December 2008 - Posts
There is a lot of speculation in the transportation industry concerning Obama's proposed stimulus package. Locally, there have been a number of requests for lists of "shovel ready" projects - projects that could be initiated immediately once there is money available. Fortunately, these requests have also included bicycle and transit requests. One lists of bicycle projects I saw being passed around the state - a list of mysterious origin, unfortunately, not linked to any of the projects listed in the existing regional bikeway or long-range transportation plans - heavily favored Roanoke bike projects. Even if this particular list needs to be tweaked somewhat, it was refreshed to see Roanoke represented so well.
That said,
this commentary on the DailyKos successfully squashed some of my mounting enthusiasm, though for very good reasons:
A hundred billion dollars invested in new highways is no investment at all. It's a commitment to spend another ten billion a year. Forever. Recreating the employment and energy of the WPA is a great idea. Replicating the outcome is begging for a white elephant we can't afford.
At first blush it seems that the President-Elects emphasis on clean energy from domestic sources, and the role conservation plays in that energy plan, would preclude investing heavily in an infrastructure that encourages more use of foreign oil. We may be getting a little spoiled now that gas prices have dropped so much, but remember that only three months ago we were flirting with $4.00 a gallon gas that caused vehicle-miles-traveled rates around the country to plummet, it we could be there again in three months. Investing heavily in infrastructure to promote a transportation system that we really don't want and that drivers themselves are moving away from, is not smart in the long term. On the other hand the stimulus proposals have as their primary goal the creation of jobs and kick-starting of the economy through influxes of large amounts of federal dollars, and nothing quite succeeds in that than the building of new highways.
The commenter's suggestion seems a fair one:
First priority should go to those projects that flat out eliminate the
majority of costs associated with a piece of infrastructure. Nothing costs less in the future than a mile of highway that's been removed.
Next should come those projects that offer the chance to upgrade existing infrastructure with an alternative whose future upkeep is less costly. This can include tearing out highways and adding more light rail. It should also include replacing older bridges and structures with newer designs that meet safety concerns while requiring less upkeep. Dead last on the list should come any project whose goal is to add more lanes for automobile traffic.
Particularly exciting to me is the thought that the TransDominion Express could finally come into being. With all of the work done on that plan,
including the Regional Commission's own study, I think that project is essentially shovel-ready. If any money goes into the creation of new roads - such as the I-77 project or widening of I-81 - I hope some small percentage of that money will go to the TDM programs in the region's affected. Not only with the TDM efforts be an important mitigation strategy during the construction projects, most of which will no doubt result in massive detours and delays, funding those programs fully will help maximize the efficiency of the newly created roads so that the investment lasts longer.
Since my daughter is out of school for the next couple of weeks for the holidays, I'm back on my former commute route taking me past the BP on 9th every morning. My last
Gas Watch post on May 9th had the price at $3.56. We're less than half that now, and
some people aren't happy. I'll be honest and say that I didn't expect has prices to fall, particularly not this far, but I hadn't considered that the economy as a whole would be tanking as bad as it is. Gas prices, like many other prices, will rebound along with the economy, so I would not expect them to stay this low. Still, in the meantime, my one-car family is enjoying the cost savings.
If you saw the recent letter to the editor in the Roanoke Times,
you might be concerned that the new
Star Line Trolley is off to an
inauspicious start. According to the trolley's ridership numbers,
though, you'd be wrong. I checked with Valley Metro General Manager
Dave Morgan, and here's the scoop:
So far, the trolley has carried over 7,000 passengers in just its first
few weeks. The goal that Valley Metro and the Carilion Foundation had
set (Carilion and Jefferson College are both paying into the trolley
system) was 80 passengers a day. Currently, the trolley is serving more
than three times that amount - about 300 people a day ride the trolley
up and down the Jefferson Street corridor. I know the day the letter to the editor was published, I ended up taking the trolley into work and saw a few people on board on the early morning commute. One of my coworkers rides several times a week just to see how things are going, and he regularly sees five or six people board each way of the trip. Not bad for a 10 minute route.
If this is what the ridership looks like at the onset of a cold, wet
winter, I'm excited to see what it will do once we reach spring!
The comments of Alan E. Pisarski in the
recent Virginia Newsletter from UVA's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service is worth a read. Some of Pisarki's thoughts could be as easily applied to our local and national transportation challenges as to our statewide challenges, and though he does not offer up any specific solutions he does provide a fair examination of where we stand and towards which direction we should be moving. While I won't delve too deeply into the article, I do want to comment on a couple of points.
