in the middle of the year and will be tested in the third quarter.
The project’s recent advances, however, have commuters increasingly looking forward to its eventual launch.
Lin Chin-hsin, a parliamentarian elected from Kaohsiung, said he might switch to the high-speed rail service when it becomes operational. “Compared with flight services, the high-speed rail would save me time,” said Lin, who currently flies to Taipei four times a week, with each trip taking two and a half hours.
THSRC official Arthur Chiang told AFP the new rail service would have far reaching consequences for the island. “It is expected to lead to the development of the ‘western corridor’ as new towns and districts are being built along the line,” Chiang said.
The government is developing up to 400 hectares of private farm land around each of the seven stations along the railway, with 40 percent of the land going to land owners, 40 percent to the government and the remainder for public facilities.
“With the high-speed rail, Taiwan would be able to realize its dream of ‘one-day life circle’,” Chiang said. “That means for instance that people will be able to travel to the central part of Taichung to visit a museum in 45 minutes and take another 45 minutes to travel to the southern Kaohsiung city and dine there before they return to Taipei at night,” he said.
In 1998 THSRC won the 440 billion dollar contract to build the system under Taiwan’s largest ever BOT (build-operate-transfer) project, under which the rail system will be managed by the THSRC for 35 years before it is turned over to state control.
A Japanese consortium of seven companies signed the deal with THSRC for the supply of the core system — trains and carriages, signalling system, electrification system, communications system and operation control system — at a price of 3.02 billion US dollars in 2000 ahead of the Eurotrain consortium.
Ninety-five of the mega deal’s civil engineering projects have been completed.
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Executive, Legislative Transit Priorities on Collision Course
Washington Post
March 8, 2004
Probably no bill is more popular with members of Congress than the highway and transit legislation that comes up every six years. With its billions of dollars for road building, rapid rail and congestion relief, it has “fast track” written all over it.
So it’s a sign of the disarray among Republicans that this year’s bill is stalled in the House. Republicans there are even giving serious consideration to jettisoning the long-term bill and enacting a $90 billion, two-year stopgap measure, according to GOP lawmakers and congressional aides involved with the legislation.
It’s a case of clashing priorities in an election year.
The White House, under fire for the soaring budget deficit, has made spending restraint a top priority. Bush administration officials are adamant about limiting the six-year cost to $256 billion — though officials have hinted they might accept $270 billion. The previous six-year bill, passed in 1998, authorized $218 billion.
But House aides say it’s questionable whether the “measly” figure touted by the White House could pass. Republican lawmakers don’t want to face voters in November after paring back road building and transit projects that provide jobs and relieve suburban congestion.
The Republican impasse was evident during a flurry of meetings last month involving White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
Young then advocated a $375 billion six-year bill financed in part by a nickel increase in the federal gasoline tax. Gasoline prices regularly bounce up and down by that amount, Young has noted. Motorists, he says, would scarcely feel the impact.
But the White House has made clear it would approve no new taxes in an election year.
Young has since indicated willingness to drop the tax hike. But, with solid bipartisan support, he has continued to insist on a bill of about $318 billion, the amount approved by the Senate. Young’s initial transit plan would add about 1.7 million jobs at a time of sluggish job growth.
In a show of muscle, Young led 37 House Republican supporters to a meeting with Hastert last month. But in a follow-up meeting at the White House, Card politely made clear to Hastert that the administration would not budge. The scenario Hastert wants to avoid is one in which a Republican president vetoes a popular bill sent to him by the Republican- controlled Congress, after which the Republican Congress overrides the veto.
Republicans can’t blame Democrats for being obstructionist. Rep. James L. Oberstar (Minn.), ranking Democrat on the transportation committee, said last week he could deliver 200 Democratic votes for the transportation reauthorization legislation that he had worked out with Young.
That’s why Young and others broached the idea of a short-term bill that would fund highway construction, safety and mass transit programs in fiscal 2004 and 2005. The bill would expire in September 2005, enabling Congress to take up the six-year bill after this fall’s election.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said last week he was open to passing a short-term bill. But Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), who chairs the transportation subcommittee on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, stressed that it would have to contain a “significant level of funding,” which may not be to the White House’s liking.
A total $90 billion authorization for 2004 and 2005 would mark a substantial beefing up of current programs. Congress last year approved $41 billion for highways and transit in the 2004 annual spending bill for the Department of Transportation.
Another possible tactic would involve the House trying to pass a smaller bill and letting a House-Senate conference increase it. The negotiated package could then be presented to the White House as the product of a united Congress.
Lawmakers and senior congressional staff involved with the legislation say it’s hard to see how the White House could veto such a bill, given broad support for increases.
MASS TRANSIT: In addition to hundreds of local bridge and road projects, the transportation bill includes popular transit spending. One dollar out of five collected in federal gas taxes is now earmarked for rapid rail, subway systems, buses and other public transportation that is a top priority for cities, suburbs and, increasingly, rural areas.
The Senate-passed bill would provide $56 billion for transit over six years — a record figure.
Support is no longer limited to senators from congested eastern cities. Advocates now include westerners and southerners who represent communities that are also coping with sprawl and congestion. Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) and Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah) have been leading the fight for transit funds this year.
Federally financed light-rail systems have sprouted in Salt Lake City, Denver, Dallas and Houston, broadening the constituency. Even in the West, overbuilt highway systems and increasing population densities have limited options for new roads, said Daniel Duff, vice president for government affairs of the American Public Transportation Association. Transit systems have become the only alternative to relieving congestion, he said.
“There’s been a significant shift,” Duff said. “In the ‘70s and ‘80s, it was highways versus transit. But in many cases, transit benefits those who don’t use it as much as those who do” by reducing traffic.
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Cable car continues to sit in City Park; Streetcar swap retooled
Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA)
March 8, 2004
San Francisco Municipal Railway cable car No. 59 rests on the slope of a man-made hill — simulating the grade of San Francisco’s hills — behind a fenced display in City Park near Popp Fountain, hardly noticed by the whizzing westbound traffic on Interstate 610.
The vehicle, part of a trade that sent a New Orleans street car out west, needs refurbishing, said Beau Bassich, executive director of City Park.
Bassich said he anticipates that after the Canal streetcar extension is finished, the Regional Transit Authority will renovate the cable car, painting it, redoing the seats and giving it a new roof.
But the RTA is busy with getting the new Canal Street streetcar on track and the new bus lines going, RTA spokeswoman Beth Branley said. “That does not make the San Francisco cable car a high priority,” she said.
Meanwhile, New Orleans’ streetcar No. 952 has been gliding on the tracks with streetcars from other U.S. cities on the F-line at San Francisco’s Historic Streetcar Gallery, from the ferry building to Fishermen’s Wharf, one of the nation’s great tourist attractions, said Rick Laubscher, director of the Market Street Railway.
“It is terrific for New Orleans tourism,” he said. It has quotes from Tennessee Williams and John Kennedy Toole, author of “Confederacy of Dunces,” Laubscher said. “We have kept it in meticulous condition. It is one of the treasured of the fleet of 30 streetcars from all over the world,” the railway director said. It soon will be a part of an extended waterfront line in San Francisco that will feature streetcars from the great port cities of the world.
In New Orleans, Bassich said it is especially appropriate now for the cable car to be renovated, with the extension this year of the New Orleans streetcar line, from Canal Street via North Carrollton Avenue to the P.G.T. Beauregard statue in front of the park.
The former Confederate general is a link between New Orleans and the San Francisco cable car, Bassich said. He said Beauregard ran a traction-mode cable car on St. Charles Avenue in the late 1860s. After the Civil War, Beauregard was state railroad director and New Orleans public utilities director.
The cable car turned out not to be practical in New Orleans, but when hilly San Francisco wanted to use cables for its rail system, its officials came to New Orleans to see Beaurgard for the patent, Bassich said.
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NOT ALL ON BOARD GREEN LINE GROWTH
The Boston Herald
March 8, 2004
Next stop, Medford.
That’s the announcement Green Line riders can look forward to if the MBTA’s board approves a $ 391,000 study this week on extending the route from Cambridge, laying the groundwork for the first trolley expansion since the 1950s.
“I feel pretty comfortable today telling you, yes, it’s going to be extended,” T General Manager Michael Mulhern said yesterday of the plan to run trolleys into Medford by 2011.
But, he said, how far they’ll go and what route they’ll take hasn’t been figured out, nor has the T determined where it will find the tens of millions of construction dollars needed beyond the study funds. “We’re being right up front. We don’t have the money to build it,” Mulhern said.
While the project currently has no construction budget, the state long ago agreed to build it — along with other plans including the Greenbush commuter rail line and restoration of the Green Line’s Arborway branch — as federally mandated transit commitments as mitigation for the Big Dig.
Though Gov. Mitt Romney gave Greenbush the go-ahead last year, the administration has been less enthusiastic about Arborway and other commitments.
Mulhern called the T a “proponent” of the extension to Medford — currently served by the Orange Line on the east and the Lowell commuter rail on the west. “We’ll look at all the pros and cons,” he said of options to run the trolleys adjacent to either the Lowell tracks or the Fitchburg commuter rail bed.
Due by year’s end, the study will also look at projected ridership numbers, likely to include Medford Square bus rider Franklin Allien.
“They should extend it,” he said, though he questioned the need for a study. So did Somerville’s Deborah Wachenheim. “That’s a lot of money,” she said, though she added, “Anything to encourage more people to use public transportation would be a positive thing.”
But Green Line rider Justin Vogel called the expansion “unbelievable,” saying the T should follow Romney’s “fix it first” motto and address current needs. “They should take care of inside the city, where all the poor people live,” he said.
Fred Moore, a longtime rail advocate and member of the T’s Advisory Board representing Saugus, called the study unnecessary. “They’ve been studying this since 1966,” he said, referring to a long-ago T annual report touting the extension. “We’ve built thousands of miles of interstate highway in less time than it takes to build five miles of track.”
