Tag Archives: BRT
Setting the Record Straight: the Post Got it Wrong in their Anti-Elrich Editorial
June 15, 2018 David Lublin
The Washington Post sure has done a number on Marc Elrich.
In a second editorial endorsing David Blair for county executive, the Post quoted Elrich stating "I prefer to put jobs in Frederick" as proof that he "wants to focus employment elsewhere" – seemingly a damning charge against a candidate for Montgomery County executive.
Setting the Record Straight
The quote is taken from the Greater Greater Washington (GGW) blog post arguing that "Marc Elrich is not the right choice for Montgomery County Executive."
Broadly, Elrich isn't convinced Montgomery County needs to add many new homes or residents, or jobs. Many people with jobs in Bethesda or DC are now living in Frederick County and other outlying areas and driving through Montgomery to get to work. We asked Elrich what he'd do for these folks, and his answer was, "I prefer to put jobs in Frederick." He'd encourage the growth of both households and jobs to happen there, and in Prince George's County, and elsewhere.
I listened to the GGW interview with Elrich and the quote is taken out of context and utterly distorts the record. Marc makes clear that he wants economic growth, indeed that it is vital to the county's future because our current budget trajectory is not sustainable into the future. If there is no money, he realizes that there will be no way to pay for efforts to do more to help people in poverty and others try to get a leg up.
So what did Marc Elrich mean when he said "I prefer to put jobs in Frederick"?
It was part of a much larger discussion of housing policy but the broader point was that it would be good to have jobs in many locales, including Frederick City, so the people up there don't have to commute so far, which would also help alleviate traffic in Montgomery – an enormous concern – and help the environment.
He'd like to see more people have shorter commutes and more jobs near them around the region. That includes Montgomery, where many people suffer in traffic on the American Legion Bridge every day and probably would just assume not live their life stressing about whether traffic on the bridge is going to prevent them from picking the kids up. Moreover, the discussion was taking place in the context of the regional Council of Governments' goal for housing and jobs around the region, which unsurprisingly includes plans for more of both in Frederick.
More broadly, Elrich doesn't see economic activity as a zero-sum game where Frederick's gain is necessarily Montgomery's loss. Ironically, the Post has repeatedly lamented that DC, Maryland and Virginia didn't come together on a bid for Amazon, an idea in the same vein, so I would have thought they'd appreciate this bow toward regional cooperation. The late Kevin Kamenetz didn't bid for Amazon because he thought it belonged in Baltimore City and that Baltimore County would nevertheless benefit.
Both the Post and GGW have distorted the record. They clearly think Elrich is wrong for Montgomery County. But they shouldn't twist his words out of all recognition to make their argument. It just undermines their case.
George Leventhal's GGW Problem
Voters would find many of the ideas that GGW pushes hard in their interview far more shocking than Marc's points. GGW's version of "smart growth" doesn't focus primarily on areas close to transit hubs and stations but promotes much higher density at almost any location with a bus line or they deem bikeable.
The heavily trafficked River Road Corridor is a prime example of where they'd like to see far more housing units built. They'd like to have seen far more density at Westbard, and to extend the Purple Line down the Capital Crescent Trail there. Previously, they've attacked the Kentlands as insufficiently dense, so their vision of "smart growth" is quite different from what many argue is good suburban development.
They also want Elrich to support allowing people to sell single-family homes to be torn down for high density buildings. Elrich sensibly pointed out that people who buy homes want some security in the neighborhood and that people who don't want to move just end up next to a tall building with super high property taxes that they can't pay. My guess is that GGW's platform would not exactly get people to flock to their endorsed candidate, George Leventhal.
Most bizarrely, while smart growth advocates heavily pushed for more density around Metro and the Purple Line because there is no more room to build, GGW turns that on its head in its post inveighing against Elrich, claiming that he would open up far too little of the county to development. In my view, that's not smart growth. It's just development writ large.
Elrich's Growth Agenda
Elrich's promotion of a bus-rapid transit system for the county is probably the most pro-growth and pro-smart growth initiative launched in recent years, which makes GGW's opposition all the stranger. My hope is that it would help start to break the Gordian knot of conflict between civic associations and developers by providing a real transit system for Montgomery that addresses transportation issues even as we grow.
GGW touts Leventhal as a proponent of "real" BRT because he wants it wholly in separate lanes, which would require more property takings, make it much more expensive, and therefore unlikely to happen. Marc argues sensibly for reversible BRT lanes, as there is no need for a separate lane going against rush hour traffic. That's spending smart, something our government badly needs.
Just four years ago, I watched George Leventhal taking a passive aggressive negative approach towards Elrich's BRT proposal without outright opposing it during a debate. He also lambasted now Council President Hans Riemer for the seemingly mild proposal to spend more on and improve Ride-On Bus service, an idea that David Blair now wants to put on steroids. I understand GGW applauds George for his staunch Purple Line support. But as on the minimum wage, he has been highly changeable on taking their transit vision into the future.