Pisarski is not as reflexively excited as I am about all the
data coming out concerning VMT reductions this year:
On the negative side, how many trips were just not taken at all? Trip avoidance isn't always negative. For example, teleconferencing may often be an efficient method of conducting busines. But trips generally have some exonomic or social transactions at their ends that benefit the trip maker and the larger society. With a threatened economy, this is not a time to be inhibiting the business interactions of our society.
Of course, he's right here, which indicates one of the flaws inheret using VMT (vehicle miles traveled) as a measure of transportation efficiency. We also need PMT (people miles traveled) to get at how many seats are filled in buses, vans, and passenger cars; how many bicycles are on the roads, how many people are making shopping trips on foot rather than driving the short distance to the grocery store. This is a much trickier number to get at and can't be done through the automated traffic counters that are used to calculate the national VMT number, but making People Miles a regular measure of transportation efficiency would go a long way towards ameliorating Pisarski's valid concern.
Later in the piece, he makes this comment concerning traffic congestion:
A major contribution can be made to improving the well-being of society by reducing congestion. But using congestion as a tool in the hope of changing public behavior in certain desired directions must be specifically renounces in any useful state transportation policy.
I'm not entirely sure what he's getting at here. If the suggestion is that there exists, or are calls for, state transportation policies that specifically
create congestion, then he's right that no policy has a place in a reasonable transportation plan. Of course we don't expect the state to create hardships on the public. However, if he's suggesting that transportation policy makers and planners shouldn't use the
reality of congestion as a tool for behavior change, I don't agree. If anything, I think that addressing congestion with behavior change should be the first line of attack. This might mean giving behavior change strategies time to work; as anyone in TDM will tell you, this takes time - a lot of time - though I think that would be somewhat reduced in truly horrific congestion. I suppose it's possible that allowing these strategies sufficient time to work could be perceived as "using congestion as a tool," and might be perceived by some drivers as doing nothing, but clearly that's a false perception and we should not accept it. After all, SOV travel (and the resulting congestion) is a mode choice, the result of driver behavior developed over years of cheap gas. lack of environmental concern, and a culture that generally equates driving alone with freedom. Let's address those issues first - which means, yes, using congestion as a tool - before we get too excited about infrastructure fixes.
Blacksburg Transit, Valley Metro and the Smart Way are now live on Google Transit. You can
go there directly, or use the
newly embedded trip planner on the RIDE Solutions site. Just like Google driving directions, you enter your starting and ending address, and Google tells you where to catch the closest bus stop, which route to take, and where to transfer to a different bus.
If you have a chance, play with the trip planner and look for any goofy routing you may encounter. I’ll collect any issues that come up and send them to their respective transit agencies so they can make sure all the kinks are worked out at Google. Send any routing issues you have to
jholmes@rvarc.org, or leave them in the comments below.
I want to take a moment to clarify and expand upon the
remarks I made in the recent vlog regarding the intersection of regionalism and transportation – particularly, sustainable transportation strategies.
My comments stemmed, essentially, from Stuart’s opening statement:
Oftentimes people say, “What will it take to create more regionalism in the Roanoke and New River Valleys?” And everything ultimately comes down to transportation. We need to get more people living in one region and working in the other, and vice versa.
At which point I responded with several meandering thoughts about public transit, rail, and employer support of transportation alternatives. What I don’t think I emphasized enough is that, to the extent Stuart is right about the live/work pattern he’s describing, I think expansion of public transportation options, and employer support of those options is key, I am not entirely convinced that the premise is feasible nor necessarily desirable from a practical standpoint.
Of course, I am coming at this from the perspective of a transportation and air quality planner, not an economic developer; my area of expertise and priorities are different, but I want to play with Stuart’s premise for a bit and see if that’s really the best solution.
The reality is that people are moving closer to, not farther from, work right now, and both Roanoke the NRV are exhibiting development patterns that support this. Roanoke’s downtown residential development is booming, and brownfield projects like the Carilion biomedical research center, the continued revitalization of downtown, and an emphasis on “village center” development like Grandin and Crystal Spring all point to increasingly live/work/play density. This is happening in the NRV, too; residential development in Christiansburg is way up, despite the challenges in the housing market, and neighboring areas like Riner are seeing significant growth. It wasn’t too long ago that the NRV suffered a dearth of shopping – this is no longer the case, with major retail chains having locations in both Roanoke and Christiansburg, a new shopping development along Main St. in Blacksburg that could rival Valley View Mall, and a reconfigured transportation infrastructure that brings visitors and residents more easily into the New River Valley Mall area as well as Downtown Blacksburg. Combines these local phenomena with the broader national trends of lower vehicle miles travelled and transportation behavior that continues to move away from driving long distanced even as gas prices retreat from their record levels, and you have a pretty convincing case that people simply don’t want to drive.
