The Urban Blog

Reno: New Transit Data Available

This blog has done a lot of data analysis on the transit system in Reno over the years, also plenty of wild speculation when no data was available.

It was good to see the RTC send out some great information as a staff report for their November 9 Public Transit Advisory Committee meeting.  This staff report relies heavily on a draft Parsons-Brinkerhoff study of the RTC’s transit services and includes some comparisons to similar sized cities around the country which were contacted as part of the research.  This is a great report and of vital interest to anyone who wants to understand the numbers involved in RTC’s transit operations.

If that were not enough, there is more good information available on the RTC Plan 2 Ride website, which is about a short-range transit plan.  Seems the RTC is out to find out what kind of transit system the people of the Truckee Meadows really want.  This “Transit 101” stuff is useful in helping make sure all the participants in the discussion have been exposed to the same common information.

Reno: Analyzing RTC RIDE

The RTC of Washoe County today held an Open House to get the public’s input on the future of the regular, fixed-route public transit service they operate.  I was unable to make it, being out of town, but I still did some thinking on the subject that when all is said and done, makes for an interesting report.

The first thing I did was think through my “pet” service change regarding bus service in the route 13/19 area (Wells Ave neighborhood and old SE Reno).  The second thing I did was build a spreadsheet of the bus routes in town and their usefulness by my measures.  See the whole shebang after the jump.

So.  The 13/19.  Lately I have been of the mindset that the 19 is either the most useful bus in town or the least useful, depending on when you want to ride it.  The 13 was much more useful when it ran more than once an hour.  The 19 runs on Wells Ave and goes to the airport, the 13 runs for some mystifying reason on the Locust/Kirman couplet and goes, well, as far as I can tell, to Costco.  The 19 runs from 6:45 am – 5:45 pm M-F, once an hour.  So it is pretty useless, especially for a bus that goes right down a major city arterial.  The 13 on the other hand runs from 6 am – midnight 7 days a week, albeit once an hour, though the route it runs seems quite inefficient.

Route 13 and 19, before I take the axe to them.

When Comedy and Urban Policy Advocacy Meet

From The Onion Radio News on December 27, 2009:

And finally, local man Andy Willer, after carrying on about light rail for the past two decades, was given his own commuter train, and told to shut the fuck up today by City Council.  Willer was reportedly overwhelmed by the gift, but soon became disenchanted upon learning he had to assemble the whole thing himself.

What would we do without The Onion?

In Reno, a Streetcar, No Wait, Light Rail? Plan is Not a Transit Plan

In Reno, news has been out for a while now about a plan to convert the soon to be implemented Virginia Street BRT (or bus rapid transit for you non wonks) service to streetcar, and eventually a light rail system.  This blog has remained silent on the subject thus far because the whole effort is part great idea, part hastily conceived notion.  The project’s costs would come in the form of a property tax increase, which doesn’t feel too promising to pass at the ballot box, which it would be required to do.

I am personally very interested in the idea of establishing rail transit in the Reno area, and I pay property taxes in Reno.  I would vote to raise my own taxes to pay for transit related improvements.  However, one of the things about this current proposal that is worrisome is that it is so ill defined, it could end up a flash in the pan and any future effort would be tainted by it.

So it is with that background that I have been looking at this thing, and when I look at things, I tend to try to find areas where they can be improved.  Here’s what the Reno plan is missing.

One thing that is missing is a long-range plan.  RTC needs to produce maps and conceptual renderings of not just what the vehicles or station facilities would look like but rather what areas are being served over the long term.  The plan to lay track and run streetcars and eventually, if voters will approve it, light rail, is shortsighted thinking.

Washoe RTC’s Proposed Primary Transit Network [Source]

Any plan put before voters needs to show how that plan has positive long-term implications for the regional transit network.  The different types of transit vehicles and their infrastructure have different uses in the regional and local contexts.

For example, a city-level streetcar network should be conceived as joining close-in neighborhoods to downtowns and other regional centers.  A regional light rail system connects farther flung destinations along greater distances.  In this model, proposed light rail would have a focus on connecting the far south end of the corridor, at Mt Rose Highway, with the north end of the corridor, in Stead.  (Instead of what?  You ask.  Hooray for you!  You’re still reading.)

