Setting the Record Straight

Somehow it's unsurprising that, in our state's game of political brinkmanship between PennDOT and Amtrak, the right wing supports killing the daily Pennsylvanian. The right wing's op-eds are fact-free tiresome rehashes. So fact-free, in fact, that in an amusing inversion of the norm, the comments are more educated than the articles themselves.

It is interesting that both rags appear to hail from the Pittsburgh area, and of course one--the Tribune-Review--makes the leap that Pittsburgh's ridership situation was symptomatic of the line as a whole:

Total Pittsburgh station passenger counts are falling, and The Pennsylvanian — with just one morning departure and one evening arrival there daily — “almost certainly” is serving “fewer than 100,000 per year or 270 people per day” and losing riders, which means even higher future subsidies, he writes.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Only one Pennsylvanian station suffered from declining ridership last year; as I've already explained, Pittsburgh suffers from a scheduling quirk that necessarily undermines its boarding counts (that is, departures are either too early or too late).

And in direct contradiction to the article's claims,  the Pennsylvanian's total ridership rose last year, as it had the year before and the year before that. The most recent figure I know of is a ridership of 207,016, a 2.2% increase over the prior year. This is not the Fort Pitt, whose ridership was 30 a day when it was discontinued. Rising ridership means more demand for the train--implying the most harmful possible move is to cut it.

Third--again, as I've already explained--the Pennsylvanian is price-competitive to the Turnpike for cross-state trips. It's not I-80 it's competing against. At any given time the effective cost for traversing the state on the Turnpike is a $30 toll plus approximately $30 in gas--that is, $60 total. Yes, the Turnpike is faster to Harrisburg--but the Pennsylvanian clearly supports other niches.

Riding The Pennsylvanian to Harrisburg costs $40 and takes 51⁄2 hours with stops. Dr. Haulk notes that Megabus has three daily nonstop Pittsburgh-Harrisburg trips that cost $14 or $16 and take 31⁄2 to 4 hours.

Dr. Haulk misses the point. It's not Pittsburgh that is fueling the Pennsylvanian in its current iteration--it's Altoona, Lewistown, Huntingdon--places where Megabus doesn't stop. And guess what? Altoona, Tyrone, Lewistown, Huntingdon--all have mid-morning or midday departures! Again, Pittsburgh's ridership isn't suffering because the train is a bad train, per se--it is because the train's schedule is built around convenience for the other side of Horseshoe Curve. Or, to put it bluntly, Pittsburgh's Pennsylvanian ridership is so low because there's only one Pennsylvanian--and it's oriented to Philadelphia.

Don't agitate to cut a useful service for Altoonans, Tyronians, Lewistowners, and Huntingdonians, friend Pittsburghers. Agitate instead to add a train useful to you.

But it's the Sentinel that commits the most grievous sins. When it says

If the state’s going to spend money on rail transportation, it should do so where money would be better spent. Continuing to upgrade the Harrisburg-to-Philadelphia line, or investing with NJ Transit on plans to bring commuter rail to the Scranton area, seem more palpable than maintaining money-losing service to Pittsburgh,

it is comparing apples and oranges (at the very least). The Keystones are (supposed to be) hourly service; naturally, when the train comes once an hour instead of once a day, it is significantly easier to take it. Lancaster demonstrates this. The still-a-long-ways-away NJ Transit Scranton proposal would probably not even be hourly past East Stroudsburg. But these trains run as corridor commuter trains. The Pennsylvanian is, at its heart, an intercity train linking Pennsylvania's two great urban heartbeats.

The sad thing is that the Sentinel bulldozed through the truth on its way to its fatuous conclusion.

Rail experts say that the line could prove profitable and popular one day, but getting there would require tens or hundreds of millions of dollars — some subsidized at the federal level, to be sure, but some on the backs of Pennsylvania taxpayers — to realign and straighten the route to allow for high-speed access.

Probably Almost certainly not the best quote, given that running speed can be brought up quite a bit in the current infrastructural envelope--but this, at least, hints at where we can start. It is not eliminating what is very much a useful service; it is not by investing the many billions of capital needed to make it full-fat HSR into the line whole. It is by incremental additions, incremental improvements. You can't justify infrastructural investment by divesting the infrastructure you already have.

And the first of these improvements is a second daily train, oriented to Pittsburgh rather than Philadelphia. Do that, and be surprised by how suddenly useful the train becomes.

Quick Note about the Daily Pennsylvanian

So PennDOT and Amtrak are engaged in a chicken game for the question: Whose responsibility is it to fund the Daily Pennsylvanian? Neither side is stepping up; each is looking for the other to take on the responsibility of funding it. In all this, naturally, the train--and the service it provides--loses; the worst-case scenario is the loss of a daily train between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Think about that for a second. No train around Horseshoe Curve. No service to Altoona or Lewistown, Johnstown or Tyrone, Greensburg or Latrobe. Several of these towns--principally east of Horseshoe Curve--have growing ridership. Yet ridership in Pittsburgh is flat, even declining.