We have a lot of excellent candidates for county executive beyond David Blair and Marc Elrich, including former Rockville Mayor Rose Krasnow, Councilmember Roger Berliner and Del. Bill Frick. There are excellent cases for all of them and plenty of room to critique Elrich's housing and other policies. I haven't voted yet and am still looking closely at them. Let the debate continue but based on their actual records and positions.
BRTFrederickGeorge LeventhalGGWGreater Greater WashingtonMarc ElrichWashington Post
Bus Rapid Transit, Metro, transportation
Moving Forward on Public Transit
Making This Work Should Be Our #1 Priority
In a series of posts, I've outlined how the major light-rail and streetcar projects are in deep trouble and why. Today's final post completes the more recent portion of the series on what we should do to spend smart to produce workable, effective transit.
Fix Metro
Members of the Maryland General Assembly have rightly come to the conclusion that they have had enough of the failing WMATA status quo and want to grapple in a serious way with the issue. Fixing the Metro system should be our #1 transit priority because it remains the lungs of the region's public transit network. We need a serious assessment of how to turn the corner on this one because the problems have only been getting worse. MTA also has major problems that need attention and merits more oversight.
Reorganize Existing Bus Lines
I love solutions that don't cost any money. This isn't a case of getting something for nothing (that just doesn't happen) but getting a lot more out of our existing budget. Houston just showed the way by reorganizing its bus routes in a smart way:
The old system, like many bus routes in the United States, expended a lot of resources on very low-ridership routes for the sake of saying there's "a bus that goes there." The new plan says that the focus should be to provide reasonably frequent service on routes where reasonably frequent service will attract riders. That does mean that some people are further than ever from a transit stop. But it means that many more Houstonians will find themselves near a useful transit stop.
Just check out the before and after maps. I've often heard advocates of light-rail claim that we need it because there is no bus route that does not connect place A to place B. But this is, after all, an easily solvable problem without building light rail. In Houston, the difference is amazing and it didn't cost the city any more money. Now that's smart growth.
Bus-Rapid Transit
Bus-rapid transit (BRT) has real cost-benefit advantages over other more expensive modes. You can build an equivalent mode of transit at a far cheaper price. Montgomery County has already moved forward tentatively in this area. I hope they will continue.
Build Only What We Can Afford to Maintain
The key lesson from Metro is that transit systems take a lot of money to operate and to maintain. Governing recently highlighted an even more disastrous example from the Boston area. Though Boston is a slow-growing area, it embarked on very fast paced transit growth that it could not afford either to build or to maintain. Beyond the system's collapse this winter:
Today the MBTA owes nearly $9 billion in debt and interest, which translates into more than one-quarter of its operating revenue going to debt service. And since money that should have funded maintenance had to be diverted to the legally mandated expansions, the system faces an estimated $5 billion maintenance backlog.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't build anything. It means that we need to spend smart because money is always tight and we need to build future operation and maintenance costs into the plan before we begin construction.
The point of this series was not just to discuss how and why we arrived in our current cul-de-sac of overly expensive projects but how we can get out of it through transit that provide more in the way of transit and economic benefits at a much lower cost and will be more sustainable over the long term.
BRTbus-rapid transitHoustonMetroWMATA
Getting to Yes on Bus-Rapid Transit (BRT)
Former Bethesda Circulator
Yesterday, I detailed some advantages of bus-rapid transit (BRT) over the much more pricey streetcar and light-rail options that the Greater Greater Washington blog plugs very aggressively (yesterday's example here) but now appear to be going nowhere.
So what is the barrier to BRT gaining more traction?
Paying Far More for Image Not Substance
Josh Barro on The Upshot blog at the New York Times put his finger on the source of the problem:
"Bus-based public transit in the United States suffers from an image problem."
That fact, laid out in a 2009 report from the Federal Transit Administration, isn't surprising, but it has led to a perverse outcome: Transit agencies are spending millions of dollars on new rail infrastructure that is no faster than existing bus service, simply because riders perceive a train as better than a bus.
Barro details how New York is now planning to spend $1 billion on an AirTrain from LaGuardia Airport that will go no faster than the existing bus connections. He reports similar investments in streetcars and trains elsewhere that go no or little faster than existing bus routes.
In Washington, the proposed streetcar slows down far more people on buses than will ride the streetcar. This isn't "greater" but grandiose public policy that wastes billions of transit dollars.
Indeed, it's really corporate welfare masked as social justice as it benefits property developers. There is nothing wrong with benefiting developers or other companies if we think that makes good transit policy and economic sense. But it just becomes corporate welfare when we can get the benefits much more cheaply through another similar technology.