 
A light rail corridor

It might be said about this light rail corridor, in the planning meetings where nearby citizens show up and say what they think, that it should be largely grade-separated, and that trains should come no less frequently than every 15 minutes.

Streetcars, on the other hand, would be used to knit together the urban fabric.

   
A streetcar network

Such a streetcar network could serve as the impetus for streetscape redesign projects, and naturally would feed into the idea of making the city more connected to downtown and making parts of the city feel more connected to one another.  The residents might say that they want streetcars to run at no greater than 20 minute intervals most of the day, on most days.

Politically, a transit plan composed of such elements would benefit more than 144,000 residents in 4 area ZIP codes.  That is over half the residents of Reno.  A plan that shows them where their money is being spent and how it benefits them will have a much better chance at the ballot box.

Streetfilms on Putting Transit in Conservative Terms

This great video on Streetfilms about William Lind’s book Moving Minds:  Conservatives and Public Transportation shows the importance of knowing your audience when trying to make an argument for public transit, particularly rail based transit.

With Reno considering building a light rail system on Virginia Street (which they should do), it will be important for people who want to see such a system built to really think about the way they can win at the ballot box.  In the last election voters soundly rejected a measure that would have increased sales tax just to keep the bus system operating at pre-downturn levels.

Some Musings on Reno Regional Transit

It was great seeing Aisha @ EcoStreets talk a little bit about the BRT / Light Rail plans that have been getting a little discussion in the media sphere lately.  Whenever this topic comes up I feel compelled to noodle on what shape and form an ideal Reno regional transit system would look like.

The Urban Blog’s 2009 Concept for Regional Transit in the Reno area
Note:  This drawing is not a detailed plan for every street the route would run down or what technology it would use.  It is intended to paint broadly the important regional destinations that would need to be served by public transit.  Liberty has been taken with cardinal directions in particular.

Fundamental to this concept is the idea that a majority of the important regional destinations be considered and served and they fall into the following categories:

Transportation Hubs, Residential Hubs, Jobs Hubs, Destinations, Mixed Use Areas

It’s been encouraging to see that RTC Washoe’s plans for the BRT / potential Eventual LRT system they’re planning include feeder routes called RTC LOCAL to feed the RTC RAPID system they want to build.  That’s encouraging because whenever I think about this problem, I end up coming back to the need to tie this 40 x 40 mile metro area together with transit that gets people where they actually need to go, from not far from where they’re starting.  This means they’ll need vehicles that will take them the long haul, but it needs not to be a hassle to get to that vehicle.

However, if you get to the luxury of considering what I just mentioned, it means you have a workable system.  And I think a workable system means a system with a design that appears to the educated observer as something that would work in real life.

With that, I propose the above transit corridors- their destinations to be the ones that are most important to cover in the three county area that is represented above.

Now might be the best time yet to imagine such a thing, so if you’ve had notions of a regional transportation system that would serve the tri-county area ideally, please let me know what you think.  If I were in charge, this is the system I’d build.  How about you?  Comment here, link to your blog, etc.  Enjoy!

Seattle: State Legislature Transit Mess

Just when Puget Sound area residents thought they had spoken once and for all about how highly they prioritize getting a regional light rail network built, along comes the state Legislature in a year of down revenues to use procedural tricks to potentially delay a recently-approved expansion for up to 4 years over a fraction of its funding.

This is going to be an exciting year for Seattle, when Link Light Rail opens up from downtown to the airport by the end of the year.  The initial segment, from downtown to just near the airport, will open up in July.  Light rail service is a welcome addition to the Seattle area.

Link Light Rail Initial Segment Map.  University Link to open 2016

In November, voters approved a second and third line – one linking the University of Washington with Northgate Mall to the north, and one linking downtown to Bellevue and Redmond across Lake Washington on the I-90 bridge.

The I-90 bridge crosses affluent Mercer Island, which has always been a point of contention for transportation projects linking Seattle and the Eastside.  I-90 includes “Express Lanes” – dedicated lanes in the middle of the freeway which are reversed to assist with the heaviest traffic direction in the morning and evening commutes by handling buses and carpools.  Or, at least the morning and evening commutes ca. so long ago nobody remembers.  One perk Islanders get, however, is that they get to use the express lanes even if they’re not a carpool.  It’s the price the rest of us paid I guess, for being able to cross the northern tip of their fair hamlet.

