Seeking sustainable change in Carrboro

Hey Alison,
What are the anti rail (not just light rail) arguments that you've heard? Not cost effective? Don't reduce traffic?

I think if you delve deeper you can get past these two objections. Nevertheless, your arguments are very real objections and hold water for those focused on the near future.

For now, I've decided any use of rail in Carrboro or CH-- light or some superior alternative-- is dead for now. It seems that few really want to curtail use of the single occupancy vehicle, and people don't want rail near their homes.

Ultimately, I hope people will come around to exploring less wasteful, more environmentally friendly ways to travel.

I wish I had a better grasp of when we start the transition from car and bus to more convenient, user-friendly, environmentally sound alternatives.

Light rail is mentioned lately as a possible express link between Carolina North and main campus. I've argued against it for several reasons. Dedicated shuttle vans would serve just as well or better for most inter-campus commuters.

Nice summary of the issues Allison. I should be counted as one of those individuals who wants to maintain the blue collar attitude of Carrboro. While I agree with Alex and others that we need to look at increasing the commercial base of our local economy, I hope we do so very carefully and thoughtfully, recruiting businesses that are compatible with our culture and our community ethos (this is addressed in the Vision 2020).

I know the annexees are unhappy with the BOA and the direction they have set for Carrboro, but to me, the town is doing just fine. The most serious problem I believe we have is skyrocketing property values and I really don't think the BOA can do anything about that problem by themselves. So overall, while we may need some tweaking, we're generally on a good path.

Of course, the causes for traffic are complex, and have to do with population growth, as well as city and regional planning designs, but I think it is myopic to assert that transportation issues in the Triangle boil down to pro or anti light rail arguments.

Unfortunately, this sentence came at the end of a paragraph in which the writer boiled all her analysis of local transportation issues down to an anti-light rail argument.

Just as increasing the number of police won't necessarily reduce crime, building a light rail system won't reduce the amount of traffic in the area. While there are strong arguments for building alternative transportation (and I am personally on the fence about it), statistics show that light rails don't reduce the amount of traffic in a metropolitan area.

Todd Littman, one of the most prolific publishers of the Transportation Research Board debunks it better than I could:

Critics often use inappropriate congestion indicators such as roadway level of service ratings and the Texas Transportation Institute's Travel Time Index, which only reflect delays to motorists, ignoring travel time savings to people who shift to transit. Per capita congestion costs are a more appropriate indicator of rail congestion reduction benefits. Baum-Snow and Kahn (2005) found significantly lower average commute travel times in areas near rail transit than in otherwise comparable locations that lack rail, due to the relatively high travel speeds of grade-separated transit compared with commuting by automobile or bus under the same conditions. Figure 4 shows matched-pair analysis that indicates the much lower congestion delays in cities with large rail transit systems.

-From “Evaluating Rail Transit Criticism” p. 9, available at www.vtpi.org

However, the original post raises a very interesting question for Chapel Hill/Carrboro.

"Is fear of change stronger than any desire for a more sustainable community?"

Patrick,

I've been thinking about Allison's analysis of the light rail issue and realized that the metropolitan areas where light rail is most commonly available use a central line with bus service out to the perimeters. Where would you like to see a light rail line run between Chapel Hill and Carrboro (the two end points)? Given the relatively small area of Carrboro, how many of the current bus lines would be eliminated/service reduced or would light rail be in addition to the current bus system?

Or are you only advocating for light rail if it is developed regionally?

Interesting front page article in N&O about nighttime versus daytime populations of Triangle towns: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/2828307p-9278411c.html
Good graphics in print edition. According to 2000 census data, only 13.5 % of Carrboro's workers live and work in Carrboro (too bad N&O didn't include data about percentage of workers in Carrboro who work in Chapel Hill). The 2000 census data shows 58.4 % of Chapel Hill workers live and work in the same municipality.
Clearly, if Carrboro wants to consider itself a sustainable community, it must attract jobs and it must be a leader in finding convenient, user-friendly, environmentally sound alternatives to the current practice of driving solo to major work destinations in RTP and Durham.

Ask and you shall receive.

Numbers of Carrboro commuters who work within their place of residence (Carrboro) and within their county of Residence (Orange).

Carrboro Census Data

Actually if you look at the daytime/nighttime data from a slightly different perspective you will see that Alex Zaffron's proposal to study strategies for deriving multiple uses of the same space deserves a much better hearing than it has received. According to the census data, there are nearly as many people in downtown Carrboro at night as there are during the day (versus on 50% as many in Chapel Hill). With commercial space at a premium, the town, according to Alex's proposal, should be working with business owners to negotiate some type of space sharing between daytime and nighttime oriented businesses. Or perhaps just encouraging business owners to stay open later than 6-7 pm. Certainly we need new office/retail, but we should also be looking at low impact (and quicker) strategies for increasing our business economy.