The 1966 report came as the T began abandoning trolley lines, such as the Green Line’s A branch, despite the 1958 opening of the widely popular Riverside branch.
“It was the most whopping success for the least amount of money of anything they’ve done,” Moore said. “I can’t see why it wasn’t duplicated.”
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A MAGLEV TOO SOON; FIRST, KILL HAHN’S LAX EXPANSION PLAN
The Daily News of Los Angeles
March 8, 2004
THE folks in Los Angeles City Hall can never seem to get it right. This time, they’ve put the maglev before the horse. Or something like that.
Last week, a City Council committee approved spending $563,000 of the public’s money on a study to determine whether Los Angeles would be well served by a magnetic-levitation — or maglev — train running from the Westside to Ontario Airport.
It may be a fine idea, but it raises an obvious question: Why would anyone in West L.A. want to go to Ontario Airport?
The short answer, for now, is they wouldn’t.
Ontario, like the airport in Palmdale, is owned by the city of Los Angeles, which has preferred to keep as much air traffic as possible flowing into Los Angeles International because it maximizes the revenue stream for L.A., regardless of the congestion, pollution and other problems associated with LAX.
So the outlying airports are grossly under-utilized, and that’s not going to change until the city embraces a regional airport plan, spreading flights between the three facilities.
But standing in the way of that happening is the horse — er, Mayor James Hahn — and his $9.1 billion plan for “modernizing” Los Angeles International Airport.
Although Hahn promises that his plan isn’t about expanding LAX, just making it safer, there are fewer and fewer people around who still believe that or can even say that with a straight face.
For starters, experts have concluded that Hahn’s design wouldn’t make LAX more secure. In fact, by putting all travelers in a single check-in facility, it could heighten the risk of a terrorist attack.
Then there’s a new study out of Berkeley showing that Hahn’s plan would bring 87 million passengers to LAX a year — 10 percent more than the mayor has admitted. That, in turn, would attract yet more traffic and pollution to the area.
No wonder the mayors of the several small cities surrounding LAX, who initially supported Hahn’s plan, have changed their minds. They realize they’ve been sold a bill of goods.
The mayors join a long list of the plan’s opponents, including several city leaders and the airlines. It seems like the only remaining supporters of Hahn’s plan are the contractors and the unions that stand to make a bundle should it ever be adopted.
That said, the plan is still on the table, and as long as it stays there, there’s no sense discussing a bike path, let alone a maglev, to Ontario Airport.
If the city expands LAX, no airline is going to want to bring more flights to Ontario, as it’s more economical to operate out of one facility than two.
A maglev system, not just to Ontario Airport, but linking up points throughout greater Los Angeles, could go a long way toward improving the region’s transportation problems. But it’s pointless as long as the mayor remains committed to a vision that would channel all air traffic through LAX.
Before wasting half a million dollars studying maglev, City Hall ought to fully embrace airport regionalization. And the first step to that end is sending Hahn’s horse of a plan to the glue factory.
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Report: Rail design not at fault for rate of vehicle accidents
Houston Chronicle
March 8, 2004
WASHINGTON — Houston’s Main Street light rail line has no fundamental design flaws that would contribute to the high rate of collisions between trains and vehicles, concludes a report by an independent panel of transportation experts to be issued later this week.
Metropolitan Transit Authority officials have reviewed part of the report’s draft, scheduled to be released at a news conference Thursday. Experts at the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University are expected to recommend minor adjustments to signal timing and signage. Those suggestions will be in addition to changes Metro already has implemented during the monthlong study, including using train horns only in emergencies.
“We knew our system had no design flaws, but it’s always good to have someone else say it,” Shirley DeLibero, Metro president and chief executive officer, said Monday at a transit conference here. “We are definitely going to look at their enhancements and implement them before increased service starts.”
Metro had planned on increasing train frequencies and adjusting bus routes to better tie in to the new rail line starting Feb. 15 but postponed the changes until TTI’s review was completed. There have been 23 train/vehicle crashes in the past four months, a rate far exceeding that of any other new light rail line in the United States.
Metro police cited 22 of the vehicle drivers for traffic infractions that caused the wrecks, including illegal left and right turns, running red lights and failing to yield the right of way when pulling out of a driveway or intersection. Police blamed the other crash on a Union Pacific Railroad employee who bypassed a flashing crossing arm on the test track, but they are still reviewing what type of citation, if any, should be issued.
Some rail critics have said that running trains at street level is fundamentally unsafe and should be stopped.
The high number of collisions on the Main Street line attracted a lot of discussion Monday morning at the annual legislative conference of the American Public Transportation Association, the organization that represents transit authorities across the United States. The discussion was sparked in part by a USA Today story published Monday on the line’s troubles headlined, “Houston’s crash course in light rail.”
With Houston the latest city to begin a rail transit system, industry executives are closely watching the safety situation. Several cities have recently started construction of their first light rail lines or are in the design process, including Charlotte, N.C., Minneapolis and Phoenix.
Metro also gained attention here Monday with a photo of its new train in the Washington Post that accompanied a story about the status of the massive six-year transportation reauthorization bill stalled in Congress. That article didn’t make reference to the Main Street line’s safety problems but rather used it as an example of how rail transit lines are sprouting up around the country, making mass-transit funding more appealing to a broader spectrum of House and Senate members.
President Bush has threatened to veto the $318 billion highway and transit bill passed by the Senate, however, because of his concern that it would expand the federal budget deficit. Bush wants to limit the six-year total, which also would fund dozens of Houston-area road projects, to $256 billion.
DeLibero and other Metro executives, board members and lobbyists are in the nation’s capital this week to brief members of Congress and the Federal Transit Administration on the “Metro Solutions” transit-expansion plan, which voters approved in November. It calls for adding 22 miles of light rail by 2012 at a cost of about $1 billion. Metro is counting on the federal government to come up with half that money.
The message from Metro to Congress this week is clear, DeLibero said: Finish the six-year reauthorization bill promptly — the previous legislation expired Sept. 30 and has been temporarily extended through April at existing funding levels — and do not settle for any amount less than $318 billion.
The more money in the pot, the greater chance Metro has at securing the matching funds it needs. The prior bill authorized $218 billion.
“Now that we’ve got the vote approved,” DeLibero said in reference to the contentious November referendum, “I hope they really push to help us get those 22 miles complete in time, help us get the federal funds because we are going to need them.”
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Auto Asphyxiation: Who has the right of way on NYC’s streets?
New York Press
March 8, 2004
On Monday, Feb. 9 at 3:30 p.m., Juan Estrada and Victor Flores, fifth- graders at P.S. 124 in Park Slope, were crushed to death by a gravel-filled landscaping truck while walking home from school. The boys were crossing 3rd Ave. at 9th St., a busy but familiar intersection, less than a block from their homes. They were killed in the crosswalk with the pedestrian signal indicating they had the right-of-way.
Like most Brooklyn intersections, the pedestrian and traffic signals at 3rd and 9th light up at exactly the same time. Pedestrians and vehicles begin moving simultaneously. In this case, the truck began making a right turn just as Juan and Victor started into the crosswalk. The driver, John Olson, says he never saw the boys in his big truck’s blind spot. In fact, he didn’t even know he had crushed them beneath his wheels until bystanders flagged him down. Olson received only minor summonses, and the boys’ families are suing the city for $70 million.
We’ve been trained in this country to call automobile killings “accidents.” But it’s hard to write this one off so easily. A simple traffic-calming device called a “leading pedestrian interval,” or LPI, almost certainly would have prevented this tragedy. An LPI lights up the pedestrian signal about three seconds before vehicular traffic gets the green. This gives pedestrians a head start into the intersection and forces turning vehicles to be less aggressive as they drive through the crosswalk. LPIs might have prevented the type of “right turn conflict” that killed Juan and Victor. The downside of an LPI is that a few less vehicles may be able to move through the intersection at each cycle of the light.
About two and a half years ago, an experimental LPI was installed at Atlantic Ave. and Clinton St. in Cobble Hill as part of an initiative called the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Project. The LPI has been a “smashing success” according to Community Board 6 District Manager Craig Hammerman and many others. So, why don’t we have an LPI at 3rd and 9th, and what does it take to get the New York City Dept. of Transportation to install one?
DOT’s public affairs office refused to make any of their “highly qualified engineers” available to answer these questions. But one former DOT director of planning, under condition of anonymity, explained to me how it works. There are no formal “warrants” or requirements for installing LPIs in New York City. The decision is made based on “engineering judgment.” He said that when traffic engineers analyze an intersection like 3rd and 9th, “they are primarily looking to see that an LPI won’t degrade vehicular ‘level of service.’ DOT’s attitude is, ‘We will do pedestrian safety, but only when it doesn’t come at the expense of the flow of traffic.’”
To the traffic engineers, “it’s all about big maps and traffic counts.” Their “engineering judgment” is not likely to take into account the two schools, major subway station, big grocery store, churches, small businesses and working-class Mexican immigrant neighborhood within a few blocks’ walking distance of 3rd and 9th. All the traffic engineers know is that 3rd Ave. and 9th St. are truck routes. Ninth St. exists in this world “for the purpose of pumping morning rush hour traffic through to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.” The avenue is a great place to put vehicles when the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway gets full.
“It’s just the way the system works,” the former DOT planner continued. “Guys in Lexuses stuck in traffic jams are simply more important than Mexicans crossing the street.”
DOT says it is “disingenuous” for anyone to claim that the agency’s traffic engineers could have done anything to prevent Juan and Victor’s deaths. Spokesmen say “budget constraints” have made it impossible to put together the “extensive geometric engineering review and substantial capital” that would be required to make 3rd and 9th safer.
