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If you look at the areas where transit functions as a useful alternative to cars, generally its in areas that are fairly dense. The areas that are dense are generally tightly geographically constrained which cause the area to build up and not out (think Manhattan an island surrounded by water, think SF a Pennisula surrounded by water on three side) generally these places were also laid out before WW2, when the cost of transportation fell dramatically as more people could afford to drive. Additionally the transit friendly places tend to have other geographic features that increase the desire to densify (areas with ocean views) where people will bid up the right for the view, making building denser cost effective.
Most of the Sacramento region is incredibly flat. We are in the middle of a great valley that is roughly 600 miles long and 80 miles wide. There really is nothing that geographically constrains development. There also aren't any oceans or hills that encourage individuals to build high to capture views. Geographically most of the area is fairly indistinguishable from another area. The view of the region from Elk Grove really isn't that different than the view from Rocklin.
The only thing that constrains growth are zoning decisions and there is a history of zoning rules changing to suit the needs of developers. Natomas was a flood plain that wasn't supposed to be developed. But that status as agricultural land made that land cheap, developers bought it up, using the pretext of bringing the Kansas City Kings to Sacramento as a pretext for rezoning the land.
Regularly developers in this area bust open the urban growth boundaries by offering carrots to local governments to get them to disregard urban boundaries. Elk Grove wanted a Mall, developers agreed to build the mall but they put it on the urban growth boundary. Elk Grove landed a mall, the developers laid out the basis for challenging the urban growth boundary.
Placer County wants a college, developers are willing to pay for one, if they can build it along a proposed expressway between Roseville and the Sacramento International Airport.
The reason I point this out is to point out that political boundaries aren't the same thing as geographic boundaries. They really don't effectively restrain growth. When land prices get high enough, developers are able to come up with an inducement financed by the change in land uses to get a land use changed.
In this region, I don't think its ever going to be dense enough to support transit that functions as an adequate substitute for autos. Politicians need money to run for office, developers provide that money.
At the levels of densities that this region seems to grow at, buses will probably always be the most economical form of transit. This region just doesn't have the same underlying topography as SF or Manhattan. Geographically its much more like Saint Louis or Kansas City, flat cities along rivers with lots of space to spread out.
There is plenty of evidence, simply look at the progress of history. The fact that nonwhites can actually buy houses in the suburbs now (until the 1960s, racial exclusion covenants made most suburbs off-limits to nonwhites) is evidence, as is the shift of racism from blatant, up-front and encoded in law to frowned upon, alienating and sublimated into far less obvious economic barriers is evidence--sure, we're not "there" yet, but over the course of time society has become more inclusive, more integrated, and more accepting of the different.
Racial desegregation was the consequence of successful litigation policies pursued by the NAACP via the courts. This wasn't a consequence of successful education policy to change hearts and minds. At the time all of these decisions were implemented they were extremely unpopular politically.
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Originally Posted by wburg
Sure, there are some who are upset over the fact that they missed out on the racial privilege enjoyed by their forefathers, and seem dead-set on returning to the "good old days" of separate-but-unequal, when you could put a "whites only" sign on your business, women knew their place in the home, and a homosexual who didn't stay firmly in the closet risked ostracism, institutionalization, and physical violence.
Speaking of Rush Limbaugh, both he and Michael Moore are not educators--they are demagogues and liars. They don't educate, they do the opposite of education--teach people to parrot their lies instead of thinking. Education works very differently--the purpose of education is to stimulate critical thinking and questioning. So it's a bit messy and inefficient sometimes, but with a positive result.
Its not low levels of critical thinking on the part of either Dick Cheney or Paul Krugman that cause them to view the world quite differently. Both men are brilliant individuals with keen minds and excellent capacities for critical thinking.
Rather they have extra-ordinarily strong pre-existing notions of how the world works and they use there keen intellect to come up with novel argument why other people should by into there world view points.
For most political issues there usually are competing values that reasonable people can weigh differently. When terrorists are blowing up the WTC is the solution to hunt down the people who blew up the towers or is it to rebuild the society in the middle east so these people will no longer want to blow up the WTC? Conflicting values cause reasonable people to come up with different conclusions.
Is drug abuse a criminal problem or a public health problem? What if the drug abusers are harming people other than themselves (innocent third parties)? Who is going to be stuck paying for other peoples poor decision making? If society is going to be picking up the tab for someone's poor decision making, does that give them a greater say in regulating private decisions of other that now cause problems born by everyone? Again conflicting values cause reasonable people to come up with conflicting answers.