Why is this? It's a matter of convenience. The train leaves Philly around noon and reaches Pittsburgh in the evening; it leaves Pittsburgh early in the morning and reaches Philly in the early afternoon. It takes 5.5 hours to traverse the Appalachians, from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh. The Turnpike takes the same time to get you all the way there.

So--inconvenient arrivals and departures from Pittsburgh, coupled with a convenient alternative; convenient arrivals and departures from Altoona, Tyrone, and Huntingdon, with a relatively inconvenient alternative. That explains the odd ridership pattern we see on the train.

Now, the next element is something lots of people tend to forget: the Turnpike ain't free. In fact, although it's a five-hour trip from Philly to Pittsburgh, it's also $26.50, usually plus overpriced gas at Sideling Hill. Try it for yourself. It's not like the Turnpike has a lock on the market purely because we're subsidizing the road, the way it is for, say, the Buffalo-Pittsburgh market. In fact, the Amtrak fare, $54.00, is price-competitive with the Turnpike. (Think about it: a $30 Turnpike toll plus $30 for gas at Sideling Hill is about the same as a one-way Amtrak fare.) It's not time-competitive, but it doesn't really need to be to begin building ridership; it can appeal to time-rich demographics, like students and weekenders, and start worrying about time-sensitive travelers later. In fact, this is the very way its ridership is growing where the service is convenient.

What it needs to be is as convenient out of Pittsburgh as it is out of Philadelphia and central Applachia. In other words, what it needs is another daily service that leaves and arrives in Pittsburgh around noon, to complement the section that leaves and arrives in Philadelphia around noon. This would better tap the Pittsburgh element of the market, and build a ridership base to make improvements like, say, hourly service to Johnstown or line improvements to 110 mph running speed.

There's a market there. The will to tap it is what's lacking.

A House Divided

In the news today, SEPTA's head, Joe Casey, is blasting the House Transportation bill. The problems with this bill are well known.

Now, the bill is in one sense obvious political posturing. It is impassable in every sense of the word--no Democrat in their right mind would possible vote in favor of it. It is a transportation bill as the ultra-regressive Tea Partiers would see it. It completely ignores major changes in transportation demands occurring among younger Americans. It would benefit one constituency and one constituency only--the Tea Party's core constituency--to the exclusion of all others.

But, in another sense, it is denial. Active denial. A willing ignorance, a nostalgia that we can return to the 1950s.

The reality? We can't. The United States passed peak oil availability in 2005. Vehicle miles traveled, unsurprisingly, peaked at the same time. We just lived through one oil price shock--in 2007-8--and are ramping up to another one. This is something the new generation gets, in a very visceral sense, and whenever possible they're choosing to live where there's no need for a car to get through the day.

This is our voice, a voice missing from the Tea Party and this boondoggle bill: we want, and demand--to the point that many cities now have powerful lobbies for them--bike lanes. We prefer taking mass transit. We usually have more than one thing going on at a time, job-wise, and time is precious. Too precious to be spent driving an hour or more every day.

And those of us who have decided to learn about how our transportation system works, who want to work for it, also know that our roads far, far overbuilt relative to how much we can spend maintaining it, while everything else is utterly opposite.

We know that the only way to reduce driving is to make driving less necessary and less convenient. And so the House transportation bill is utterly antithetical to our needs.

Tea Party Urban Planning Pt II

 Planetizen got wind of the California Tea Party group actively "engaged" in land-use planning. A few posts ago, I criticized the group's approach, and used this criticism to demonstrate my critique that the Tea Party is really just a bunch of hypocrites using a warped version of libertarianism as cover for retention of a faltering status quo.

The Tea Party isn't really libertarian in nature. The California group demonstrates this to a T: their primary focus is in preserving the "entitlements" they've grown used to...a large house with a large lawn and a car for each parent, each of their 2.3 children, and possibly their pet(s) too. There's nothing wrong* with this as a lifestyle choice, but to the Tea Partiers, it has been warped into a God-given right that every red-white-and-blue-bleeding American needs to have. What if otherwise reasonable people, like you or I, don't want it? Well, tough balls.

But you see, there's the rub. That's not choice. And without choice, you can't have freedom. "Freedom Is Slavery" is really a right and proper motto for these Tea Partiers, for a "freedom" without choice is a false freedom--a slavery. And that segues into the ultimate irony: this position is the antithesis of the libertarian ideology. That's right: the Tea Party is to libertarianism as al-Qaeda is to Sunni Islam, or televangelism to mainstream Christianity. It's a warped, perverted, obnoxious fringe view so secure in the dogmatization of its entitlements that it can't see there's another way of doing things, and one that may well be better in the long run.