But that’s simply not true. DOT’s failure to implement traffic calming measures at 3rd and 9th has little to do with budget constraints or geometric gobbledygook. The recommendation to install an LPI at this particular intersection has been sitting on a shelf in the DOT Brooklyn Borough Commissioner’s office since, at least, November 2001. That’s when Arup, an internationally respected engineering firm, issued its first draft of the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Plan, and it doesn’t take two years to install an LPI.
This particular traffic-calming device is so inexpensive and easy to set up, DOT doesn’t even bother to put a dollar figure next to it in their budget estimates. All the traffic engineers have to do is make a slight adjustment in the timing of an intersection’s signals. Not only that, if the LPI causes problems, the traffic engineers can simply change the signal back to the way it was. No concrete gets poured. No work crews dig up the street.
The real reason there is no LPI at the intersection where Juan and Victor died is because the traffic engineers who control and run New York City’s Dept. of Transportation fundamentally disagree with the entire concept of traffic calming. In the world of the traffic engineers, taking away five seconds of green time from trucks heading west to the Battery Tunnel is a serious risk. It’s a major sacrifice.
“Unfortunately,” says DOT spokesman Keith Kalb, “Not all accidents can be prevented with engineering.”
Just as the U.S. Dept. of Defense was once more-honestly called the Dept. of War, the New York City Dept. of Transportation was formerly the Dept. of Traffic. Though the name has changed since the days when the all-powerful public works czar Robert Moses flattened vibrant neighborhoods and decimated mass transit to make the city more convenient for motorists, DOT still reflects his cars-first values. We may as well call DOT the “Dept. of Traffic”as many agency old-timers dobecause traffic is what they continue to make. It’s their product. It’s what they are all about.
The way that DOT operates is scandalous. But the scandal is not so much about incompetence or corruption. The DOT is controlled and run by an insular and widely discredited group of professionals called “traffic engineers.” The more effectively the traffic engineers do what they perceive to be their job, the more choked and immobilized New York City’s streets become.
The real crime at DOT isn’t so much that the agency is doing a bad job, but that it’s doing the wrong job.
Former DOT Traffic Commissioner and Chief Engineer Sam Schwartz is, himself, a traffic engineer. Best known by his nickname, Gridlock Sam, Schwartz started his career behind the wheel of a New York City taxi and, perhaps, because of that, tends to have a more holistic view of transportation than your typical engineer.
“Traffic engineers have failed,” Schwartz says. “If you compare the accomplishments of our profession [in this country] over the last 50 years to the medical profession, our performance is equivalent to millions of people still dying of polio, influenza and other minor bacterial diseases that have been cured.”
While London, Paris and municipalities all across Northern Europe are, with great success, developing ways to make their dense central districts less convenient, accessible and free to automobiles, American traffic engineers are still focused on figuring out how to shove more motor vehicles through our nation’s roadways. The traffic engineers’ solution for congestion is to add a lane or build a new road, which in Schwartz’s words is like “telling an obese person that the way to get healthy is to buy a bigger pair of pants and a longer belt.”
For Schwartz, the fact that “the interior of our cars have become like our living rooms and offices”with DVD players, email access, cup holders and beverages and snacks designed specifically to fit in those cup holdersindicates his brethren’s failure. “People know they’ll be spending so much time stuck in traffic they’re equipped to live in their cars.”
Whether they know it or not, DOT’s traffic engineers are deeply ideological. Their -ism is motorism; they believe in the primacy of the automobile. One former DOT employee says the agency’s prime directive is “to move the most traffic possible. They always try to maximize the street’s capacity and increase the flow of traffic. The traffic- engineering profession believes that streets are for moving the most amount of vehicular traffic possible. Period.”
Although the majority of New Yorkers does not own automobiles, the majority of the city’s public spacethe streetshas been annexed for the primary use of motor vehicles. Considering that few things are as valuable in New York City as space, this giveaway may amount to the single biggest government entitlement program we have. As the agency that controls and maintains the city’s streets, DOT runs this program.
The fact that DOT is oriented around moving traffic and maxing out roadway capacity is not a big secret to anyone except, perhaps, the agency’s public affairs office. Spokesman Keith Kalb insists the department’s “primary focus is pedestrian safety.” Yet, Kalb’s boss, Commissioner Iris Weinshall is often heard to say that her job is “to keep the traffic moving.”
It may be that Kalb and Weinshall haven’t read their agency’s mission statement lately. In fact, the job of DOT is “to provide for the safe, efficient and environmentally responsible movement of people and goods in the City of New York.” Unless we as a society have decided that tinted- window Cadillac Escalades with pumping sound systems are the safest, most efficient and environmentally responsible way to move people and goods through the city, DOT simply isn’t fulfilling its mission.
At first glance, the commissioner’s goal to “keep the traffic moving” sounds like a good thing (or, at least an innocuous thing). Urban planners around the world, however, have learned otherwise. In fact, the ultimate result of traffic engineers’ quest for maximum capacity is maximum congestion.
John Kaehny, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, explains: “If you build it, they will come. If you increase the supply of road space, motor vehicles will fill it up. If you reduce the supply, traffic will diminish.” Transport for London, the British version of the DOT, studied this phenomenon in the late 90s. They looked at about 50 cases where big roads were suddenly taken out of service by natural disasters and other eventsthe collapses of San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway in 1989 and New York City’s West Side Highway in 1973. In virtually every case, traffic engineers predicted that the reduction in road capacity would create total chaos. They assumed that if 50,000 vehicles per day were using the road that had been taken offline, then almost every one of those vehicles would now travel over surface streets.
This doesn’t happen. The British study found that in every case a significant amount of vehicular traffic simply “disappeared.” When it wasn’t convenient to drive anymore, commuters took a different mode of transit, traveled at a different time of day or made fewer, more efficient trips. They concluded that if you tighten roadway capacity and make a city less accessible to the automobileparticularly a city that offers good transit optionsthere will be less traffic congestion, higher quality of life and significant economic benefits.
In February 2003, London’s mayor Ken Livingstone began charging motorists £5 ($7.50) every time they drove through an eight-square-mile section of Central London. The tolling is automated, so motorists don’t have to slow down or stop at toll booths to pay, and the enforcement is carried out by traffic cameras. Violators are mailed £120 ($180) fines. The initiative is projected to raise $200 million a year, all of which will be used to improve London’s mass transit, pedestrian and cycling facilities.
According to the most recent analysis, congestion pricing has been a major success. Traffic is down by 30 percent, average trip speeds are at their highest since the 1960s and travel times are more reliable. London is now considering an expansion of the congestion-pricing zone.
Meanwhile, the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, has promised to “fight, with all the means at my disposal, against the harmful, ever-increasing and unacceptable hegemony of the automobile.” After establishing a number of measures to improve public transportation, in the summer of 2001, Delanoe began closing two and a half miles of the Pompidou Expressway. He then turned Paris’ busiest artery into a public beach and park, complete with sand, grass, palm trees and vendors. On opening day, the usual 200,000 motor vehicles were replaced by 600,000 revelers.
Here in New York City, when Mayor Bloomberg floated the idea of congestion pricing for the East River bridges in his 2003 preliminary budget, the plan was shouted down by Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and a cadre of outer-borough councilmembers. Even Manhattan councilmembers whose constituents would most clearly benefit from congestion pricing remained mostly silent.
Take a walk through Downtown Brooklyn at about 10 on a weekday morning. In the likely event that the BQE is choked with traffic, many motorists will have decided to try their luck on the neighborhood streets. On the narrow sidewalks of Court St., pedestrians are jostled off the curb as buses and double-parked trucks turn the air brown with diesel. It’s not difficult to imagine Court St. a vibrant pedestrian mallexcept for the fact that DOT traffic engineers believe its purpose in this world is to inject motor vehicles into southern Brooklyn as rapidly as possible.
One block over, Clinton St. is occupied by an armored column of yellow cabs and SUVs horn-blasting their way to the Brooklyn Bridge. One can imagine this tree-lined street of classic brownstones peaceful and pleasant, but traffic engineers see Clinton St. as an on-ramp to the East River bridges and BQE. It is also their personal parking lot. On weekdays, street parking down here is confiscated by government employees with bogus, photocopied parking permits on their dashboards.
Meanwhile, down by the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, traffic may be so light that, as Schwartz says, “you can roll a bowling ball to Manhattan.” Because the tunnel is tolled, motorists avoid it in favor of downtown’s Brooklyn’s free bridges.
Ever since Robert Moses began plowing the BQE through Brooklyn’s working-class immigrant neighborhoods in 1945, the area’s traffic problems have steadily worsened. Things reached a boiling point in 1986 when, as a gift to his Republican constituents on Staten Island, Senator Alfonse D’Amato helped get rid of the eastbound tolls on the Verrazano Bridge.
“This was the moment when people really started to feel like Brooklyn was being unfairly overrun,” recalls local activist and architect Jane McGroarty.
One-way tolls on the Verrazano made political sense, but from an urban- planning perspective they’re a disaster. Rather than driving into Manhattan via the New Jersey Turnpike, Schwartz points out that the current system “encourages truckers to barrel down the rickety BQE and downtown Brooklyn’s neighborhood streets, bounce across the creaky Manhattan Bridge, thunder over choked Canal St., and leave the city via the Holland Tunnel” which is also free going westbound. Using this circuitous route, New Jersey and Staten Island truckers and commuters can save as much as $40 a day in tolls.
In 1997, the neighborhoods surrounding downtown Brooklyn got fed up enough to take to the streets. No wild-eyed anarchists, these: In a series of early morning protests, doctors, lawyers and stroller-pushing mothers put their bodies in front of rush hour traffic to demand that the city do something about the vehicular chaos. In the midst of a reelection campaign, Mayor Giuliani was compelled to respond. The protests began what would become known as the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Project (DBTC).
Traffic calming is said to have started in the Dutch city of Delft in the late 1960s when a band of residents, sick of vehicles cutting through their neighborhood, grabbed shovels and pick-axes and reconfigured their street into a serpentine pattern that forced motorists to drive more slowly. Today, it’s an engineering specialty.
