Re: Brisbane Light Rail,Briztram - questions

[qldspeed-spamisevil@geocities.com (qldspeed)]

On Sun, 07 Mar 1999 23:26:04 GMT, McFergus@my-dejanews.com wrote:

>In article <36e27908.18863150@bri-news.tpg.com.au>,
>  qldspeed-spamisevil@geocities.com (qldspeed) wrote:
>>
>>
>> This should debunk the light rail myth... (and a whole lot more)
>>
>> http://www.publicpurpose.com/ut-mspsp.htm
>> http://www.demographia.com/d-amerdr.htm
>> http://www.publicpurpose.com/pn-rail.htm
>
>No, what's said on those sites *is* the light rail myth. They are generally
>pro- automobile ultra right wing think tanks that have light rail in their
>sights because it has been so successful at attracting people onto public
>transport. They like to peddle all sorts of alternatives to light rail, such
>as monorails and Personal Rapid Transit, because these modes have much lower
>proven success rates.

Well, here's another one that stridently dissagrees with ya!

There is nothing ultra right wing that I can see - just plain old
common sense and not so much of the ultra left greenie nonsense.

The following article discloses a lot about the motivation and
thinking behind "modern planning" and it strikes an erie similarity to
how the city of Brisbane is being "congestionized" in order to achieve
the goals of the planners

http://www.teleport.com/~rot/autowar.html <- get the whole article
here


The war on drugs began in the 1980s. The 1990s are witnessing a war on
tobacco. What will be the target of the great social war of the next
decade? The answer is not alcohol or fatty foods, as some might guess.
Instead, the next target of the social engineers and planners will be
automobiles and those who drive them. 

Early skirmishes in this war have been fought with increasing
intensity since the 1960s. Major battlefronts are currently located in
Oregon, Minnesota, Maryland, and Florida. But these local efforts have
only modest support from federal officials. If Al Gore is elected
president in 2000, an all-out federal effort is certain.

The war can be traced, naturally, to a misbegotten and misguided
federal program: the Interstate Highway System. As originally
conceived by President Eisenhower, Interstates were to link cities but
not pass through them. But in the 1950s, most Americans lived in the
cities. City officials couldn't stand the thought of all that federal
money being spent outside their borders, so they quickly transformed
the program into one that served mainly commuters.

That turned out to be a big mistake. Building an Interstate in a city
generally meant wiping out a wide swath of existing homes, businesses,
and parks. The freeways that were built ended up literally paving the
way for urbanists' flight to the suburbs--a flight motivated less by
racial issues than by people's desire to live in pleasant
neighborhoods on large houselots. 

Some freeways met with such objections from local residents and the
beginnings of an anti-automobile coalition that they never got built.
In the wake of Earth Day in the early 1970s, a spate of books were
published with titles like Road to Ruin, Highway to Nowhere, and
Autokind vs. Mankind. The authors of all of these books agreed that
the automobile was one of the greatest horrors ever invented and that
Americans were victims of a dark conspiricy coming out of Flint,
Michigan.

During this period, the most significant victory of the
anit-automobilists was the government takeover--usually with
federal assistance--of virtually all of America's urban transit
systems. Transit had been in steady decline since 1920,
when autos went from being toys for the rich to mobility for everyone.


Transit advocates persuasively argued that, due to youth, age, or
disabilities, some people were simply unable to drive. Society owed
these people as much mobility as the auto offered everyone else, so
society should subsidize transit. But behind this argument lurked a
belief that mass transit was better than personal autos and that we
would all be better off if we could go back to the late-nineteenth
century when most cities had streetcars but no one yet had cars.

The next big goal of the anti-auto crowd was to "bust the trust
fund"--to open up highway funds for mass transit. Since around 1950,
highway user fees in the form of gas taxes, vehicle registrations, and
truck weight taxes had paid for nearly all road and highway
construction in the U.S. (but not for many neighborhood streets, which
were usually built by developers and sometimes maintained out of
property taxes). 

The federal government and most states dedicated these fees
exclusively to roads. This, transit advocates argued, created a bias
in the minds of transportation planners for more roads. Opening up the
funds to all forms of tranportation would supposedly allow planners to
find the best way to spend the money, not just automatically spend it
on more roads.