Should people be directed to live in high density housing to reduce carbon emissions? What if that means higher housing prices and fewer people getting to own their own homes? What if the newly industrializing countries decide to continue to there use of high CO2 energy sources at rates? Reasonable people can weigh different alternatives differently.
The is no political dispute over the existence of gravity. For obvious issues there is no dispute. Political disputes occur regarding issues where there is more than one conclusion that reasonable people can arrive at. Abortion is a dispute because some people view abortion as the killing of another life and others don't.
There are a lot of issues that you really can't persuade people one way or the other. To me the genius of the first amendment was the recognition that different people are going to come up with different answers to unresolvable issues such as religion. Its pointless for the state to take sides in these disputes.
For a lot of issues and disputes I don't think there is one correct answer that be resolved through education and critical thing. I think voluntary self segregation is the rational and appropriate response. If the Amish want to live together in Pennsylvania let them. If the S&M aficionados want to hang out with each other in SF let them do so.
The advantage that Davis has over everywhere else in this area is that when transit has service cutbacks in Davis, the bike infrastructure fills the void especially for short trips. If bus routes are cut back in Davis, people just ride there bikes instead.
My own feeling is that bikes are an acceptable and in many ways a preferable option to transit for short trips. Davis already has completely gotten rid of all school buses. Once you have the bike infrastructure in place, your bike network has much lower variable costs for maintenance and upkeep than the cost of sustaining the bus network.
Your catchment basin for transit increases from the .5 mile to .75 miles that pedestrians seem to be willing to put up with to about 3 miles that people on bikes seem to have no problem covering.
Once you make the substitution from buses to bikes, that frees up money to pay for expanding light rail service or alternatively bus rapid transit.
What Portland is doing by spending 600 million dollars is putting in a long term budget to make bikes a serious alternative to cars and transit for short trips.
What that means is that transit network in Portland can be restructured. Instead of spending money on buses that money can be spent on increasing the budget for longer hours, increased frequency or just expanding the rail grid.
For transit riders instead of waiting around for infrequent bus stops, they can just use the safe bike routes that Portland is going to build.
$600 million gets you a lot of new bike infrastructure.
One factor in transportation is scalability. Bikes are a good substitute for transit in a small city like Davis, but as cities get bigger the disadvantages of distance multiply. No matter how you slice it, getting Sacramento past the car would take a lot of money, time and effort, or some kind of serious cataclysmic change. What is more likely is the use of alternative transit to supplement the auto infrastructure, over time taking a more important role as the areas around transit centers develop. Even though we have had light rail for 23 years, transit-oriented development around light rail stops is comparatively recent. Even though Sacramento has always been great bike-riding country, it was discounted because bike riding was generally considered recreation, not transportation--except for students and greenies. Both of those attitudes are starting to change, but they will certainly take time to sink in.
More bike and pedestrian infrastructure would be a definite boon to places like Natomas. One of the things I find most disorienting about North Natomas is the feeder-street design, designed to maximize land for sale vs. streets, and optimized for cars. Both walking, biking and transit are very difficult in those configurations, because all of those modes benefit from a grid system. Grids are more permeable to traffic of all sorts, allow choice and variety (making walks and rides more pleasant by allowing different routes) and lets non-fixed transit adjust routes much more easily than a feeder-street neighborhood.
Amsterdam and Copenhagen are both larger than Sacramento and have bike shares of around 40%. The reason in the US that it seems like bike infrastructure isn't a scalable technology is that no large US city has implemented it yet on a wide scale. In the US, only Davis and arguably Boulder have made a fairly substantial commitment to bike infrastruture, both both of these towns are fairly small. Portland is the first bigger US region to make such a commitment under Mia Birk (who is now with Alta Planning)
But its also important to realize that the dutch cities didn't always have a lot of first rate bike infrastructure. Their current success is the result of implementing policy changes to make it happen. Compare what was happening in the 1970's vs today.
These areas also have really crappy climates. In terms of climate, the Netherlands is a lot like Vancouver BC. They get snow in the winter time, it rains a lot year round. They are getting 40 percent of all trips in an area of the planet where people are riding bikes in snow and on ice.
If you look at the cities in the Netherlands or Denmark very few cities have any type of grids. The cities in the Netherlands are like London, Paris and Boston, the cities generally predate grids.
