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Regional Rapid Bus Transit Requires HOT Thinking

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(Just shocking to see Garamendi use the Bay Area as the example here. Worth a read tho. – promoted by Julia Rosen)

California’s San Francisco Bay Area, a beacon for the world’s most ambitious and entrepreneurial, is in some ways a victim of its own success. Decades of regional growth have created a highway and public transportation infrastructure incapable of meeting the demands of commuters.

As a Contra Costa Times editorial recently explained:

“The worsening traffic congestion in the Bay Area is having an increasingly negative impact on the quality of life in the region. The millions of people who commute to work daily lose valuable time, waste gasoline and add to air pollution. Businesses suffer and new enterprises are discouraged from locating in the area, harming the Bay Area economy.”

The average Bay Area driver spends 39 hours each year stuck in traffic on a regional freeway. Average time spent idling in traffic will rise to 72 hours per year by 2035 if present trends continue. For a host of reasons – including the needless pollution, wasted fuel, and loss of time at work or with family – minimizing congestion should be a priority for regional leaders. And when possible, enticing commuters into a carpooling arrangement or public transportation should be encouraged.

Fortunately, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the regional transportation authority, with input from Bay Area leaders and activists, has crafted an ambitious regional transit plan: Transportation 2035.

There’s more over the flip…

One important component of the plan is the development of a network of high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes in the Bay Area, allowing carpool lanes to turn a profit by permitting single-and-double-occupancy commuters the ability to use the underutilized lanes for a variable fee dependent on traffic at the moment.

Presently, a hodgepodge of carpool lanes appear and disappear throughout the Bay Area’s highway grid, forcing carpool drivers to merge into often heavily congested stretches, particularly near intersections. Under the Transportation 2035 plan, 500 miles of carpool lanes would be converted to HOT lanes, while 300 additional miles of HOT lanes would be constructed over the next 25 years. This would help create a smoother commute for carpoolers and newly minted HOT drivers, encouraging elevated carpool usage and reducing congestion in normal lanes. For example, HOT lanes in San Diego increased carpool usage by 53 percent, while HOT lanes in Minneapolis reduced the number of drivers reporting congestion delays by 20 percent.

By generating revenues from willing HOT drivers, the region will have a somewhat reliable source of revenue to work on other transit projects. Some local transportation officials have urged setting aside specific revenues for public transit, and that is a concept worth exploring, but regardless of the exact funding distribution, the region’s transportation infrastructure will clearly be strengthened by granting regional control over these HOT revenues.

While some have raised concerns that HOT lanes give wealthy commuters special access – and this is a criticism I take very seriously – I would argue that broad access and equity in services are best achieved with a package of transportation solutions that includes the expansion of longer distance rapid transit bus service throughout key corridors in East Bay and South Bay counties. The most effective and profitable rapid transit routes reaching more inland regions of the Bay Area will have to be implemented along the proposed HOT lane network to provide a reliable enough commute to convince riders to leave their cars at home. There is nothing rapid about gridlock.

Rapid transit buses, which along city streets allow bus commuters to avoid most traffic lights, have been shown to be popular and effective in the Bay Area and should be considered a low-cost solution in areas where a more speedy public transit commute is desired but rail is impractical. A study of a busy seven-city 14-mile Bay Area route by the Federal Transit Administration determined that the rapid transit line reduced end-to-end travel time by an average of 12 minutes, leading to a 21 percent reduction in time previously spent on local service non-rapid bus lines. Ridership across all areas of the corridor increased by 8.5 percent as a result of the rapid transit line, and most significantly, around 19 percent of rapid transit riders previously used a car for their commute along the corridor, a reduction of around 1,100 auto trips per day.

No matter how strained our purse strings, a continued state and federal investment is crucial to shift our society toward a more public transit-friendly future. Perhaps ironically, the HOTtest way to encourage an increase in bus ridership may depend on making it easier to drive to work.

Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi chairs the Commission for Economic Development and is a former Deputy Interior Secretary.