Transit advocates were unable to convince many states to go along with
this logic. But in 1982 it convinced Congress to dedicate two cents of
the federal gas tax to mass transit. Congress also agreed to allow
cities that had approved but unbuilt interstate highways to convert
the funds for those highways to funding for mass transit. 

In almost every major American city, one of the best ways public
transit agencies can improve transit is to buy more buses to add
service to existing routes. Transit riders are frequency sensitive,
and doubling frequencies can often lead to far more than double the
ridership.

The problem with this strategy is that, in most cities, buying more
buses creates few local jobs and doesn't line the pockets of the
construction companies that were expecting to build the cancelled
interstates. The solution found by San Diego, Portland, Sacramento,
and several other cities was to build a rail transit line. Rail
advocates were fond of pointing out that a single rail line could
carry as many people as a four-lane freeway. Planners predicted that a
low-cost investment would reduce transit operating costs, boost
ridership, and reduce congestion on nearby roads
and streets.

It didn't work out that way, though you would never know it listening
to the publicity generated by the transit agencies. Portland's light
rail "was built on time and under budget and carries more riders than
predicted," says G. B. Arrington, the head planner for Portland's
transit agency.

In fact, Portland's light rail cost 55 percent more, took a year
longer, and carries less than half the riders originally predicted.
After funding was approved and construction began, planners revised
their cost and time predictions upward and their ridership downward,
enabling them to claim success despite the reality of failure. 

One reason why the light rail carries so few riders is that it is
slow, averaging less than 20 miles per hour from start to finish.
Although frequencies are high, many riders were lost because the
transit agency cancelled express bus service that previous covered the
same distance in less than half the time.

Rail transit has been a failure in every American city where it has
been built in the past several decades. Even Washington, DC's
extensive and expensive rail-and-bus system carries less than 14
percent of DC commuters--a smaller market share than the
bus-and-streetcar system of 1960. 

Nevertheless, light rail is now touted as the solution for all sorts
of cities, from Missoula, Montana, to northern New Jersey opposite
Manhatten. In fact, light rail has become a major weapon in the
campaign against the automobile. 

...... etc   (continues for 4 x as muxh again)



Leading the Charge in Oregon 

The state of Oregon and city of Portland are leading the New Urban
charge against the automobile. Oregon's land-use board has directed
every city over 25,000 to force its residents to reduce their 
 per-capita auto driving by 20 percent. This may seem a strange rule
for a land-use board, but a major tenet of New Urbanism is that there
is a strong link between land uses and automobile usage.

Following suit, Oregon's air pollution agency has ordered all
employers of 50 or more people to induce their employees to reduce
their auto commuting by 10 percent. Employers who fail to prepare and
implement plans to do so may be heavily fined.

In Portland, a regional planning agency called Metro has dictorial
powers over twenty-four cities and three counties. Metro has developed
an elaborate campaign against the automobile that includes several
coordinated tactics: 

     Increasing highway capacities by no more than 13 percent even as
the region's population grows by 75
     percent; 
     Spending most of the region's federal and local transportation
dollars on light-rail transit, even though
     planners know that light rail will never carry more than 2
percent of the region's trips; 
     An urban-growth boundary beyond which little or no development
may take place; 
     Highly prescriptive zoning within the boundary requiring
landowners who do any building at all to build to
     high residential densities designed to increase congestion; 
     Requiring all owners of shopping and office complexes reduce
available parking by 10 percent and
     eventually charge for their parking; 
     "Traffic calming," a euphemism for actions that reduce roadway
capacities, such as concrete barriers limiting
     the flow of traffic and reductions in the number of lanes on
major streets; 
     Banning on any new shopping malls and "big box" stores such as
Costco or WalMarts; 
     Promoting and subsidizing instead small shops in mixed-used
areas.

Planners lovingly paint of picture of people living in high-density or
mixed-use areas, walking to the grocery store and taking the train to
work. The reality, planners quietly predict, is that no more than 12
percent of all trips in the Portland area will be on foot, bicycle, or
mass transit. While this is a 50 percent increase from today's 8
percent, it means that the share of trips by auto decline by less than
5 percent from 92 to 88 percent. 

With the expected 75 percent increase in population trying to drive at
least 67 percent more miles per day on a road system that is just 13
percent larger, planners predict that their plan will lead congestion
to at least triple. Portlanders will spend more time in traffic trying
to get to and from work. 