But you don't necessarily want a grid. Grids are actually suboptimal. Grids make everything equally accessible to pedestrian, bike rider and car driver. What matters is connectivity for pedestrians and people on bikes. Ideally what you want is what is described as filtered permeability in Europe or alternatively what the Canadians refer to as fused grids. If you look at grids you always have the problem with through traffic from cars reducing livability in the neighborhood. This is why Boulevard Park set up the traffic barriers as a traffic calming method to get rid of the through traffic in their neighborhood.
The street layout isn't the biggest problem with Natomas, its the overly determined land use policies. There are only a few land uses that probably should be zoned into there own specific zones. Maybe animal rendering, auto dismantling and adult activities, (I have always seen prostitution as less of a moral problem than a land use problem, I would put nightclubs, cannabis dispensaries, bath houses for homosexuals, adult bookstores and liquor stores in the same category. If there was one neighborhood where all that stuff took place those who wanted to partake in it could do so and those who want to shelter their families from it could avoid it. In this respect, I thought Mexico was light years ahead of us with there boy's towns). Otherwise land owners should freely be able to shift land uses from residential to commercial to office. Make everything else essentially mixed use.
Instead of utilities billing by type of use, have them charge by quantity of use. If you change your house into a restaurant make the person doing the conversion pay for the increased sewage and water use. Make them upgrade the kitchen to commercial standards for health and safety purposes, but don't let zoning laws dictate what people can do with there property. If people want to subdivide their property again let them (make sure there is adequate sewage and water connections) but if someone wants to convert there home into a fourplex or convert there fourplex into a single family home, let them do so.
Additionally get rid of all minimum parking requirements for any land use. If there isn't enough parking in a neighborhood, start charging for street parking.
Where the city should get involved is increasing the permeability to bikes and pedestrians and in slowing down traffic on the thoroughfares. Build the bike bridges across the Natomas canal. Create bike and pedestrian pathways to link to the larger bike networks.
What I would love to do in Natomas is just take a couple of lanes away from traffic to widen the sidewalks and to add bike paths. If you did that it would really slow down traffic in Natomas. The only place where traffic should move fast is on actual freeways. Everywhere else keep the traffic closer to 25 to 30 mph. If you slowed traffic on the thoroughfares, the thoroughfares would stop acting like pedestrian and bike barriers. Add lots of streetlights on the thoroughfares with lights that change fairly quickly, it would slow down the auto traffic and make the neighborhood much more accessible for pedestrians and bike riders.
Interesting perspective and interesting links, but I am not sure that global warming is going to be addressed by building bike trails everywhere or even building mass transit everywhere. I think its mostly going to be substituting natural gas for coal plants, people shifting to plug in hybrids and just more carpooling.
Development is path dependent. We have this huge investment in the current infrastructure and I don't think its going to change much during my life time. Gas is also still incredibly cheap. Even when gas got past $4.00 a gallon the share of people taking mass transit stayed under 5% and the share of people biking stayed under 3%. In terms of funding the share of people commuting by other means (which I understand to mean mostly bike commuting) is 2.3% which isn't that far behind transit at 3%, but the region is probably spending 100 times on mass transit what its spending on bike infrastructure. In terms of cost effectiveness, that probably means that the region should spend more on bikes vs mass transit.
But I suspect the real gains in terms of the environment come from expanding carpools which account for 13.3% of all commutes in the region. In the 1970's the fed and the state had a lot of success pushing van pools. In this region I think those types of investments probably have the highest environmental benefits.
Thinking of them as "bike trails" suggests recreational use--I think what Kim Racer is thinking of is bikes as functional transportation, not recreation. I agree that a shift to natural gas over coal, plus more solar, wind, nuclear etc., and more efficient cars and more efficient use of those cars are part of the story. But the other part of the story is more localization--living close enough to the workplace or to shopping that allows one to walk or ride a bike, or within distances that makes transit more practical. The relative low cost of pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure is an attractive option, and most of the things that make streets comfortable for pedestrians and bikes also make them pretty in general: tree cover, good sidewalks, mow strips between sidewalk and street, street furniture for people to sit on and lock their bikes to, other landscaping elements.
When gas shot above $4 a gallon, the share of people taking mass transit did a considerable jump, and many of the people who made the switch kept using transit after prices came back down (to a mere $3 and change a gallon, ouch.) Their numbers have dropped a bit more because many transit systems' funding has been cut, just as ridership is going up (an unkind cut indeed.) But those numbers could only go so high, because American transit systems simply don't go to many of the places where suburban America lives.