Certainly this isn't a strategy that would work for all spaces or all businesses, but there is a logic to it that comes only from an official who knows his town and is always on the lookout for creative ways to solve problems.

This census data is amazing and I don't have time to sift through it.
What percentage of Chapel Hill workers work in Orange County?
I'm surprised the Carrboro number is as high as it is. What percentage of Carrboro workers work at Orange County jobs in Chapel Hill?

Again, people working in town/out of town and in county/out of county, this time for many Triangle towns.

Same data as Carrboro with other Triangle municipalities added

Note that you can figure some things out that aren't listed by working the two stats together.

For example, we know that there are 10,001 workers in Carrboro. We know that 6818 of them work in Orange County. We know that 1354 of them work in Carrboro. We can then theorize that most of the (6818-1354) 5464 other Orange County employed Carrboro-ers work in Chapel Hill, since there are no other major concentrations of employment in Orange County, other than some in downtown Hillsborough.

Note- of the 33,000 workers in CH/C, 21,000, or roughly 63%, work in Orange County.

Patrick, I have long held mixed feelings about the proposed TTA rail line. We've heard all the arguments pro and con, but I do have one question that I've never heard asked.

All the successful mass transit systems that I've ever ridden
on, either rubber-tired or steel-wheeled,
are hub-and-spoke systems. Their overwhelming function is
to deliver people to some central
point in the morning and take them away in the evening.

What TTA proposes is totally different. It is located not because there is a needed hub fed by spokes, but rather located
to take advantage of a freight train corridor.
Excluding really dense cities which we don't compare to,
do you know any successful commuter rail line that is not a hub-and-spoke system?

Joe, you're right- to a large degree, the TTA line is very different from most everything else on the drawing board these days.

The closest analog might be the Trinity Railway Express between Dallas and Fort Worth, (http://www.trinityrailwayexpress.org/) but then again, there are lots of things that make that line a poor comparison to TTA as well, most notably the size of center city Dallas. The reason for similarity to TTA phase I is that ridership flows both ways morning and evening, not largely in one way and very little in the contraflow direction from the urban core.

The hub-and-spoke systems tend to serve one very large concentration of jobs in a metro region. TTA Phase I is unique in that it serves several smaller but significant job concentrations (Downtown Raleigh, NCSU, Duke Hospital, Downtown Durham, IBM Campus) today and high job concentration growth areas (Triangle Metro Center, Downtown Cary) tomorrow.

That said, I think the case for rail into Chapel Hill/Carrboro is quite different. At some point, I should probably write out a longer thesis paper on the web that explains what I think would make sense in CH/C and why.

Well, I certainly wouldn't want to model anything after a Dallas light rail system. I've lived in Dallas for a total of 14 of my 38 years and never heard of it 'til Patrick's post, so my guess is its remarkably under utilized.

Trinity Railway Express is a commuter rail system, not a light rail system, and most of its stops are not in Dallas.

For more information on the distinctions, please read Durham resident Ernest Robl's helpful rail typology page.
http://www.robl.w1.com/Transport/modes.htm

Despite Katrina's confusion, Dallas does have a Light Rail system which opened in 1996.

History of DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit)
http://www.dart.org/newsroommain.asp?zeon=history

As for its utilization, the latest stats in the National Transit Database were 2002, in which Dallas Light rail carried 13.7 million passengers a total distance of 74.4 million miles.

In 2002, the Dallas Commuter Rail carried 1.3 million passengers a distance of 16.1 million miles.

Of course, it is now 2005. Assuming ridership generally grows with population growth, it is likely that Dallas area rail transit carried 15 million or so people this year a distance of approximately 93 million miles, which is the distance between the earth and the sun.

Draw your own conclusions about whether or not rail in Dallas is "remarkably underutilized."

Patrick, do you know how big DFW is? The Dallas area is perhaps the definitve example of sprawl. So each trip is many more miles that a typical metro area.

Take a look at the other number. 1.3 million people in an entire year. There are about 5.5 million people in the area. That means that less than 25% of the population took the train once a year. Only 4 out of a thousand residents of the metroplex take DART on any given week. And that's for a whopping $328 million dollars this year alone.

And if you'd have called in DART ( Dallas Area Rapid Transit), I'd have known what you were talking about, and I've taken Dart to the airport many times. I can guarantee you it's under utilized. I've never been in a DART car with more than 3 people in it.

.4% of the population for 328 million dollars. Doesn't sound like a model for success to me.