But the DOT’s drive to maximize capacity conflicts with the concept of traffic calming. Over the course of the DBTC’s five-year study, DOT engineers steadily dragged their feet and undermined the community’s wishes and Arup’s recommendations. For example, on Hicks St., known to locals as the “fifth lane of the BQE,” when Arup said raised crosswalks had to be four inches tall to be effective, DOT insisted they only be two inches. When, as expected, the shorter raised crosswalks proved worse than useless, DOT deemed them a failure and eliminated them from further consideration.
In June 2003, the stakeholders involved in the DBTC gathered at Brooklyn Borough Hall for the presentation of Arup’s final recommendations. After the consultant’s lengthy presentation, DOT Deputy Commissioner for Traffic Operations Mike Primeggia announced that the agency would not implement any of the recommendations from the Arup’s 130-page report until 2009at the earliest.
Sandy Balboza, president of the Atlantic Avenue Betterment Association recalls: “Primeggia told us that before they’d do anything, DOT needed to re-study every one of the plan’s suggestions. Well, we just spent five years and $1.2 million studying it.” To throw a bone to the community, DOT promised to fast-track a set of 30 traffic-signal timing, bike-lane and parking improvements.
DOT was too “timid and conservative” says Community Board 6’s Hammerman. “The whole point of hiring a consultant was to have them think outside the box. But DOT grabbed the Traffic Calming Plan and put it right back in.”
Kaehny believes that “DOT never wanted to be at the table. They were forced to do this by city hall. Once Giuliani was gone, it was revenge of the traffic engineers.”
For its part, DOT says: “DBTC is ongoing. We’re evaluating the suggestions of the consultants. We don’t know when the final report will be issued.” If, as DOT claims, pedestrian safety is its “primary focus,” the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Project was a perfect opportunity to prove it. “They could have hit it out of the park,” Kaehny says. “They didn’t even swing at it. That’s the power of DOT.”
To be fair, DOT does some things right, and New York City’s increasingly broken and dysfunctional car-centered transportation system is not entirely the fault of traffic engineers. The agency is managing near record- levels of vehicular traffic with less and less resources. After a difficult and demoralizing eight-year period during which DOT weathered six different commissioners, massive cuts in budget and operations and a concerted effort to abolish the agency altogether, there has returned to the organization a measure of stability and pride.
Steve Weber, Deputy Commissioner for DOT’s Lower Manhattan office, credits Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Weinshall for “unleashing the expertise of the people who were already in the agency and attracting creative and innovative new people.” He says his bosses urge the staff to “develop effective solutions to problems that have seemed unsolvable for decades.”
He points to midtown Manhattan’s Thru Streets program as an example of this new spirit. By eliminating turns on certain streets, the administration says Thru Streets has improved pedestrian safety and increased average cross-town automobile speeds from 4.0 mph to 6.1 mph. And though it took decades of community pressure and hundreds of casualties to get DOT to act, the agency has recently made big improvements to pedestrian death-traps like Herald Square, Queens Blvd. and the Grand Concourse.
A former DOT engineer points out that the steady decline in pedestrian fatalities and injuries over the last decade may just as well be attributed to the surge in traffic congestion during the same period. “Pedestrian fatalities have a lot to do with vehicular speed, and vehicular speed in much of Manhattan is negligible.”
Though DOT has a lot of power to fix what’s broken about New York City transportation, the agency works within a much larger context of dysfunction, a culture that loves its cars and a city that has little political will to tackle major transportation issues. Perhaps the biggest problem is that the city has no real control over its subways, buses and tolled bridges and tunnels. These are all run by the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which is controlled by the state and the governor. Over the last decade, Republican legislators have increasingly steered MTA resources away from the city and toward the suburbs.
As Kaehny says, “the MTA dwarfs DOT in budget, planning resources and political [power]. The fact that our city’s transit agency is completely separate from the agency that owns and controls the city’s streets is a serious problem.”
Then there’s the outer boroughs’ car culture, a powerful force despite New York City’s 46-percent car ownershipthe lowest percentage in the nation. At Brooklyn community meetings, it’s not uncommon to hear people complain in one breath about all the traffic in their neighborhood and then demand more parking space for their own cars.
“They don’t want other people to drive through their neighborhood,” says Cobble Hill president Roy Sloane, a grizzled veteran of neighborhood transportation battles. “Yet they want to be able to drive around freely and have a parking space when they get there.”
Much of New York’s transportation problem is cultural. “This is a city of immigrants,” John Kaehny says. “The car is seen as a fundamental totem of making it in the middle class. In Queens, for example, if you tried to charge more for parking on Steinway St. in Astoria you’d be lynched.”
Come election time, one of former City Council Speaker Peter Vallone’s favorite things to do was roll back parking fees. “All that got the people of Queens was a lot of double parking and choked traffic.” It also helped Vallone get reelected each year.
Perhaps the biggest problem of all, however, is the lack of political will to deal with the city’s transportation issues. There is no transportation vision or leadership coming from City Hall right now.
“Transportation,” says Kaehny, “simply isn’t considered a top tier political issue. In New York City it’s all about crime, jobs, schools and the budget. Transportation does not make the cut as a mayoral priority.”
Sloane sees DOT traffic engineers as innocent implementers. If traffic engineers are acting as the city’s de facto urban planners, it’s only because they are filling a void left by the politicians. “What’s required is a political commitment to solve these problems. The political decision has to be: We are not looking for maximum vehicular capacity and traffic flow. We are looking for maximum quality of life.”
McGroarty notes that “politicians simply don’t want to attack traffic. It’s a no-win situation for elected officials. No matter what they do, they’re going to make somebody unhappy. When you try to reduce someone’s ability to drive their car, they just go ballistic.”
When Mayor Bloomberg briefly brought up the idea of tolling the East River Bridges in 2002, he spoke of it only as a revenue-raising measure. Many urban planners and transportation experts see congestion pricing as the best, easiest and most sensible way for New York City to fix its broken transportation system. As one former DOT planner says, the main reason DOT is dysfunctional is simple economics.
“If the cost of something is zero,” he explains, “there’s always going to be lots of demand. If ConEd gave electricity away for free then they’d always be installing new wires and infrastructure. Driving is essentially free.” DOT can’t keep up with the needs of the city’s pedestrians, cyclists and transit users because they have to maintain the infrastructure for this huge, expensive, entitlementthe ability for New Yorkers to drive a car wherever and whenever they want.
Schwartz wants the mayor and governor to completely revamp the tolling systems in and around New York City and implement congestion pricing for spots with traffic congestion and good mass transit service. Tolling motorists over the Cross Bay, Whitestone and Throgs Neck bridges doesn’t make a lot of sense, he notes, but those “diving right into the heart of Midtown Manhattan at rush hour” should pay.
“If you want to drive by and show your kids the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree from the window of your SUV, I’ll charge you $25 for the pleasure of doing that. Want to drive through Central or Prospect Parks? I’ll charge you for it.”
The technology exists to do his kind of tolling. Schwartz says that London- style congestion pricing could raise close to a billion dollars and significantly improve the city’s transit systems and overall quality of life.
“If the mayor pulled off the creation of a Dept. of Education,” Schwartz says, “he can accomplish this.
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Nottingham: A proud day for the city
Nottingham Evening Post
March 8, 2004
As the tram doors opened today to admit the first passengers on to the £200m city-to-Hucknall line, it marked the completion of 16 years of planning. Environment Correspondent SEAN KIRBY looks at a transport landmark and how Notts got here
There were a lot of smiles in Nottingham today. Warm, practised ones from the politicians, pleased to be associated with a prestigious project that boosts Notts’ image. Big, happy ones from excited children and ‘young at heart’ enthusiasts, clambering on to the 33-metre-long trams they’ve so far only been able to watch gliding through the city on test runs. And, no doubt, broad smiles of relief on the part of the engineers and council officers who’ve devoted years of their lives to reaching the official launch.
Today was described as a ‘celebration day’, with Transport Secretary Alistair Darling as guest of honour and 500 invited guests, including selected Post readers, boarding the first trams.
Tomorrow sees the start of public services, with the 5.58am from Phoenix Park to Nottingham starting off a passenger system designed to run services every day except Christmas Day.
The caution in effectively splitting the tram’s launch over two days is understandable. The certificate needed from HM Railways Inspectorate, saying the line is ready to welcome the public on board, was only issued on Friday.
And things haven’t always run smoothly in the past 12 months of the £200m line’s development. A “minor” tram derailment at the city-to- Hucknall line’s Highbury Vale stop in May led to an announcement two months later that the expected November 11 launch date would be missed.
There were further slips in estimated start dates from mid-January to “early spring”. Reasons given for this included a lack of suitable materials and contractor staff, and “significant’’ problems with tracks gripping in the wet, and visibility.
But Nottingham Express Transit (NET), which promotes the tram for the city and county councils, points to the fact that the tram is launching around a month earlier than their most recent estimate of “early April”, as evidence that things have gone well this year.
One man who’s waited longer than most for the tram to finally pull in is NET project leader Pat Armstrong, who’s been working on turning the line into a reality for 14 years. His team looking into the feasibility of developing a tram system began working with no rail experience, from portable buildings in a council car park.
He said: “I am often amazed that it has become a reality. It is great to see the trams running around now. I feel immensely privileged to have been involved.’’ The road to the main Wilkinson Street tram depot in New Basford is to be named Armstrong Way in his honour.
Coun John Taylor, chairman of the NET Development Board, said today was about celebrating a “massive achievement” after 16 years of planning and construction. “Those who have been involved in the project, along with those with an interest in it, should be proud of this significant moment in the city’s history and the part they have played in it. We’re pleased that the Secretary of State for Transport is visiting us at this exciting time.’’