By contrast, libertarianism really is about choice. If these Tea Partiers really were at all libertarian, no matter what their opinions on the planning effort may be, there's one thing they should unconditionally support: road privatization. But they don't, and they won't, because doing so exposes many of the hidden costs of suburban living currently just subsidized away. They don't want a balanced playing field, or real choice, or freedom: they just want to put blinders on and have things stay the way they are.

But the world is changing around them, and that ain't gonna happen.
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* Well, other than the insane social, sociological, psychological, cultural, and ecological costs, of course.

Tea Party Urban Planning? Bad for America!

Found this article on the intertubez (thanks Urban Planning Blog). Here's a choice excerpt:

When planners asked audience members to rank the importance of open space like parks, Gass exploded. “Open space also includes people’s private property,” she said. “You cannot ask people to vote on something that violates others’ private property.”

Lou Hexter, who was leading the exercise, tried to placate her, saying quietly, “It’s good to hear everyone’s opinion, but we need to ——.”

“Back off!” Gass yelled.

To the Tea Party, a lawn counts as open space? I smell something rotten.

Lawns in the United States come about as a result of setback requirements. That is, the zoning code mandates that a structure on a property be set so-and-so feet from the street, from the sides, and from the rear. Philadelphia's R1 zone, for example, requires 65% "open space" on the lot via these setbacks. That is, the lawns are regulated in.

This is manifestly at odds with the Tea Party's self-proclaimed less-regulation ethos. But it is in keeping with Tea Partiers' actions. This "movement" is really a hypocrisy on a grand scale: it uses far-rightist ideology to promulgate the current status quo--at all costs. Scott Walker, despite the truth of rising gas prices, elects to spend money on idiotic and shakily justified road-widening projects while rejecting guaranteed monies for improved rail service--remembering that what passes for rail service in most of the U.S. would be considered barely rudimentary anywhere else in the developed world. Christie axes ARC (a political decision whose legal ramifications will haunt him the rest of his career) in favor of bailing out troubled and ever-incomplete Meadowlands Xanadu, or whatever they're calling it now--a shopping mall whose success in an era when shopping malls are seen as passé is dubious at best. Florida nixes high-speed rail (again). And these ideological vultures are circling Calfornia's incipient system.

Tea Partiers see driving as "freedom" and trains as "socialism". But I have news for them: the Interstates are socialist! They are a public commons in this country, but elsewhere in the world (France) they are privately tolled and operated. They are private. And how much public transportation money do we spend on them? The system is 99.9% complete (there is a section in Mississippi which was never finished) and so any road widenings or new proposals on the Interstates are done for one reason and one reason only: to promote sprawl, as defined by the overly-restrictive, overly-regulated land-use planning of most suburban municipalities. But demand for this sprawl died in 2007 and it ain't coming back.

It is an irony that California Tea Partiers are, instead of de-regulating our built environment, thereby making development more flexible, implicitly assuming our over-regulation status quo as an ultimate good, and continuing this over-regulation, due to their own narrow view of what a home should be. But the market is fighting this regulation--and so the Tea Partiers are fighting the market. Libertarian ethos elevates the market to apotheosis: to libertarians, the market is sacred, and must not be fought. So the Californian Tea Partiers have discarded libertarianism: through their actions, they prove they are not libertarian.

It is unsurprising, however, when one considers the cultural underpinnings of the Tea Party. Narrowness and dogma in thought produce narrowness and dogma in politics and policy. Intellectual justifications, to this anti-intellectual subculture, are just a game of smoke and mirrors. But the Tea Party's influence far exceeds their actual numbers, and in any event, its message is antithetical to Generation Y. It's at its obstinate, obstructionist apogee, and as it becomes forced to define itself by actions and not just words--we see these actions and we don't like what we see.

Which is why the end of this article brings me such a nod of grim relief:

Even with the group of vocal critics, when the audience voted on priorities for the Bay Area, the top five were: daily needs close to home, clean air, convenient access to jobs, water conservation and lower carbon emissions. “Large homes with big yards” was near the bottom.

The words flash onto a black screen: “The ‘New World Order’ is here.” Dramatic music swells as the message continues: “One Global Vision, Designed by the United Nations, To Strip you of Your Freedom.”
What could be so sinister? According to the video posted on the East Bay Tea Party’s website, it’s the Sustainable Communities Strategy being developed by two of the wonkiest governmental bodies in the Bay Area: the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments.

Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/12whC)

The words flash onto a black screen: “The ‘New World Order’ is here.” Dramatic music swells as the message continues: “One Global Vision, Designed by the United Nations, To Strip you of Your Freedom.”
What could be so sinister? According to the video posted on the East Bay Tea Party’s website, it’s the Sustainable Communities Strategy being developed by two of the wonkiest governmental bodies in the Bay Area: the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments.

Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/12whC)