There are considerable problems with Katrina's analysis assessing the benefits and utility of transportation projects. Here they are:

1. Understanding the Ecological Fallacy and the MAUP (Modifiable Areal Unit Problem)
http://www.jratcliffe.net/research/ecolfallacy.htm

The ecological fallacy and MAUP often come up when discussing spatial data. In short, by using an overly broad geographic area to draw conclusions about a smaller area, you can make significant mistakes in discerning trends.

An example would be “I-40 stretches 3000 miles from Barstow, CA to Wilmington, NC, and yet it carries less than 1 percent of the travel in the United States! That doesn't sound like a very successful outcome to me!”

It should be obvious that such a complaint is silly, since it suggests that I-40 (which runs through the southeast and southwest) is doing a poor job because it isn't attracting more traffic between say, Minneapolis and Pittsburgh.

Katrina complains that the Trinity Railway Express, which runs pretty much in a straight line from Downtown Dallas to Downtown Forth Worth, carries too small a share of metro-wide trips to be considered a wise investment. So let's look at the TRE map, which has no stations east of central Dallas:

http://www.trinityrailwayexpress.org/map.html

Now let's look at the Metro Area map:

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?searchtype=address&country=US&addto...

By counting the population of the entire metro area, Katrina's analysis essentially complains that TRE isn't doing enough to move people between Richardson, TX and Mesquite, TX, where of course no TRE rail service exists. (Katrina's analysis also counts a demographically specified population of actual rail commuters against an unspecified population that she considers potential commuters, which includes toddlers and schoolchildren, but that's beside the point)

A better question would be “what percentage of rush hour trips does TRE capture in the corridor between Downtown Dallas and Downtown Ft Worth?”

2. Understanding Peak Demand

A second problem with transportation decisionmaking is that it is challenging and expensive to serve peak demand, and efforts to serve peak demand leave facilities underutilized at non-peak times, as well as during peak times in non-peak traffic flow directions. This is why I-540 is an absolute parking lot at 5 P.M. on weekdays, and virtually empty on Sunday mornings.

It's also why CHT buses are standing room only from Friday Center to UNC Student Union in the morning, but then empty going by Fetzer Gym 5 minutes later as the bus returns back to the Friday Center for another inbound trip. Are those return trips to the Friday Center “wasteful?”

Looking at photos of the TRE trains, I don't know why you'd spend the extra money on double-decker railcars unless you needed the capacity.

http://world.nycsubway.org/perl/show?39626

So back to Katrina's airport experience. TRE opened in 1996, but did not connect to Fort Worth until 2001. This means that during those first 5 years, TRE was a one-way peak flow line of commuters into central Dallas in the morning, and out in the evening. That means if you lived in Dallas and were heading to the airport prior to 2001, you were traveling in the non-peak direction and very likely to have a much smaller number of people on the train.

Theoretically, you would also see this pattern change when the rail link to Ft Worth was completed because the line would suddenly access 2 major job centers instead of 1. In fact, this is exactly what happened. Ridership increased dramatically (almost 1 million NEW annual passengers) after the Ft Worth connection came online- look at the 2002 numbers. (see link below)

http://www.dart.org/newsroommain.asp?zeon=TREfacts

*******

The point of all this is that public officials have many empirical methods available to accurately analyze the effectiveness of transportation systems.

“I took the train to the airport in Texas a half dozen times several years ago and I can guarantee I know how it works” is not one of them.

Patrick,

As always, thanks for providing a well-informed analysis. Your posts are always so strongly supported by references that it is sometimes intimidating. Keep up the good work.

Patrick, that is precisely the point that Joe's argument was making.Light rail is a difficult solution in an area that does not have a central hub, and that is the problem in Dallas, and a relevent question in any Triangle light rail solutions. The problem with the metroplex, like the Triangle from a public transit standpoint is that there is no density at any one given destination. You used DART as a "good" example of a non-hub and spoke light rail system, and I'm telling you, if you only achieve DART-like market penetration, you will have a very costly failure on your hands. It is only federal funding that keeps it alive, as state and local governments have deemed it a lost cause.

And, FYI, I took Dart from a stop near my home to DFW twice a week ( to the airport on Sunday and from the airport on Friday) EVERY week for three years, and it IS underutilized, period.

"... and it is underutilized, period." Great dialoguing, Katrina.

At this point, Katrina is simply making stuff up. See below:

You used DART as a “good” example of a non-hub and spoke light rail system, and I'm telling you, if you only achieve DART-like market penetration, you will have a very costly failure on your hands. It is only federal funding that keeps it alive, as state and local governments have deemed it a lost cause.

The dominant trend in financing of public transportation over the last 10-15 years since ISTEA passed in 1991 is that the federal government is a large partner in capital expenditures, and a small participant in ongoing operational expenditures. Conversely, state and local contributions provide the lion's share of operational funds, which is what “keeps [the agency] alive.” So what about Dallas?