Coun Terry Butler, county council environment spokesman, said: “I’m delighted the tram is ready to roll for its official opening.”
The councillors will join John Watson, chairman of city promotion group Nottingham Development Enterprise, to wave off the first services at 5.58am tomorrow at the Phoenix Park, Station Street and Hucknall stops.
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Trolley extension proposed for UA; Will extend to UMC via Park Ave., Second St.
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tuesday, March 9, 2004
In addition to bikes, CatTrans and pedestrians on cell phones, students may also have to dodge trolleys in order to get to classes in the Harvill building.
Under a proposal being entertained by the city, Old Pueblo Trolley, which currently runs from North University Boulevard down to East Fourth Avenue, would expand its services to link downtown Tucson to the Arizona Health Sciences Center.
One proposed route would bring the trolley down East Second Street, passing the Slonaker House and the Harvill building.
While no plan has been solidified and no funding set aside for the project, the city of Tucson and the UA are collaborating on the proposal, said Shellie Ginn, bicycle and pedestrian coordinator for the city of Tucson. The expansion would link the Rio Nuevo downtown revitalization project with the UA, Ginn said.
Richard Guthrie, president and chief operating officer of Old Pueblo Trolley, said the trolley would pass by the UA’s main gate and head north on North Park Avenue. The trolley would hang a right at North Park Avenue and East Second Street and head to North Cherry Avenue. At North Cherry Avenue, the trolley would cross East Speedway Boulevard on its way toward AHSC.
Connecting downtown Tucson to the UA would allow students and visitors to easily access museums at both locations, while providing a boost to businesses that line the route, Guthrie, a UA alumnus, said.
By increasing the trolley’s route, Ginn said she hopes people will see the project as a viable mode of transportation. “This will make life a little more pleasant downtown,” she said.
According to the 2003 Campus Master Plan, the UA is interested in creating “unique downtown housing options for students, faculty and staff.” Ginn said students and faculty could easily use the trolley to travel to and from the UA.
But the expansion would be difficult for Old Pueblo Trolley to afford, as it is a non-profit organization that uses volunteers to operate the trolleys, Guthrie said.
The trolley service operates only on the weekends, but if the route were expanded, Guthrie said the trolley would run seven days per week. The trolley would also operate refurbished or replica streetcars that require extra money to maintain.
In order to accommodate the changes, the trolley service would have to hire staff and add two trolleys to the four that are already in operation.
Right now, a one-way trolley ticket costs $1 for adults and 50 cents for children
According to Old Pueblo Trolley’s Web site, it would cost $8 million to put in new rails, wiring and electricity. The money would also go toward buying and servicing the streetcars, which would cost about $300,000 per year.
Guthrie said he wants the city to subsidize the project in order to expand the trolley’s services while keeping prices reasonable. Programs such as SunTran and ParkWise receive money from the city. Fares would be similar to that of SunTran, Guthrie said.
Old Pueblo Trolley is negotiating a contract with the city to set up the subsidiary, Guthrie said. With the proper funds, Guthrie said a staff could manage the service during the week and allow volunteers to work on the weekends.
If the trolley’s expansion does become a reality, both Guthrie and Ginn said the trolley could become a successful alternative to traveling downtown and to the UA.
Guthrie said the success would provide a good example of mass transit that could convince voters to support a light rail system.
In November, Tucsonans voted against a proposed light rail system that would have been created around East Broadway Boulevard. But Ginn said a great deal of research would have to be done to look into whether a light rail system would be feasible.
Ginn added that it might be more realistic to expand the trolley service, which uses refurbished streetcars, rather than using light rail passenger cars.
Guthrie said that the trolley would be successful, because people would enjoy riding the trolley. “Rail transportation like Old Pueblo Trolley is more subject to use by all customers than a bus,” he said. In 2003, nearly 23,000 people rode the trolley, Guthrie said.
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Gold Line critique hits home
Pasadena Star-News
March 9, 2004
THE OTHER DAY the L.A. Times followed up on our Gold Line expert Mary Bender’s story on the new light-rail line’s ridership woes, and Tuesday morning Roger Rudick, a transit consultant, followed on both stories with a KPCC radio essay.
It was exactly the kind of commentary the good village burghers of South Pasadena don’t want to hear. According to Rudick’s analysis, the reason far fewer commuters than had been hoped are hopping the Gold Line is that it’s simply too slow. At most hours, a car easily beats the 36-minute East Pas to Union Station train time.
According to some in South Pas, as you faithful readers well know, the Gold Line is not too slow: it is way too fast, and too loud, and in general too too.
Back in the real world there are other factors at play, Rudick noted, especially that the line’s downtown terminus is not where you want to go unless you work on Olvera Street instead of in a Flower Street law firm or brokerage house.
To get to the real downtown, commuters have to transfer at Union Station to a Red Line subway car or a cab or an MTA shuttle bus.
All points well taken. But one anti-speed factor Rudick cited is to my mind a red herring. He said that it was penny-wise but pound-foolish not to underground various portions of the Gold Line route so that trains could go faster without traffic or noise concerns. That ignores the fact that the financing that got the line built at all was so precarious that there was simply not another dime much less tens of millions of dollars available for construction.
Rudick’s bottom-line argument is very much worth remembering. While safety is cited as a concern by some who object to higher train speeds, and while inevitably there will be a Gold Line accident, the simple fact is that light-rail travel is exponentially safer than car travel. The more people we can get out of their personal vehicles and into the train, the more lives will be saved. And letting the trains go a little faster is one clear way to get more commuters into them.
Pulling up to park for an Athenaeum lunch Tuesday, I came to rest behind a Caltecher’s car sporting this provocative bumper sticker: “What’s your SUV overcompensating for?’
In light of the FBI’s arrest that morning of a physics grad student in the Hummer firebombing, I found myself thinking, “Watch it, buddy the feds are gonna be all over your tail with that kind of eco-talk.’
Inside the faculty dining room, I figured the buzz would be of nothing but the arrest. Still, I didn’t want to invade the sanctity of the assembled worthies of the Round Table. As he was leaving, though, I button-holed chemist Nelson Leonard. Nope, said Nelson, they hadn’t even heard of the arrest. The lunch topic of the day was dinosaurs specifically, whose bright idea were they? The consensus was that even God makes big and lumbering mistakes.
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German rail travel — don’t forget to pack the mace
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
March 9, 2004
A German Rail advertisement on billboards across the country these days shows a young blonde in a slinky negligee lounging in a train berth. The caption reads: “An overnight train trip is something you really might want to share.”
But you might also want to pack mace, pepper spray or perhaps a stun gun to fend off roving gangs of knife-wielding robbers who have been haunting nighttime trains for weeks now.
They find easy pickings among German rail passengers, wholly unaccustomed to armed robberies on wheels. For decades, rail travel in Germany was considered practically immune to the sort of petty larceny that abounds elsewhere.
In the past, foreign guests invariably were amazed when German hosts would invite them to traipse off to the dining carriage, leaving behind all their luggage, overcoats and valuables. “It will all be safe,” the host would say. And, sure enough, everything would be intact upon returning to their seats.
Not any more. Now Germans warn visitors to let nothing out of their sight even for an instant and to be on guard constantly for armed thugs. They tell of the 53-year-old businessman who boarded the high- speed Inter-City Express train, ICE Number 1529, in Frankfurt one recent evening so he could be in Munich in time for a power breakfast. Settling into his comfortable first-class seat, he had dozed off by the time the conductor roused him to ask politely to see his ticket. It was then that the passenger noticed his suit jacket was missing, and with it all his identification, cash and credit cards.
The conductor nodded knowingly and summoned a second train attendant to check out a lavatory that had raised his suspicions earlier because it was locked from the inside. “You’d better stand back,” the conductor told the passenger as the two train crewmen approached the lav and forced the door open. Inside were three men armed with knives who bounded out with blades flashing. By the time the train pulled into the next station, the two train crewmen were bleeding from multiple superficial stab wounds — and the three assailants had fled with their ill-gained night’s earnings, according to Focus news magazine, which shocked readers with the story this week.
“The sad truth is that organized gangs are engaged in criminal activities aboard trains and this has turned into a major problem for us,” federal police spokesman Ralf Stroeher told the magazine. Worst affected are night runs from Frankfurt to Mannheim, Stuttgart and Munich, all in southern Germany. But busy daytime routes are also subject to wily pickpockets, purse-snatchers and laptop-pinchers. “The daytime jobs are carried out by individual thieves, primarily skilled pickpockets from South America, who take advantage of the fact that a busy station or a packed train is a full of distractions for hectic travellers,” said Stroeher. “The nighttime jobs are carried out by gangs of up to three persons, primarily organized gangs from Southeastern Europe, who prey on sleepy passengers who nod off and leave their possessions unprotected.”
He is referring to notorious Albanian mafia mobsters who are armed and dangerous. Knives and small firearms are their weapons of choice. They don’t hesitate to use them, even just to snatch a pocketbook. While there is no talk yet of arming train personnel as a counter- measure, federal law-enforcement officers are being employed aboard trains in a low-key manner. “I can confirm we are assigning plainclothes officers for night train duty,” Stroeher told Focus. German Rail officials so far are playing down the seriousness of the situation. But a young woman train conductor conceded, “In the wake of a number of really bad incidents in recent weeks, we make sure we do our rounds only in pairs.”
Meanwhile, unsettled rail passengers are taking matters into their own hands. “I make sure I sit near the train personnel,” 20-year-old Wiebke Schneider was quoted as saying aboard the Frankfurt-to-Munich ICE No. 1529 night express. “I make sure I keep awake and that I have my hand on my pepper spray.”
The rail crime wave is just the latest bad news for German Rail, battling federal budget cuts and a huge deficit. A botched fares reform package last year was so unpopular that it eventually was rescinded. Budget cuts have also led to cuts in service, with dining carriages being replaced by onboard snack vendors.