Improving BRT's Image
The good news is that FTA has found that gaining acceptance for lower cost BRT occurs with the adoption of straightforward design and marketing solutions:
That 2009 transit report gives reason to believe it's possible. The researchers conducted focus groups with "choice riders" in Los Angeles: people who have cars but sometimes use transit. These riders had an unsurprising preference for trains.
"Riding the bus carries a 'shame factor,' " the researchers found. "Most of the choice riders would not consider using it, or if they did, they would feel ashamed and keep it a secret."
But what the local transit agency marketed as the "Orange Line" — really just a bus route in the San Fernando Valley with high frequencies on a dedicated right of way — managed to gain acceptance among "choice riders."
As it turns out, making buses look as good as light rail or streetcars is just not that hard as this photo from the Montgomery Planning website shows:
We can even make them look like streetcars, complete with hard and uncomfortable benches, as the former Bethesda Circulator bus (shown at top) demonstrated for many years. People still ride it even though it now looks like a bright red bus.
These design features and marketing simply have to be far less expensive than the literally billions of dollars more that streetcars and light-rail cost to do the same thing. The good news is that BRT is expanding around the country and so hopefully the unfamiliarity with it will decrease.
Public officials along with transit advocates need to get past the idea that trains are better and more elite or equivalent to faster, heavy rail Metro. They're not. They just waste dollars that could used be to provide more public transit or something else useful. The sooner they realize it, the sooner we might stop spinning our wheels and build something useful and affordable.
Bethesda CirculatorBRTbus-rapid transitFTAGreater Greater WashingtonJosh BarroUpshot
purple line, Red Line, transportation
The Giant Purple Credit Card, Part III: Is Pro-Purple Anti-Transit?
December 11, 2014 David Lublin
The choice to spend vast sums of money on one project requires foregoing other choices. The tangled finances for the Purple and Red Lines (see also here) render it especially obvious. When the fares from Baltimore's public transit system are needed as a backstop in case Purple Line fares are lower than hoped, the use of the Transportation Trust Fund (TTF) for non-Purple purposes is obviously going to be quite limited.
The plans to move ahead also with Baltimore's Red Line should further assure that the TTF is tied up for literally decades. Indeed, the two projects have been closely tied together in order to build political support. It is hard to imagine moving ahead with one project without the other, as legislators in one metro area are unlikely to want to fund an incredibly expensive project in the other unless their constituents share in the benefits.
Existing Transit Needs
Montgomery and Prince George's County already have an extensive public transit system. Both are integrated into WMATA's Metro and Metrobus system. Each operates its own bus system: RideOn and TheBus. Both are also tied into the MARC system.
All parts of the system have suffered from cutbacks and need investment in infrastructure. Metro, the lungs of Washington's transit system, remains in particularly dire need of money to maintain and to upgrade its infrastructure. Placing so many chips on the Purple Line will constrain the ability of the State to aid Metro–Montgomery and Prince George's cannot expect to get all of Maryland's transportation funding.
Less widely heralded in Montgomery in the face of perennial Metro problems–endless single tracking, escalators that don't work, overly crowded trains at rush hour despite stagnating ridership–have been the cutbacks to MARC and Ride-On. Oddly, we reduced transit service designed to connect to the Purple Line even as we move forward with building it.
Foregoing Other Transit Opportunities
Some key supporters of the Purple Line recognize these implicit tradeoffs even if they don't advertise them. In the at-large County Council debate in Chevy Chase, new Council President George Leventhal derided Councilmember Hans Riemer's support for additional Ride-On service. He and other Purple Line supporters have also expressed great skepticism about the proposed countywide bus-Rapid Transit System (RTS).
The irony here is that for the cost of building the Purple Line, we could build a RTS that would serve all parts of the County. Indeed, a Purple Line incorporated into an RTS would accomplish most of the goal at far less cost than the proposed light-rail system even according to MTA's own analysis (see also here).
Purple Line supporters like to accuse opponents of being anti-transit–it's a good simple communication meme that boils down a complex decision to good versus bad. Except that wanting to spend transportation dollars wisely and get the most for our tax dollars is pro-transit. Opposition to expanding bus service and continued negativity regarding an RTS that could serve the whole county sure doesn't sound pro-transit.
We shouldn't starve our existing transit system and forego future opportunities in order to build the Purple Line and the Red Line. Ironically, we could build cheaper RTS versions of both that would save the State billions–not chump change–and allow for additional transit and road improvements that would truly aid economic development and the ability of all Marylanders to reach jobs far more broadly. Now that's smart growth.
BRTbus-rapid transitGeorge LeventhalHans RiemerMontgomery CountyMontgomery County CouncilPrince George'sRTSsmart growth