To planners, congestion is a feature, not a bug. 
>*Q* I think Brisbane is using the same textbook *Q*
They know that Americans respond to congestion by living closer to
work. This means Portlanders will be happy to live in the high-density
housing that planners have assigned them to. Congestion, says Metro
quietly, "signals positive urban development."

A series on National Public Radio's All Things Considered was more
forthright. Noting that most transportation planners try to ease
congestion, NPR said that Portland planners "are embracing congestion;
they want to create more of it." 

Planners proudly point to certain Portland neighborhoods that they
consider to be their ideal: Northwest 23rd, Southeast Hawthorne. These
are relatively dense older neighborhoods with many apartments
surrounding a busy street of small charming shops. 

"People are learning to walk more in these neighborhoods," says Metro
planner Mark Turpel. They have to: The areas are so crowded with cars
that people often to park many blocks away to get to the shops. The
residential streets are lined with cars on both sides, and the busy
streets are one continuous traffic jam. This, according to Portland's
New Urban congressman, Earl Blumenaeur, "is the kind of congestion
that is exciting."

<snip - more good stuff in the interest of brevity>

What is the reasoning behind the campaign against the automobile? New
Urbanists say that automobiles are evil
because: 

     They impose huge hidden costs on society; 
     They lead to sprawl; 
     They create ugly strip malls and sterile suburbs; 
     They are forced upon unwilling Americans who would rather rely on
mass transit.

Hidden Costs 

Enemies of the auto tote up a huge list of costs that autos impose on
society and subsidies that society must pay to
support auto drivers. When added together they total billions of
dollars each year, which typically averages out to
several dollars of subsidy or social cost per mile driven. 

Yet the vast majority of the costs they claim are neither hidden nor
subsidies. The entire federal highway trust fund
is often described as a subsidy even though it is entirely paid by
highway user fees such as gas taxes. Transit
advocates seeking to divert gas taxes to transit don't say they are
asking for a subsidy; they say they are reducing
the subsidy to highways.

As previously noted, highway fees generally pay for all tollways,
freeways, highways, and roads. Neighborhood
streets, however, are generally maintained with local taxes, usually
property taxes. While auto opponents call this a
subsidy, it is reasonable to expect local homeowners to contribute to
the streets and sidewalks in front of their
houses because they will use them whether they drive or not.

In trying to arrive at as high a cost as possible, auto opponents also
include the cost of automobile insurance,
highway and bridge tolls, and parking--even though these are all paid
for by auto drivers or (in the case of some
parking) people seeking the business of auto users. one anti-auto
economist counts a $21 billion subsidy equal to
the income taxes the government would collect if employers charged for
employee parking and increased employee
pay to cover the cost.

Auto opponents add in the cost of state highway patrols, highway
administration, and interest on highway bonds--all of which are paid
for out of user fees. Then they add the costs of highway congestion,
which again are paid for by users and which have increased in recent
years mainly due to the efforts of the anti-auto lobbies. 

One auto opponent counts half the cost of America's military presence
in the Persian Gulf as a subsidy to autos. Yet the U.S. gets little
oil from the Gulf--most goes to Europe and Japan--and the U.S. has
military in many places with no oil. 

About the only legitimate social cost that can be tallied against the
auto is air pollution and associated health costs. But even the most
virulent auto opponents agree that this totals to no more than a few
cents per mile driven.

In contrast, the subsidies to transit are enormous. Farebox revenues
typically cover less than a quarter of the cost of urban bus service,
and often cover less than 5 percent of the cost of recently built rail
lines. Most capital costs are paid for out of highway user fees, while
operating costs are paid out of various local taxes, mostly paid by
auto drivers. So the real subsidies are from autos to transit riders,
not the other way around.


<snip>

General Motors Made Us Do It 

If autos are so bad, auto opponents explain their ubiquity by claiming
that Americans have been forced to drive when they would rather not.
The most potent support for this claim Los Angeles, whose streetcar
system was purchased by General Motors, Firestone Tire, and Standard
Oil, who quickly scrapped the streetcars and replaced
them with rubber-tired, oil-burning buses. Since New Urbanists claim
that buses are less efficient than streetcars, they see this not just
as a way to sell buses but as a dark plot to run the transit system
into bankruptcy and force everyone to drive. 