The rail service’s legendary punctuality has also come in for a beating, with only 80 per cent of trains running on time — scandalous by German standards. Just last month, in a bid to improve is its image, German Rail said it would offer 20 per cent off the ticket price to any passenger who is delayed for more than an hour by one of its trains. Hitherto, rail passengers qualified for compensation of between 10 and 25 dollars on a sliding scale for delays of between 30 to 90 minutes. Which is at least enough to pay for pepper spray. dpa eg sc
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MARYSVILLE WON’T BE RAILROADED INTO YARD; Commissioners join mayor in rejecting proposal from COTA
Columbus Dispatch (Ohio)
March 10, 2004
Faced with growing opposition to the Central Ohio Transit Authority’s proposed $30 million rail yard here, the Union County Commissioners are pledging $50,000 to fight the project.
Mayor Tom Kruse also recently told COTA to “rethink any plans” it has to locate the yard in the city.
In light of these developments, and already under fire from a local opposition group, COTA officials yesterday canceled the public meeting they had scheduled for 6:30 tonight in Marysville. “The bottom line is that we don’t yet have the detailed information that the community is requesting,” said Mike Bradley, director of rail development.
Although he wouldn’t say the transit authority is abandoning its plans for Union County, Bradley did say COTA will “investigate alternative sites in central Ohio” for the rail yard.
COTA is promoting a $501 million proposal for a light-rail line extending north from Downtown Columbus. Key to the plan — assuming the transit authority can persuade voters to pay for the project — is acquiring an existing CSX rail line that brings trains into the Buckeye Yards on the Far West Side, between Roberts and Trabue roads.
In exchange for a portion of that line, COTA has promised CSX a new intermodal yard — a transportation hub where shipping containers are transferred between trucks and trains — and has proposed it for 250 acres along Industrial Parkway, largely on land zoned for manufacturing.
The county commissioners, in a resolution passed Monday, say the negatives of such a rail yard outweigh any positives. “The effect on traffic alone would be horrendous,” Commissioner Jim Mitchell said yesterday. “The rail yard isn’t the kind of development we need in this community.”
The $50,000 from the county’s contingency fund, Mitchell said, will be used if necessary to hire environmental lawyers or other experts whose work might help build a case against the rail yard.
Pressure from the opposition group strengthened the commissioners’ resolve, he said, but wasn’t the driving force. “We’ve been left out of COTA’s process,” Mitchell said. “That’s the problem.”
COTA officials disagree.
The transit authority hasn’t provided answers about the yard’s environmental and traffic impacts, Bradley said, because those effects remain unknown. He said preliminary engineering and environmental studies will be complete by early next year. He wouldn’t say yesterday what alternative sites will be considered.
Although COTA canceled its presentation, members of the opposition group will be at the Union County Services Center as planned tonight to answer questions from anyone who might show up, said organizer Gloria Butler.
The group is buoyed by the stance taken by Kruse and the commissioners, but isn’t giving up the fight, she said. “This is just COTA’s attempt to regroup. We’re just praying that we can stop it.”
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Bay Area Rapid Transit District Intends to Sue SamTrans to Pay for Its Share of the San Mateo BART Extension
Business Wire
March 10, 2004
Saying it was left with no choice, the Bay Area Rapid Transit District today gave notice that it intends to file suit to collect millions of dollars in payments owed by the San Mateo Transit District for operating costs for the BART extension into San Mateo County and to ensure SamTrans’ payment for service in the future.
“SamTrans is failing to meet its obligations to fund the operations this year and has given written notice that they don’t intend to pay any money in the future. This is simply unacceptable. We take this action reluctantly. But given SamTrans’ actions, it is our duty to protect core service for riders and taxpayers of the BART District and to do what we can to preserve service in San Mateo County,” said BART President James Fang.
Fang said BART is readying its lawsuit because of a series of missed payments by SamTrans of $11 million and a letter from the agency sent in January of this year saying “that effective July 1, 2004, San Mateo County Transit District will be unable to remit continued subsidies for the San Francisco Airport Extension.” The $11 million SamTrans currently owes will grow to $14 million by the end of this fiscal year and the BART District could be faced with a cost of over $20 million for next year should SamTrans continue to refuse to pay.
BART directors unanimously voted March 4 to authorize legal action against SamTrans should it fail to make payments and uphold its contractual obligations.
Fang said SamTrans has pledged to consider a recommendation this Thursday at its board of directors meeting to make good on $11 million in current debts to BART.
Should SamTrans fail to act at tomorrow’s Board meeting, BART will file a breach of contract lawsuit against SamTrans to ensure it pays the money currently owed for the San Mateo extension and to ensure SamTrans’ payment for service in the future. Under the contract SamTrans bears 100% of the responsibility for operating costs in San Mateo County.
“We have patiently waited for months for SamTrans to meet its obligations under our contract to pay the costs to operate this service in San Mateo County. We have done everything we can to escalate our concern repeatedly to SamTrans’ General Manager and Board. We have been promised payments, only to have those payments not made. We have taken actions requested by SamTrans to reduce operating cost. Even before the extension opened in June 2003, SamTrans took unilateral actions to attempt to cap its financial responsibilities at $6 million. Months and months of effort to resolve this situation have not been successful. We have a duty to the taxpayers and BART riders of Alameda, Contra Costa and San Francisco counties to ensure that they are not stuck with SamTrans’ bill,” said BART Vice President Dan Richard.
“We must ensure that SamTrans pays immediately to protect our service, our riders, our taxpayers and our workforce as well as to enforce the contract we have with SamTrans for the future,” said BART Director Tom Blalock.
“The people of San Mateo overwhelmingly voted two times to bring BART service into their county,” said Blalock. “By its actions SamTrans is breaking faith with those San Mateo residents. But we can not allow SamTrans to drain money from the taxpayers in Alameda, Contra Costa and San Francisco counties to pay for their extension.”
Fang said BART would take the legal action “with regret” against sister transportation agency SamTrans. However, he noted “SamTrans can not jump the turnstyle and ride BART for free.”
The 1990 agreement that SamTrans entered into with BART to extend service into San Mateo County obligates SamTrans to pay 100 percent of the extension’s operating costs. In addition, the agreement provides for SamTrans to contribute to the capital costs of the extension in San Mateo County, and to make a “buy in” payment to the East Bay. In 1996, the contract was amended at SamTrans’ request to cap its responsibilities for the San Mateo line construction costs at $99 million. SamTrans’ responsibilities for operating costs are not capped.
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Shanghai considers high-speed train
Cable News Network
March 10, 2004
BEIJING, China (AP) — Shanghai is considering German cooperation in construction of a magnetic-levitation train line that would connect the commercial metropolis with the eastern city of Hangzhou, said officials and reports.
“The governments of the two sides are discussing such a project,” said Li Rong, a Shanghai government spokeswoman. She said, however, the leadership in Beijing hadn’t yet agreed to the proposed project. “Shanghai can’t start such a big construction project without central government orders,” she said.
Staff at Shanghai’s Maglev Transportation Co. said they were only at the early stages of doing feasibility research on extending Shanghai’s high- speed train line to Hangzhou, 200 kilometers to the southwest in Zhejiang province.
German reports said Transrapid, a German consortium including engineering giants Siemens AG (SI) and ThyssenKrupp AG, was about to wrap up a deal to build the line.
Maglev Transportation Co. operates a high-speed, 30 kilometer magnetic rail link between Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport and the city’s financial district. The $1 billion railway began carrying passengers earlier this year at a maximum speed of 430 kilometers per hour.
However, the German-built line has been plagued by technical problems.
German, French and Japanese companies have been competing fiercely for involvement in another high-speed rail line between Shanghai and Beijing. Chinese officials say they haven’t settled on what sort of technology to use for the new rail link, but they plan to open the project to international bidding once a decision is reached.
A report on China News Net, a Web site operated by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council, or Cabinet, said officials in Zhejiang planned to present their proposal for the maglev line to Beijing for approval by the end of this year. Construction would begin in 2005.
The new line would shorten travel time between the two cities to about a half-hour from the current two hours, said the report, citing an interim feasibility study. It said the line would begin operation in 2008, with tickets costing 130 yuan.
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China’s vehicle demand growth to exceed 20 pct a year by 2008 — ING
AFX.COM
March 10, 2004
Growth in China’s demand for all vehicles — including cars, buses and vans — will accelerate to more than 20 pct a year by 2008, from between 13-18 pct currently, as bus operators increase the size of their fleets ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games and as people spend more money on traveling, said Peter So, head of China research at ING Financial Markets.
“When you look at the consumption patterns in China, people are already shifting expenditure from consumer durables to more services such as education and travel,” So said in an interview with AFX-Asia. “As we move to the Olympic Games, many tourist companies will expand fleet capacities so there will be more demand for buses.”
So’s comments come after AB Volvo’s head of Chinese operations Jan Van Setten confirmed reports that the company’s joint venture with Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp (SAIC) had signed an agreement of intent with a domestic company to form a joint venture in the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao.
Earlier today, state media reported that Volvo-SAIC’s joint venture, Shanghai Sunwin Bus Corp, will take a controlling 51 pct stake in a joint venture with state-owned Qingdao Public Transportation Group.
The joint venture will be based at Qingdao Public Transportation Group’s manufacturing and repair plant and will have an initial annual production capacity of 1,000 city and commuter buses.
Setten said the joint venture was part of Volvo’s plan to expand its presence in China — the world’s third-largest automobile producer after the US and Japan. “China has an enormous amount of buses on the road already, but most of them are quite outdated and are not environmentally friendly,” Setten said. “So its high time at least in the big cities to have more environmentally friendly buses.”
Setten said Volvo expects its two bus manufacturing joint ventures in Shanghai and Xi’an to increase production capacity over the next few years.