The Express Lanes are the key to the light rail project.  Remove the cars from those lanes, and run trains on them instead and all of a sudden you have just cost effectively done a large chunk of the work required to get light rail linking the two halves of the region’s economic engine.

The clincher here is that in order to turn the Express Lanes over to trains, the HOV capacity has to be moved to the main roadway.  Most of that project is done.  All that’s missing is $24 million in funding the state agreed to dedicate to the project, which Sound Transit is also contributing to.  Several key lawmakers in the state Leg are currently working to thwart that $24 million in funding – and calling for new studies – and bending over backward to find any tortured logic they can that will justify stalling this project.

The money, of course, is being diverted to more highway projects around the state.

It seems like decades following Robert Moses’ exit from road building and transit starving for the purposes of expanding the road network, transit is still quite vulnerable to being held hostage by its opponents – even in the face of overwhelming voter support.

This must stop.  Seattle Transit Blog has called for citizens to write their legislators and I for one am joining the chorus.  Here are some key email addresses (lifted right from STB’s pages):

Rep. Judy Clibborn - Chair of House Transportation Committee: [email protected]

Rep. Marko Liias - Vice Chair of House Transportation Committee: [email protected]

Rep. Frank Chopp - Speaker of the House: [email protected]

Senator Mary Haugen - Chair of Senate Transportation Committee: [email protected]

Senator Chris Marr - Vice Chair of Senate Transportation Committee: [email protected]

Senator Fred Jarrett - Member of Senate Transportation Committee: [email protected]

More great info on this, of course, can be found at Seattle Transit Blog, and once in a while SLOG even writes about it. 

Stimulus Funding and Transit Budgets

In my recent spate of transit related yammering, I’ve been talking a lot about some of what I consider “basic” elements in the operation of a transit system, things like:  Revenue Per Customer (and measuring customers as customers), deferring new facilities in lieu of operations funding, and of course over time it’s been more efficient routing and more frequent service.

The bottom line is transit systems cost money.  The funding source for transit operations in a lot of places is drying up as so many places are dependent on sales tax revenue to fund the necessary public subsidy for transit.

Despite everything I’ve said about transit fares covering more of the costs of a system’s operation, I have not argued nor will I for the elimination of subsidies for the ongoing operation of a public transit system.  Far from being money down the drain, when public money goes into operating a decent public transit service, the tertiary benefits make it worthwhile.

I’ve been not using my car lately.  I live 10 blocks from an express bus that takes me straight from the middle of the city to suburbs 12 miles away in 35 minutes.  This bus runs from early in the morning until late at night, every 30 minutes except for one run, except on weekend days where several evening departures run hourly as well. 

This bus is reliable, clean, comfortable, and quiet except when the accordion section hasn’t been oiled, and has wi-fi.  Thanks to the network of local feeder buses, which don’t have terrible schedules, it is possible to go to and from work virtually any time of day or night on any day.

If you think about the potential lack of productivity which might be suffered by the economy as a whole when people’s cars don’t work, to me that sort of outweighs how annoying it is to be stuck in traffic trying to just do basic necessities of life.  A regularly scheduled vehicle that moves along it would seem to me to be a basic component of any arterial route.

The new administration in Washington seems to get this to a certain point:  there is money in the recently passed stimulus legislation for public transit service improvements.  Sadly, according to Derek Morse, interim director of the Washoe County RTC, none of the money can be used to fund operations.  In a recent Reno-Gazette Journal article, he said “"The biggest misfortune in my mind is the lack of flexibility to use those funds for operations.“  [Only a few state transportation priorities to get stimulus money, ANJEANETTE DAMON 2/18/2009]

I’ve argued here before:  Spend the $37 million that would be spent on the wrong location, wrong facility new transit center on service improvements and a smaller-scale transit hub located on the couple of blocks of covered train trench in downtown Reno. 

One thing stands in the middle of that plan, however, which is a similar thing to what the RTC chairman alluded to in the RGJ:  the transit center project I don’t like is 80/20 FTA Grant/local money.  $30mil of the funding isn’t local, it’s from a federal transit grant and that grant is probably all about facilities and not at all about vehicle service operation.