Van pools are an interesting idea--although they are actually a form of mass transit!--but they don't answer other transportation questions, such as how people who might want to leave the house for things other than work would use them to get around.
In that same time period, the number of people in the region using mass transit increased 16,502 to 19,736 but this growth didn't keep up with population growth. In terms of share of the commute the percentage of people commuting by transit actually fell from 3.1% to 2.9% during this period.
If doubling the price of gas in that time frame isn't getting people out of there cars, I suspect that commuters in this area just aren't going to use transit to adjust to changing gas prices. Instead they are probably just going to get more gas efficient cars or maybe car pool.
But this idea that people are going to start using buses or ride bikes for most of there trips just isn't something that I see happening anytime in the foreseeable future. I think people adjust to higher gas prices in different ways, the get cars with better mileage, they upgrade the insulation on there home.
Again, you're assuming that the public transit was there for them to simply utilize. Sacramento's transit system hasn't done a lot of expansion, so no matter how many people might be interested in trying transit, if there isn't enough of it in the right place, they don't really have the option.
Coping with rising gas prices assumes that more gas-efficient cars will be easily available and affordable, and that their efficiency will continue to climb with gas prices. It also assumes that we will continue to expand our highway system and build wider roadways to continue the current sprawl pattern (building more lanes only temporarily eases traffic, because it encourages growth that brings more traffic.) It also assumes that $3-5 a gallon is expensive enough to force a mode switch for most people. It probably isn't.
But as gas gets more expensive, it does become a bigger factor in people's decisions as to where they will move. Look at the people who post here--how many log on asking for a walkable, bikeable place a short commute from where they are going to work? As time goes on, people may still be driving, but they will try to drive to places that are closer, in order to spend less on gas and spend less time on the road. And at some point, they may see others trying different modes, and eliminate some auto trips entirely by walking or biking instead. Or maybe they just get sick of a long commute and a big gas bill.
Factually what you are saying just isn't true. From RT's own website here is some the expansions that occurred during this period.
"Five years later (September 2003) RT opened the first phase of the South Line, a 6.3-mile extension to South Sacramento. In June 2004, light rail was extended from the Mather Field/Mills station to Sunrise Boulevard, and on October 15, 2005 a 7.4-mile extension from the Sunrise station to the city of Folsom was opened.
In December of 2006, the final leg of the Amtrak/Folsom project was extended .7 mile to the downtown Sacramento Valley Station, connecting light rail with Amtrak inter-city and Capitol Corridor services as well as local and commuter buses."
RT was expanding in this period. Its just that the growth in light rail ridership was partially offset with a fall off in bus ridership on the bus lines that were redirected to feed the light rail lines. The net effect is that growth in transit ridership failed to keep up with the population growth in the region even in a period where gas prices were doubling.
In terms of users, mass transit is getting about 3% of the commuters in the region. In terms of measure A funding, RT gets 1/3 of the measure A funds.
In terms of funding 1/3 of the transportation tax is being spent to benefit 3% of the commuters. That means they are getting about 11 to 1 leverage in terms of spending. Granted this population is expensive to serve. Its expensive to make buses and light rail trains accessible to people in wheelchairs. But in terms of large amounts of spending going to small percentage of the population its strains credibility to argue that 1/3 of the transportation tax to support 3% of the commuters is too little.
The region has roughly 2/3 as many bike commuters as transit users and we are by no means spending on bike infrastructure 2/3 of what we are spending on transit. The region also has roughly 2/3 as many people walking to work as using transit and again we are spending nowhere near spending on pedestrian improvements 2/3 we are spending on transit. In that sense I completely agree with kim racer, bike infrastructure, pedestrian improvements are all relative to transit dirt cheap. Relative to transit usage, auto improvements are are dirt cheap. Relative to transit, just about anything else is dirt cheap. Only in transit do we spend so much to serve so few, with such little results.
But the more germane issue is that the environmental argument for transit in this region is really weak. Buses get 4 to 6 mpg. Light rail vehicles are much heavier than buses and require even more energy to move than a bus. Most buses and most transit in this region runs mostly empty on most routes for most of the day. During rush hour when buses and light rail is running fairly full, I acknowledge that transit during those hours is fairly green. But during the rest of the day, cutting transit when ridership is poor is probably decreasing the environment detriment of transit during those periods. The problem with increasing spending on transit is that it practice the region is just increasing the frequency and scope of routes offered during non peak times when buses and light rail is running mostly empty.