Sunwin, which makes city buses, is forecast to boost capacity to 2,000 units a year, from 1,600 last year, while the Xi’an operation, which makes luxury coaches, is targeting 1,000 units a year, from 500 last year. “The Chinese market is extremely important for Volvo in the future. All our business areas are now represented in China,” Setten said.
Volvo’s sales for commercial vehicles and construction equipment hit 308 mln usd in 2003, significantly higher than the 164 mln a year earlier.
A breakdown of sales for each type of vehicle was not immediately available. China edged out Germany last year to become the world’s third-largest automobile producer with 4.44 mln units.
Vehicle output is expected to reach 5.1-5.34 mln units this year, up around 20 pct from last year, but down from the 35 pct growth seen in 2003 and 2002, state media reported earlier this year.
Output this year will include 2.5-2.62 mln passenger cars, 1.31-1.37 mln trucks and 1.29-1.35 mln buses.
Passenger car output in China surged 83.2 pct year-on-year to 2.01 mln units in 2003, while truck output stood at 1.22 mln units, up 10 pct, and bus production rose 11.9 pct to 1.19 mln units.
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Affordable cars drive China’s great leap forward; As China becomes more prosperous and influenced by the west, so it is becoming rapidly more car conscious. Mark Godfrey reports from a congested Beijing
The Irish Times
March 10, 2004
“Traffic in Beijing will not only be fast moving, it will be a pleasant experience to drive in the city.” Even by the ever-optimistic standards of China’s official news service, it seemed preposterous. The prediction by a Beijing city planner in the state media in January imagined a clean, green, smiley place in time for the 2008 Olympic games.
Alas, things look very different on any Beijing road on a weekday afternoon. Only 12 per cent of Beijing households own a car, but that still means that two million vehicles jam the city’s streets.
Taxis weave and dodge between buses; flash new jeeps edge out trucks, six lines of vehicles stuffed into a space designed for four.
Cyclists have had some of their road space eaten up, and those still braving some of the busier stretches of road have to contend with the exhaust fumes of the growing traffic jams. Two new ring roads circling the city are under construction, while in the sub-terrestrial world, 13 new subway lines are being built.
The Chinese seem keener to drive than to ride a bike. More than 96 million vehicles were trundling along China’s roads by the end of 2003.
With a rise in car numbers comes the rise in accident rates. China topped the world in road accidents since cars became affordable and available to locals in the late 1980s. Traffic administrators last year dealt with over half a million road accidents which killed over 100,000 people.
That’s a 13.7 drop on the previous year, according to Wang Jinbiao, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Public Security, but the outbreak of SARS might have helped to reduce the figures.
Chairman Mao had banned private car ownership and kept inter-city movement to a minimum with a rigid household registration system. Today, rising incomes, plummeting new car prices and new motorways have changed everything, though only some can afford the new mobility.
Last year China overtook France to become the world’s fourth largest car builder. Car output in 2003 exceeded six million, putting China in line to become one of the world’s top three car producers by 2010. Car building is one of the Chinese economy’s five most valuable industries in terms of sales and Communist party planners have excitedly suggested the industry could become the economy’s largest growth engine. Statistics support the claim — if China matched the world average of one car to eight people, 150 million private cars would be driving on China’s roads, 15 times the current figure.
With the growth comes a rash of state- and privately-owned car makers. Last year was the 50th birthday of the pride of China’s auto industry, the state giant First Auto Works (FAW). Compared to FAW, Chery is a relative newcomer.
Opened in 1997 and based in Ahui province near Shanghai, the company last year entered into a deal with Iranian automaker SKT to build a factory in northeastern Iran for 30,000 cars a year. Chery is also in talks with companies in Bangladesh and Vietnam to build factories producing low-price kit-box cars.
The Geely group from neighbouring Zhejiang province produces 48,000 of its Haoqing and Merrie saloon models every year. Started in 1986, the group has recently found itself in hot water after Japanese car maker Toyota took it to court for allegedly copying its logo. Toyota lost the case in Beijing but is considering appeals and several other car makers have mulled legal challenges to patent and technology piracy by Chinese automakers.
However, the rush to a fast profit could be spoiled by a hangover. China’s auto industry will probably hit over-supply in the next two years as significant new capacity comes on stream and imports increase. FAW announced late last year that it will double its annual output to two million vehicles over the next five to eight years.
General Motors plans to build Cadillacs at its Shanghai factories next year while Volkswagen, China’s biggest foreign automaker, is investing $ 6.8 billion (about E8.5 billion) over the next five years to expand its plants here. Japanese giants Toyota, Nissan, and Honda have all established joint ventures with Chinese partners. Sino-foreign joint ventures like those of General Motors and Volkswagen’s two Chinese partnerships, control over 80 per cent of the market, compared to 4.4 per cent held by companies like Chery.
China’s second largest car maker. Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp (SAIC) is the joint venture partner of German giant Volkswagen, and produces the ubiquitously popular Santana and Jetta models, Volkswagen’s only models in China before it introduced the Polo more recently.
While multinationals may find it hard to make money amid the glut of production, small operations may also find it hard to stick the pace. “Small domestic car makers lack sustainable technical innovation,” says Meng Sizong, deputy secretary-general of the China Automotive Engineers Society. They have an advantage, however, in low labour costs, plentiful spare parts and local political protection explains Meng.
Government planners have been trying to protect local car makers even as China’s World Trade Organistaion (WTO) membership commitments have cut tariffs and improved choice and price for local car buyers.
The State Development and Reform Commission has spent the past year developing new policy to steer domestic vehicle manufacturing. A recent draft of new policy stipulates that vehicles made by patent-holding Chinese firms should account for more than 50 per cent of vehicle sales by 2010.
Competitive local car makers couldn’t expand, while poorly managed companies were allowed survive by provincial governors. Car buyers were kept away by high prices and poor choice.
Soaring pollution levels and traffic congestion have cast a shadow over the whole car scene. Inefficient public transportation systems and bad layout of roads are both clogging up Chinese cities. “Transportation infrastructure and auto growth are mutually dependent,” says Li Yang, editor of Auto Fan Magazine. “Better infrastructure should be a pre-condition for any would-be car buyer but it’s a Catch-22 situation because the need to improve infrastructure is often based on the fast growth of the auto sector.”
Beijing’s broad boulevards are now choked with a rush hour that extends from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., with few plans other than new roads in sight to alleviate the situation. A chronic shortage of parking spaces is adding to the gridlock. In an effort to keep the mess flowing perhaps, Kentucky Fried Chicken opened its first drive-in fast food outlet recently. Business is booming.
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T AGREES TO $328,000 FINES FOR WATER AND AIR POLLUTION ALSO TO PAY $1M TO CUT EMISSIONS ON COMMUTER RAIL
The Boston Globe
March 11, 2004
Making amends for dumping waste into rivers and allowing idling buses to spew fumes in urban areas, the MBTA agreed to pay fines and tighten pollution-control programs in a sweeping settlement announced yesterday by federal and state officials.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority agreed to pay a $328,000 fine and about $1 million to reduce emissions by retrofitting diesel commuter trains operating out of South Station. The T also agreed to donate a 1-acre strip of property on the banks of the Mystic River so a commuter bike path can be extended to Sullivan Square; and the agency promised to be more environmentally sensitive in its operations.
Separately, Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly announced that the T had agreed to clean up the 37-acre Readville railyard near the city’s border with Dedham, which had been contaminated with arsenic, lead, and other pollutants, by mid-May.
“They were a chronic violator,” said Robert W. Varney, New England regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, referring to the T. But, he said, the T has “really seen this was a problem, and they have taken the issue to heart.”
The settlement announced yesterday follows a pattern of the EPA making polluters pay for projects instead of solely fines. In January, the EPA announced a similar deal in which an Everett power company agreed to pay $5 million to lower emissions by Boston schoolbuses and North Station commuter trains, and also to retrofit the Amelia Earhart Dam across the Mystic River to accommodate bikes and pedestrians.
Yesterday’s settlement, which was put together by the EPA, the Justice Department, and the US attorney’s office, “marks the end of an era” when buses belched dirty exhaust and were allowed to idle for too long, said MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo.
The primary violations leading to the settlement included some 55 instances at bus maintenance facilities in Boston, Roxbury, Medford, and Lynn where buses were left idling for more than five minutes at a time, the limit under state law except when temperatures drop below 20 degrees. In one case at a maintenance facility in a Roxbury neighborhood, a bus was left running for more than an hour. The EPA also accused the T of letting rainwater contaminated with oil, grease, and metals to drain from repair yards into area rivers.
Pesaturo said bus idling times are now strictly monitored, but vehicles are getting cleaner regardless. Two-thirds of the bus fleet will be converted to high-tech, low-emission vehicles by the end of this year, most using compressed natural gas, and the remaining buses will be equipped with filters and retrofitted to maximize use of low-sulfur diesel fuel.
Klaire Allen, an activist with Alternatives for Community and Environment, an advocacy group on environmental issues in urban neighborhoods such as Roxbury, said the settlement was particularly satisfying because several dozen fourth-graders staged a protest in 1997, complaining about pollution from idling buses.
Laurie Stillman, executive director of the Asthma Regional Council, said that one in five households with children in New England report cases of asthma; and air pollution exacerbates the condition. “We want to see environmental controls out there so this epidemic is brought under control,” she said.
Catherine Smith, a senior enforcement counsel at the EPA, said all the measures would probably cost the T between $3 million and $4 million over several years. But Pesaturo noted that the T would have to spend the money on pollution controls anyway. He said the federal government requires that trains lower emissions by 2007, for example, “so we’ll actually be ahead of the curve.”
Under the terms of the settlement, the T will not only limit idling and tighten pollution controls in all its operations, but also retrofit 33 commuter rail locomotives so they can use low-sulfur diesel fuel, which the EPA says should reduce 460 tons of air pollution over three years.
