American Dream

A Philadelphia suburb declares a relatively upscale shopping district to be "blighted" so it can use eminent domain to spend $140 million turning the area into a mixed-use, transit-oriented development.

The Sierra Club has convinced a judge to halt construction of a Las Vegas freeway on the grounds that the environmental impact statement for the freeway failed to consider a light-rail alternative.

How many environmental impact statements for light rail consider a freeway alternative? (Answer: almost none.) We should be stopping light rail construction on the same grounds.

We have a district worth imitating
Boundaries stretch as new condos appear
Evolving Pearl casts wider net

The Pearl can not sustain it's growth without the taxpayers subsidies.

Call goes out to big-box retailers
Allowing big box stores such as Home Depot, Target, Costco and Wal-Mart might reduce the lengths of many of auto trips in Portland by shortening the trips to the suburbs to shop at these stores.

Why did the $859-million Pasadena-to-Los Angeles Gold Line fail to meet ridership expectations, as described in the link posted by Matt below? Maybe because it is s - l - o - w. The writer of this article notes that switching from an auto to the light rail doubled his commute time.

When he made the switch, he hoped he could "read my paper, sip my coffee, and gleefully thumb my nose at people stuck in traffic." But it turns out the traffic whisks by him, you aren't allowed to drink coffee on board, and he can't concentrate on reading because he is always wondering why the train is going so slow. "Instead of screaming 'Go!' at little old ladies on the freeway, I wanted to bellow 'Go!' at train drivers," he says.

The writer is thinking of switching back to driving, but unfortunately the drive now takes longer thanks to the fact that there is a new source of congestion on his route: The Gold line, which crosses streets three times and wastes the time of drivers. Don't worry, transportation planners say; they are "working on it." Right.

For those of you who want to know what transport Nirvana will be like, there is a presentation on what is reportedly a Sierra Club Toronto website. I look forward to the day that transit + station cars gets me places faster than my car --- Not so much for the transport benefits, but for the fact that the Israelis and Arabs will have long since enjoyed cordial relations and our friends George and Osama will be regular dinner buddies.

It should also be noted that the Club's inclusion of "station cars" (collective non-auto autos that take you from where transit leaves you off to where you need to go) represents an admission that the modern urban area is auto-dependent (at least "station car" dependent). In Toronto, of course, most trips would require station cars at both ends of the trip, since most trips simply cannot be made on transit (suburban transit users are little better off in Toronto than in Phoenix).

http://www.movingtheeconomy.ca/content/ditl.html

Credit-Based Congestion Pricing: A Policy Proposal and the Public's Response
Credit-Based Congestion Pricing: Travel, Land Value and Welfare Impacts

Came across this interesting congestion-pricing scheme at the University of Texas civil engineering department website. Essentially it works like tradable pollution permits - drivers receive a monthly allowance of travel "credits" - if they exceed their monthly allowance they pay out-of-pocket, if they use less than their monthly allowance they receive credits that can be used the next month or exchanged for cash. In other words, peak-hour drivers pay others to stay off the highway, theoretically reducing congestion.

Plan would raise parking fees
Many taxes and fees will be increased to fund the I-205 line such as.
Increased parking meter fees, creating a local improvement district composed of downtown properties near the transit mall, higher transit payroll taxes, diverting urban renewal money that would have gone to police, fire, schools and social services and federal transit grants. Also included are contributions from Portland, TriMet, Metro, the Oregon Department of Transportation, Portland State University and Clackamas County.
Tri-Met has stated in the past that there is not enough passengers to run a bus along I-205.

The EPA Withdraws Inaccurate Smart Growth-Traffic Congestion Report  byWendell Cox and Ronald D. Utt, Ph.D. July 28, 2004 (Backgrounder #1782) TheEPA's Characteristics and Performance of Regional Transportation Systemsreport was so deeply flawed that the agency was forced to withdraw it withintwo months Read it at:http://www.heritage.org/Research/SmartGrowth/bg1782.cfm   

 

Email reveals that transportation officials knew all along that Hiawatha LRT would cripple traffic - LRT planners hid this info from the public

This email from Minnesota transportation officials in 1999 describes how light rail signal preemption would "severely cripple" congestion at intersections, causing "extreme delays along side streets." This shows that LRT planners knew all along that the Hiawatha LRT line would cripple traffic along the corridor but chose to hide this info from the public because, as noted in the email, to release this info would have been a "show stopper" for the $715 million project. State legislator Phil Krinkie is calling for an investigation of the issue.

Krinkie: MnDOT knew Hiawatha Avenue traffic would suffer

Designing a district The possibility of a Home Depot in the Central Eastside raises larger questions