Given that fact, I think that it will be pretty difficult, even with attractive public transportation options, to convince people to make the 30-some-odd mile trek between the regions. And from a transportation perspective, I’m not sure that’s desirable. Do we want to increase traffic on I-81? Do we want to increase the amount of time people spend on a vehicle? Do we want to increase vehicle emissions, even from relatively benign sources like buses? Do we want to encourage development in largely undeveloped area along the corridor? From my perspective, we should be discouraging all of these things – take vehicles off the road, every chance we get. When we can’t do that, make sure they are driving as short a distance as possible. Invest in density, which not only encourage walking and biking as viable transportation options, but also creates efficient public transit systems with the least amount of public funding. Reinvest in blighted and neglected neighborhoods that improve the quality of life for everyone, rather than develop new areas.
Stuart also touched on the issue of topography in listing some of the challenges to development along the I-81 corridor. I don’t think this point can be understated. The mountainous terrain between the regions make development of any kind difficult and expensive. What’s more, the terrain creates some enormous perceptual barriers. Thirty miles is really not that much, but when you actually have to travel across and up a mountain to get to the next major region, it is difficult to think anything other than you are
leaving one place and
going to another, rather than across a single expansive region. What’s more, the difference in elevation actually makes for different weather patterns – Blacksburg often gets snow when Roanoke doesn’t, for example, and more snow when it does. It seems like a small thing, perhaps, but there’s an difficult mental leap in believing then when it’s snowing in Blacksburg and dry as a bone in Roanoke, that we’ve actually got much in common.
All that said, it sounds like I’m arguing against regionalism, which is not what I want to do. Quite the opposite – I think that both the Roanoke and New River Valleys have much to gain from each other, and without regional cooperation we will likely miss out on enormous opportunities to advance the area. That cooperation is not going to come, however, from commute patterns – it’s going to come from business relationships - like those between Virginia Tech and Carilion Clinic that have resulted in the new medical school being built at the Riverside Center - and cultural opportunities. Virginia Tech and the Corporate Research Center are only going to grow as the regional center for technology and research, drawing students, researchers, and tech-savvy young professionals to an expanding list of cutting edge technology companies and research opportunities. Roanoke, meanwhile, has an established base of technology, manufacturing, and other industries, not the least of which is health care with both Carilion Clinic and HCA leading the way. It’s also got a thriving downtown, a stable population base unaffected by the wild variations that Blacksburg’s student population causes, and enormous public and private investment in arts and cultural amenities, as seen in the recent opening of the Taubman Museum of Art.
In many ways, it’s going to be up to businesses to take advantage of the respective competencies of each region – cooperative efforts taking advantage of Tech and the CRC’s research capabilities and applying them in Roanoke businesses and other endeavors. It’s going to require connecting people to amenities in each region rather than encouraging long commute times – providing access to educational opportunities through growth of efforts like the Higher Education Center, and making sure that NRV residents have access to arts and cultural activities through public transportation, way-finding, and other creative efforts. It’s going to require us to look at phases of life and recognize that it might make more sense for twenty-somethings to live/work/play in Blacksburg with their peers, but come to Roanoke when they’re ready to start a family, and building policies and incentives that take advantage of this. It will also require looking much farther in the future – as, to their credit, the City of Roanoke has done – to recognize that the idea of living one place and working another is going to change drastically as the knowledge-based economy grows and technology gives workers access to their job no matter where there are. Roanoke and the NRV can also be desirable home for people working in DC, Manhattan, or Silicon Valley.
I do not, I admit, have good specific solutions. But to the extent that transportation is one of those solutions, there are major challenges facing the two regions that probably won’t be easily overcome. I think it’s important to keep an eye on technology, the environment, and some of the remarkable demographic changes that are occurring right now and recognizing that old patterns and concepts of how people live and work are on the verge of a major upheaval in the next ten to twenty years. Whatever the answers are to improving regionalism, that future is where we need to start looking for them.