The donation of the strip of MBTA-owned property along the Mystic River will complete a vital link in a commuter bike path between Draw 7 park in Somerville and Sullivan Station, said Bryce Nesbitt, a member of the Somerville Community Path organization. A path through the MBTA yard also will connect with future parkland development at Assembly Square, he said.
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Siemens signs $50M light rail vehicle contract
Metro magazine
March 11, 2004
North County Transit District (NCTD) in Oceanside, Calif., signed a $50 million contract with Siemens Transportation Systems for the purchase of 12 diesel multiple unit (DMU) light rail vehicles.
The Siemens Desiro model DMUs, which will be delivered in 2006, are a cross between traditional heavy passenger rail and electrically propelled light rail transit.
The low-emission diesel cars will be used on the NCTD’s planned Sprinter rail project, which will connect the existing bus system as well as Coaster, Amtrak and Metrolink trains.
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Official denies report on maglev between Shanghai & Hangzhou
China View
March 11, 2004
BEIJING, March 11, (Xinhuanet) — An official with the Zhejiang provincial government has denied media reports that a maglev line will be built between Shanghai and Hangzhou, capital city of East China’s Zhejiang Province.
“We are merely studying possibilities for the high-speed railway. It’s far too early to say whether we will adopt conventional technology or maglev technology,” said Wang Guoxiang, a section chief of the province’s planning commission.
But he conceded that Guangdong Province’s decision not to use maglev technology for the rail link between Guangzhou and Zhuhai “more or less had some impact” on their decision-making.
Using traditional instead of maglev technology, Guangzhou is expected to save 15 billion yuan (US$1.8 billion).
Shanghai Maglev Transportation Development Company has recently finished an interim study report on the project, triggering speculation that the technology would be used.
Wang said a proposal on conventional rail was submitted a long time ago, but some data needed updating. Neither solution has been submitted for approval, he added. The railway is scheduled for completion by 2010.
The maglev system, which cannot be integrated with existing tracks, has been opposed by the Ministry of Railway. As China does not have all the core technologies, there is concern among government officials and academic circles over the system.
With strong support from the central government, especially former premier Zhu Rongji, Shanghai built a maglev line connecting the city proper with Pudong airport, which started commercial operations in January after one year of trials.
The 32-kilometre railway cost about 10 billion yuan (US$1.2 billion) but according to a source familiar with maglev technology, building the railway elsewhere in China would not be so costly.
More technologies needed for the maglev line can now be developed by domestic scientists; and the land cost will not be as high as in Shanghai.
Another well-informed source, who did not want to be named, told China Daily that Shanghai plans to build a 7-kilometre maglev line to connect the existing Longyang station and the World Expo 2010 site.
“Despite the high price, it is important for Shanghai and the country to adopt the latest technology, and develop our own at the same time,” the source said.
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Carnage in Spanish stations as survivors stumble past bodies
Agence France Presse
March 11, 2004
Dazed survivors, their faces streaked with blood, stumbled past bodies strewn along railway platforms and tracks Thursday as four bomb blasts sowed carnage among Madrid commuters, reportedly killing more than 170 people.
“The coach behind mine was packed with bodies. Some people were burnt in their seats,” said one passenger, Antonio Villacanas after the coordinated blasts ripped through four trains at three Madrid stations.
He was among the horrifed early morning commuters at southwestern Santa Eugenia station who were picking their way past bodies and the injured as the terrifying morning rush-hour events unfolded before their eyes.
“Just a few minutes after we set off we felt a strong jolt and the lights went off. There was total confusion in my carriage. People didn’t know what was going on and we couldn’t open the doors,” he said.
“It was horrible. After the explosion people hurled themselves to the floor. There were dead and injured lying all around,” said a student, Isabel Vega, in floods of tears.
Renfe, Spain’s national rail carrier, spoke of two blasts at Atocha while explosions struck two other southwestern stations Pozo and Santa Eugenia, where witnesseses spoke of chaos with dozens of blood-soaked people running around in panic.
At Atocha, a large commuter station in southwest central Madrid, police and emergency services said at least 400 people had been injured in a massive explosion.
The Europa press agency said 173 people were killed, while emergency services put the toll at 131. The blasts were blamed on the Basque separatist group ETA in what would be the worst the attack by the group ever. More than 400 were injured.
“There were people like me going to school. It was a strange sensation. I can’t explain the feeling, dead people all around,” said one young student at Atocha station, a terminal which serves as the start of a high-speed rail link to Spain’s deep south. “As we came into the station things suddenly went back and the room fell in on me. I jumped onto the platform. But I’m fine — compared to many others.”
The main Atocha blast occurred at 0730 am (0630 GMT) on a packed high-speed train, derailing carriages which lay spreadeagled across the track as rescuers gingerly tried to lift out survivors.
Survivors left the station, some assisted by rescuers and firefighters, others able to walk away on their own. Many had had their clothes cut from their bodies to assist rapid treatment of their injuries. Spanish television showed one young woman beside herself with grief as she raged at “the bastards” who had carried out the attacks.
Another passenger, Jose Garcia, spoke of a “dantesque and apocalyptic scene.”
One man sat in a state of shock, receiving oxygen. Others simply sat on the pavement, their head in their hands. Many were trembling and in tears.
Rescuers transported some of the victims to a nearby gymnasium for further treatment from first aid teams, who rapidly moved on from one patient to the next as they struggled to keep pace with the scale of the disaster.
Stretcher teams evacuated as many people as they could to city hospitals, which issued urgent calls for blood donors. Within barely an hour, hundreds of residents were queuing up to offer blood.
Outside, police carried out two controlled explosions on parked cars suspected of containing further bombs.
The police and firefighters also evacuated buildings adjacent to Atocha station fearing the possibility of more explosions, while keeping back the general public, even relatives of those on the train who had arrived desperate for news of their loved ones.
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STUDY TO EXPLORE EXTENSION ROUTES FOR GREEN LINE
The Boston Globe
March 12, 2004
The MBTA took the first steps yesterday to extend the Green Line from Lechmere to West Medford, a $375 million expansion of the transit system that the state promised as a condition for undertaking the Big Dig.
A $391,000 study to be conducted by the firm Vanasse Hangen Brustlin of Watertown will spell out the possible routes and station stops of the 4.2-mile extension through Somerville, approved by the board of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. The study should be finished this year.
Somerville is more densely populated than Cambridge or Brookline yet has no light rail service, only one Red Line stop at Davis Square, buses, and commuter trains that pass through but don’t stop, said Wig Zamore, a member of the Somerville Transit Equity Partnership.
The extension of the Green Line will go either alongside the Lowell commuter rail tracks to Washington Street, School Street, Lowell Street, Tufts University in Medford, and finally West Medford at Route 60; or along the Fitchburg commuter rail tracks to Union Square, and under a new tunnel under Prospect Hill to School Street.
Though the Green Line extension is among the state’s legal obligations to expand the transit system as part of a 1990 pact giving the go-ahead to build the Big Dig, there are no firm funding plans for the project. Only the cost of the study is in the $2.5 billion, five-year capital spending plan the board approved yesterday.
While the Green Line extension is widely supported in Somerville, the T board got an earful yesterday about another expensive project that several Roxbury residents said they didn’t want: the $760 million tunnel linking the current Silver Line bus service with Boylston Station and then South Station.
The Silver Line bus service can’t replace the elevated Orange Line that ran down Washington Street until 1987, said Robert Terrell, a member of the Washington Street Corridor Coalition. The T should invest in turning the bus service into a light rail service like the Green Line, he said.
Instead, T planners have proposed connecting the bus service from Dudley Square to another line, expected to open later this year, that goes from South Station through the South Boston Waterfront and ultimately to Logan Airport. The connection would be made through a tunnel from Washington Street to Boylston Station, and then under Essex Street to South Station.
City Councilor Chuck Turner said the two projects — the existing Silver Line and the waterfront portion of the Silver Line — should be “uncoupled,” because getting light rail service is more important than getting to the waterfront or to Logan for his constituents.
In other action yesterday, the T board approved a $1.2 billion budget request for 2005 that now goes to the state Legislature, and $238 million for independent contractors to operate The Ride, despite withering criticism from several users who testified yesterday that the paratransit service is often late and unreliable. In addition, the membership of the new 24-member Rider Oversight Committee was announced.
The committee, which the T agreed to form to hear customer grievances after the fare hike in January, consists of eight regular riders of subway or commuter rail, and representatives from advocacy groups.
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Metro OKs cashless parking lots; New plan aims to stop embezzlement by cashiers
The Washington Times
March 12, 2004
Metro Board members yesterday tentatively approved conversion to a cashless pay system at subway parking lots and garages by July 1 in a move to stop parking lot cashiers from stealing up to $1 million a year.
Metro officials, who have long contemplated the change, said a total changeover to its current card system, SmarTrip, would eliminate the need for its contract with Penn Parking, the company hired to manage Metro’s parking lots and garages.
An internal Metro audit accused Penn-contracted parking lot cashiers of stealing $500,000 to $1 million a year from cash payments made at parking lots and garages. “We understand that parking is not our core business,” said Richard A. White, general manager of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. “We also understand that we do not want to be handling cash.”
The controversy comes amid proposals for the second increase in rail and bus fares in two years. Metro is attempting to cut almost $47 million from its fiscal 2005 budget to erase a deficit of $28.8 million to $36 million, depending on the subsidies provided by local jurisdictions.
Under the proposals, peak-hour and off-peak base rail fares would increase 15 cents. Bus fares would go to $1.35, an increase of 15 cents. Daily parking would go up 25 cents to $1, and the monthly parking spot reservation fees would rise by $10.
The automated system would require parking fee payments from 9 a.m. until closing on weekdays, while weekends would remain free. Parking at Metro-operated lots currently is free on weekends and federal holidays, and fees are collected weekdays upon exit between 2 p.m. and 10 p.m.
The expansion of payment hours is expected to generate an additional $2.5 million for the fisc |