So, while it’s admirable that the administration’s plan includes funding for new transit service facilities, it’s unfortunate indeed that it does not offer a band-aid for local transit operations budgets which are suffering as a result of down economic trends.

To that I would add that it is also the unfortunate that the voters in this instance decided not to raise the sales tax a fraction of a percent to offset the loss in funding.

Reno: But Then What About The Transit Center?

There’s more in my brain about this bus situation in Reno, as there always is.  Here’s the gist of my argument:  the 4th Street Station transit center project is and has always been not the best idea.  Now one thing it is, it is an idea.  And it’s certainly not the worst idea.

Anyway, there still needs to be a transit center.  Reno still requires a place downtown where buses can congregate, and though I suspect buses can continue to use the existing CitiCenter facility for a while until the economy improves (and I get the inkling the ballpark district developers aren’t chomping at the bit to turn shovels just yet). 

Still, we probably all want the ballpark developers to feel like the deal they signed onto is the deal they’re getting.  And we all want to see the ballpark district develop.  And at some point, CitiCenter will in fact every single day be terribly inadequate, which I’m sure it already is at times.

So what to do?  Well, let’s start by addressing the fundamental issue:  ain’t no money in the operating budget.  6.7Mil in the hole.  Man, that has got to hurt.  But the transit center is $37Mil.  So we’re looking at 1/6 the cost of the transit center.

If memory serves, the trench covers cost $10Mil per.  I’m not going to go to the place where I ask how it is that a parking lot with some bathrooms is supposed to cost 37 million dollars.  Instead I’m going to look for ways out of this current crisis while still giving Reno a transit center.

Here’s an idea:  Cover the third block of the trench between Arlington and West Streets.  Build a terminal building with facilities on the middle block.  Put up some shelters, landscaping, benches.  Get the price way below $37 million, say, $20 million.  Operate bus service for at least 2 years on the money saved.

There is 854 feet approximately of frontage for buses at CitiCenter.  If the trench plaza were opened as a transit center, there would be 1/3 of a mile, double the size of the current CitiCenter, and if the third block were covered and opened, there would be just a little under a half a mile of frontage for buses.  Add #1 stops on Virginia Street and you have a transit corridor that is roughly equivalent in frontage to the 4th Street Station.

RTC should be thinking outside the box on this one.  We already know that the ballpark developer isn’t crazy about Evans turning into a transit corridor.  A transit center in a good downtown can take many shapes and a corridor would work for Reno.  The corridor is set right in the middle of downtown.  A transit system is not just a collection of stationary facilities – it is primarily moving vehicles.  If those vehicles arrive and depart with sufficient frequency and schedule duration as to be worth riding, people will show up to board them.

More on Washoe RTC Cuts

RGJ today has more on the service cuts RTC is considering. 

From RTC’s web page about the cuts:

• Reduce peak hour frequency:
  Weekdays:  RT 1, 13, 16
  Saturday:  RT 1, 5, 13
• Reduce midday frequency:
  Weekdays:  RT 1, 6, 9, 13, 16
  Saturday:  RT 1, 5, 11, 15, 21
• Drop midday service:
  Weekdays:  RT 2s, 3CC, 57
  Saturday:  RT 25, 57
  Sunday:  RT 4, 13, 57
• Discontinue service:
  Weekdays:  RT 14A, 19
  Saturday:  RT 2s, 3CC, 14A, 19
  Sunday:  RT 2s
• Additional reductions:
  RT 3CC – drop last trip, weekdays
  RT 5 – drop last trip, Saturday
  RT 18 – drop 1 peak trip, cut evening, but run late night, weekdays
• RTC ACCESS possible service reduction and fee increases
• Would more than double the RTC ACCESS fare from $1.75 to $4.00

There will be a public hearing on Thursday, February 12 at RTC Administrative Offices, at 2050 Villanova Drive (under the US 395 Freeway next to Wooster High) at no earlier than 9:05 am (whatever that means.)

For what it’s worth, RTC’s new 4th Street Station project is a $37Mil project.  There is clearly some work they can do around efficiency of service – definitely eliminate the useless #19 for example.  But the RTC is looking at a funding shortfall of $6.7Mil, at the same time they are about to undertake a $37Mil capital project.  They should delay 4th Street Station until sales tax revenues begin to improve, and borrow from 4th Street Station funds to minimize the service cuts.