Here I am probably closer to kim racer's position, bikes are environmentally a better alternative than most transit.
If your job was relocated to Rocklin, would you move to Rocklin or would you commute from midtown to Rocklin? If Majin's job was relocated to Rocklin do you think he would relocate to Rocklin or do you think he would commute from Midtown to Rocklin? What if gas was $5 a gallon, then would you move or would you still commute? What about Majin?
People develop strong attachments to the places where they live. Some people love Folsom, some people love Lincoln and some people love East Sac. Moving is expensive. People have strong attachments to their existing neighborhoods where they live whether its the schools, the neighbors and existing friends, the nearby restaurants or what have you.
Rather than moving closer to where they work, I think people are first going to look for gas substitutes, either a car that gets better gas mileage, a plug in hybrid that gets most of its power from some source other than gas or maybe they will just commute by motorcycle. Lastly in the face of rising gas prices, employers might accelerate what they are already doing, move out the suburbs where office rents are cheaper and they are closer to existing high quality labor forces.
I think its a lot more likely that an employer is going to move out of downtown, than the Sac City Schools suddenly start challenging the schools in Rocklin or Folsom in terms of academic performance. I doubt the gangs will ever be fully removed from the Sac City Schools. Its these types of coordination problems that make it really difficult to turn around and transform an existing neighborhood. Its much easier for the employer to move than for the employee to move.
Look at the people who post here. How many are looking for neighborhoods with high quality schools in safe neighborhoods?
Last edited by edwardius; 03-06-2010 at 03:43 AM..
I am not saying this thread has yet turned into a pissing contest, but I see the potential for that happening. Before that happens. I want to throw out some other data points and push the discussion into a more fruitful path and keep it more on the bike theme that I started this thread with.
Portland where mass transit is funded by a surcharge on income tax, which also has had a number of transit improvements also failed to actually increase its share of people commuting by transit between 2000 and 2006-8. Portland dealt with the same spike in gas prices that the rest of the country was dealing with in this period. From what I can tell, the professionals in the field have no concrete idea why these transit investments failed to actually increase the share of people commuting by transit in Portland. In short if the professionals aren't sure why it isn't working, I doubt we are going to come up with better answers. See discussion below and accompanying chart.
But also look at what was working during this period. The share of people commuting by bikes was actually going up substantially. For dramatically less money than what Trimet was spending to unsuccessfully expand transit share, it got a lot more people to commute by bikes (going from 2.3% to 4.7% between 2000 and 2008 and increasing from 1% to 4.7% between 1990 and 2008. Bike commuting is increasing at geometric rate, more than doubling between 1990 and 2000 and more than doubling again between 2000 and 2008 in Multnomah County). Multnomah County is the county in the area where the City of Portland is located and where Mia Birk adopted the previous master bike plan for Portland back in 1992-93. It was the success of this plan the made Portland go Platinum and it was the reason the region decided to put $600 million into bikes over the next 20 years.
Remember as recently as 2000, more people were commuting to work in the Sacramento region than in the Portland region. Back then the received wisdom in Portland was that Sacramento had the ideal climate for bike commuting, its flat, it doesn't rain, no snow, no ice etc. Thus people in Portland would never take to bikes like people in Sacramento.
Also remember in terms of costs bike commuting is one of those rare activities that have huge positive externalities. If people are riding there bikes regularly, they are getting regular exercise. When people exercise more, they are more fit and get sick less often, they have longer life expectancies. Obesity has overtaken smoking as the largest preventable cause of death in this country.
Even if you drive to work, the fact that other people take bikes to work makes it easier for you to find parking. You can easily fit 10 to 15 bikes in just the space where just one car parks.
Bike infrastructure is also incredibly cheap. A good majority of it can be as simple as repainting the traffic lines and changing posted speed limits. More fancy improvements include redoing traffic lights and crossing signals. If you have more money you can add more bike pedestrian bridges, but compared to bridges for cars or transit, again these are dirt cheap. Bikes don't create the noise of cars, buses and trains. You don't have to move sewer and power lines. Bikes also don't create huge additional labor costs. People on bikes want to see streets swept regularly, especially during the fall, but other than that, this is group that is really cheap to cater to.
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