California, Environment, Orange County

Should Cars Share the Road With Bikes?

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This morning, I’ve been leisurely perusing through The Register. I may not always agree with their opinions (OK, so it’s more like ALMOST NEVER, but whatever), but I like their local news and I like their columnists. Well anyways, I was reading Gordon Dillow’s column today and I was stopped in my tracks!

I was driving along an open stretch of Pacific Coast Highway the other day, at or just under the posted speed limit of 50 mph, and every hundred yards or so I was passing groups of two or three or a dozen bicyclists pedaling along in the bike lane. And that’s when it occurred to me:

I don’t want to share the road. More specifically, I don’t want to share a high-speed road with bicycle riders – not because it’s that big of a problem for me, but because it’s too dangerous for them.

Now in case you haven’t heard, “Share the Road” is the slogan that’s here to encourage motorists to be more aware of bike riders while on the road, and to cooperate with them. Now this sounds like a good idea, but is it really? Or are we just asking for accidents on places like PCH? Gordon Dillow thinks so, and I think he might be onto something.

Follow me after the flip for more…

So maybe bikes can share the road with cars on streets in residential neighborhoods and other areas where the speed limit is 35 miles per hour and less…

But on roads like sections of Pacific Coast Highway, where speed limits range up to 55 mph, it seems like utter madness to have 3,000- or 4,000-pound cars going 55 mph hurtle past 25-pound bikes going 15 mph – with nothing more substantial between them than a thin white stripe delineating the shoulder or the “bike lane.” It’s like allowing baby strollers on the freeway.

Yes, I know we’ve spent millions of dollars creating bike lanes – as opposed to separate, no-cars-allowed bike “paths” and “trails” – along our streets and highways. I also realize that in this day and age there are few things more politically incorrect than to suggest that cars be given preference over bicycles. After all, in the popular view, motor vehicles are pollution-spewing, gas-guzzling (and gasoline tax-paying) monsters, while bikes are benign, environmentally friendly little munchkins.

But the problem is that when monsters mix with munchkins, the munchkins are inevitably going to get stepped on – too often with tragic results.

Really? Munchkins? Stepped on? Tragic?

Consider the numbers. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in 2005 there were 115 “pedalcyclists” – that’s the NHTSA’s word – killed in traffic crashes in California, nine of them in Orange County. True, bicycle fatalities were only about 3 percent of the total 4,300 traffic-related fatalities in the state, but if you factor in such things as “fatalities per miles traveled,” it’s pretty clear that statistically it’s more dangerous to ride a bike on the roads than to drive a car.

Yep, when we look at the numbers, it just seems unavoidable. It really is dangerous to have bikes on the same lanes as cars. Now we can argue that all this danger is caused by the slower and lighter bikes trying to mingle with the faster and heavier cars. Or perhaps, we can argue that all this danger is caused by all these cars just going too fast…

But the point is that regardless of who is at fault in a car vs. bike collision, it’s the bicyclist who’s going to suffer, physically at least. Once again, no 25-pound bike is ever going to “win” in a collision with a 4,000-pound car – and yet we persist in trying to mix heavy, high-speed motor vehicles with light, low-speed bikes on high-volume, relatively high-speed roads.

And this is why cars and bikes just can’t get along on the same road. And perhaps, we should start taking this into consideration more often when we plan more bike lanes.

Perhaps we should follow Irvine’s example. The City of Irvine has 44.5 miles of off-road bike paths connecting to the 282 miles of on-road bike paths. In Irvine, bike riders have the chance to get off the road once they leave those quieter residential neighborhoods with the slower cars, and get onto these special paths just for bikes that take them to lovely parks and gorgeous nature preserves. Maybe Irvine is doing something right that other communities in Orange County, as well as other parts of California, should pay attention to.

And perhaps we should create more off-road bike paths besides busy highways like what is being done on SR-133/Laguna Canyon Road from Irvine to Laguna Beach. What Gordon Dillow saw recently on PCH also used to happen all the time on Laguna Canyon Road. And sometimes, that mix of speedy bikes and even speedier cars was quite a deadly one. But now, the bikes are getting their own lane. And most likely, this will make both the bike riders and the car drivers both happier and safer.