DART Financial Statement (Audited by Deloitte and Touche) 2004:
http://www.dart.org/DARTAR2004Financials.pdf

Page 7 reports that in 2004, Federal grants made up 11% of DART's operating budget- 89% is state and local. This report also specifies that in 2003, federal contribution to DART operations was 1%, with 99% state and local.

This is further confirmed by examining DART's National Transit Database annual profile report, filed with NTD on 12/10/2004.

DART 2003 NTD statistical profile
http://www.ntdprogram.com/NTD/Profiles.nsf/2003+All/6056/$File/6056.pdf

Notice that federal funds make up 32% of capital expenditures, but only 1% of operating funds.

That's a lot of state and local dollars spent on a lost cause.

Of course, I'm not surprised, this is the general direction of federal policy. Locally, we can see the same pattern with Chapel Hill Transit:
http://www.ntdprogram.com/NTD/Profiles.nsf/2003+All/4051/$File/4051.pdf

But beyond making stuff up, Katrina continues to misread my posts:

You used DART as a “good” example of a non-hub and spoke light rail system, and I'm telling you, if you only achieve DART-like market penetration, you will have a very costly failure on your hands.

I did no such thing. Joe referred to the TTA Phase I line (Raleigh to Durham), about which I said:

Joe, you're right- to a large degree, the TTA line is very different from most everything else on the drawing board these days.
The closest analog might be the Trinity Railway Express between Dallas and Fort Worth, (www.trinityrailwayexpress.org/) but then again, there are lots of things that make that line a poor comparison to TTA as well, most notably the size of center city Dallas.

My comparison was based on similarity of operating characteristics, not any normative point about whether or not the Dallas COMMUTER RAIL was a good model to emulate. I went on to say:

That said, I think the case for rail into Chapel Hill/Carrboro is quite different. At some point, I should probably write out a longer thesis paper on the web that explains what I think would make sense in CH/C and why.

Back to the original topic- I really think any movement towards sustainability is going to include a significant change in energy use per capita, and transportation is a huge part of that equation.

Patrick,

I actually like light rail. It's my favorite form of public transit. I'm not against the idea. I merely remain unconvinced of the viability of a light rail system for this area.

And, in regards to your numbers, DART has failed to perform under Texas's "fatal flaw" legislation, which means it's failed to meet target objectives for X number of years, thus my comment, it is underused, period.

When a particular transit line fails under "fatal flaw" laws, it becomes uneligible for certain types of funding. DART has been saved by state officials diverting federal monies that were originally targeted for community block grants and other federal aid for the development of the relatively poor neighborhoods in cities like Irving, which is on the DART line.

It's in the news in Dallas all the time that monies meant for other things are funding DART.

It's in the news in Dallas all the time that monies meant for other things are funding DART.

Really? I bet you could produce a lot of weblinks to news articles to prove it, then.

To paraphrase Amory Lovins a few weeks back- "In God we trust, all others bring data (or citable sources)."

I just searched the Texas Legislature's website for the term "fatal flaw" and turned up no results.

www.capitol.state.tx.us

To double-check, I used Google's individual site search feature, and again turned up no legislation by that name.

Google Search of Tex Legislature

The "fatal flaw" legislation is almost identical to the "sunset clause" in the federal budget that Bush has been trying to pass. It's a coloquialism, but I'll e-mail a friend of mine in Austin, and post the actual verbage from state finance code later.

This sounds like an interesting event sponsored by Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, the Museum of Life and Science and WGBH Boston, producer of NOVA scienceNOW.

From the MLS:
“On Thursday, November 10 at 7:00 pm at Tyler's Tap Room in downtown Durham's American Tobacco Historic District we'll kick off a series of cafés on issues at the intersection of science and society.

Our first café considers a problem of pressing interest to everyone: auto fuel efficiency and current and future research and policy options. Join researchers Tom Meyer of UNC-CH's Chemistry Department and Rob Jackson of Duke's Center on Global Change to get their take, and then join in the dialogue.

To find out more about this science café, the researchers and the central problem we plan to address, follow the link:
http://www.sigmaxi.org/programs/public/durhamcafe.shtml

Space is very limited, so please RSVP to cafe@sigmaxi.org as soon as possible.
http://www.sigmaxi.org/programs/public/durhamcafe.shtml”

It's a coloquialism, but I'll e-mail a friend of mine in Austin, and post the actual verbage from state finance code later.

13 days later..........?

To be fair to Katrina, Patrick--she may have e-mailed her friend, and said friend may not have replied. Plus--there was this ELECTION that happened...

Oh please. If this really were true she would be making more of an effort to defend her statement.

Well, you know best.