So perhaps when we’re considering new roads and new bike lanes, we should try to keep the two separated. And perhaps we should especially do this with highways where dozens upon dozens of cars speed by every day at 50 miles per hour. After all, shouldn’t we keep the good, brave bike riders safe and happy? : )

Bay Area, California, Los Angeles Area, Orange County, San Diego

Robbing Peter to Build for Paul: Rural/Urban Divide over Bond Money

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As noted here a few days back, the California Transportation Commission voted earlier this week to  allocate billions more from the recent highway bond to urban projects, including the widening of the 405 through the Sepulveda Pass.

Unfortunately, to do this, the CTC robbed the rural Peter to pay for the urban Paul’s freeway widening, and the folks in Mendocino, San Luis Obispo, and Fontana are *pissed*. Mendocino, which lost funding for the Willits bypass on Highway 101, had this to say, from the Ukiah Daily Record:

“This is clearly a blatant display of power politics disguised as a competitive process. There’s not any other way of saying it,” Dow said, adding that the nine governor-appointed commissioners, not one of whom lives north of the Golden Gate Bridge, acted as if their function was “to bring home the bacon to whatever community they came from,” rather than address the entire state’s needs.

As elfling pointed out last week here at Calitics:

I lived in Los Angeles for most of my life. The traffic in Willits easily compares to the worst of LA. At some times of day the town is in total gridlock. It’s a safety issue, since there are no alternate routes, and logging trucks and semis compete with people driving to Safeway or ambulances trying to get to the hospital.

If you are driving between San Francisco and Eureka, I suggest allocating 30 minutes to travel the 5 miles through Greater Willits.

Steve Lopez, at the LA Times’ Bottleneck Blog, also describes how Fontana feels the shaft:

Said S.B. supervisor Josie Gonzales: “I think it’s definitely a sign of big government versus small government. As the Inland Empire is becoming a force, we are competing one on one with Los Angeles for the same funds. We are a metropolis in the making, and we are trying not to experience the same problems as Los Angeles.”

Who else lost out? Lopez again tallies the casualties:

San Luis Obispo County watched in vain as $58 million to widen a bridge on Highway 101 across the Santa Maria River evaporated.

This bridge is OLD, and narrow, and a bottleneck between Santa Maria, one of the state’s fastest growing cities, and San Luis Obispo’s South County, cities like Nipomo and Arroyo Grande.

A recommendation that Imperial County get $29 million to build a freeway bypass in Brawley was rejected.

Imperial County, one of the state’s poorest, as well as its most heavily Latino, could have used this as a way to spur economic development and to better connect the El Centro-Calexico-Mexicali region north to the Coachella Valley.

Now I’m not saying that the urban areas couldn’t use the money, or that freeways are the best method of rural transportation (although as elfling notes, the Willits bottleneck IS a huge safety problem as well as an inconvenience). But it does seem unfortunate that urban areas won out over deserving rural projects.

I don’t believe the answer is for us to get involved in a fundamentally neoliberal argument of trying to determine who wins and who loses. We need to find ways to rebuild our infrastructure that don’t force urban and rural areas to fight it out.

Further, this suggests to me that the state and the metro areas need to work more closely on crafting solutions for moving people that don’t rely on freeways. You can only widen the 405 or the 101 so much, before you have a freeway too wide to be functional (and nevermind the inevitable homeowner revolts such a project would cause).

It doesn’t have to look like a dream map of SoCal mass transit – although that’d be nice – but to avoid these unfortunate fights, either we “grow the pie” or we find other ways to move people.

Of course, in the end, it comes back to things out of the control of cities and metro areas. The state needs to sort out its financial priorities, and with a federal government wasting nearly $500 billion on stupid wars, money that could otherwise have been used to build both the Willits Bypass and the subway to the sea, along with a whole bunch of other progressive land use projects.