The simple fact is that every rail transit system in the country lost
money throughout the 1930s, late 1940s and 1950s. With three or four
exceptions, they all scrapped their streetcars and replaced them with
buses. Buses are more flexible and cost much less to operating and
maintain since they share the cost of roadbed maintenance with
autos. 

Numerous cities, including San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington,
and Chicago, have built or maintained extensive rail transit systems.
Yet the auto has more than 80 percent of the market share of commuters
in these cities, and transit's market share has generally declined.
Only in New York has rail maintained a significant market share, yet
transit carries just 25 percent of commuters in the New York
metropolitan area, while cars have 65 percent.

Americans have shown that they are willing to put up with enormous
amounts of congestion in order to avoid the inconveniences and
indignities of mass transit. The typical response to increasing
congestion is not to shift to transit but for employers and homeowners
to move closer to one another--which explains why many business are
moving to the suburbs.


New Urbanism's Backers 

The ease with which the auto's enemies arguments can be dismissed does
little to dispell their persuasiveness. For one thing, many of their
points resonate stronly with Americans, particularly with concerns
about loss of farms and open space and the ugliness of strip
developments. The idea that we could ride fast, convenient trains
instead of sitting in traffic is also appealing--although it turns out
most people hope that everyone else will take the train so they can
drive without congestion.

New Urbanism's real strength, however, comes not from these myths but
from several very real interest groups that will benefit from
increasing urban congestion. These include:  

     Central city officials eager to maintain the prominence of their
cities over the suburbs; 
     Downtown interests desiring to reverse the "declines" of
downtowns relative to suburban "edge cities"; 
     New Urban planners interested in trying their theories out on
various cities; 
     Urban environmentalists opposed to more freeways and the
automobile in general; and 
     Engineering and construction firms looking for federal dollars to
spend on urban public works projects.

All but the last of these benefit from congestion. And while
construction firms would be just as happy building highways as rail
lines, they won't complain if New Urbanists promote congestion so they
can build gold-plated light-rail systems. 

These groups have combined to dramatically shift the federal role in
urban transportation. Even in the Interstate highway era, that role
was rather passive, being limited to doling out funds for projects
designed primarily by state and local highway engineers. But with
passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act
(ISTEA) of 1991, the federal government is now strongly promoting New
Urbanism throughout the country. 

ISTEA requires cities to use a long-term planning process that is
easily captured by New Urbanists. The law encourages cities to blow
all their dollars on rail projects that no one will use rather than
build highways that will be used. In cities with air pollution
problems, ISTEA actually forbids the use of federal funds for
expanding road capacities, even though congestion is often the
greatest cause of air pollution because slower cars pollute more.

ISTEA is up for reauthorization by the 105th Congress. Unfortunately,
most of the debate inside the beltway is on which states are going to
get the most highway funds, not whether those funds will be spent on
highways or rail boondoggles or whether the federal government should
even be in the urban transportation business. 

Senator Connie Mack and Representative John Kasich have proposed to
eliminate most federal gas taxes and let the states or cities fund and
plan urban transport. But transportation funding has become an
important form of pork, as indicated by the fact that the largest
committee in Congress is the House Transportation Committee. No one on
that committee wants to give up federal allocation of funds.


Fighting Back 

More than four out of five American workers drive to their jobs, and
more than 90 percent of all non-job-related trips are also by car. Yet
auto drivers are remarkably unorganized and easy prey for the anti-car
coalition. 

Auto users have been made to feel so guilty about their desire for
safe, efficient, and convenient transportation that they often accept
the congestion offered by New Urbanists as their just desserts. Groups
such as the American Automobile Association and National Motorists
Association are barely aware of the anti-auto campaign. 

The real opposition to the New Urbanists will come from the suburbs.
People who have escaped the crowded cities don't want congestion and
density imposed upon them by planners whose ideal lifestyle is in
Manhatten. But most suburbs remain as unorganized as auto drivers in
general

So, if you live in a suburb, if you drive to work or anywhere else, if
you like shopping at Costco or Sam's Club, then get ready for the next
big social war. You will be the target of social engineers who want to
control where you live, where you work, where you shop, and how you
get from one to another. If the New Urbanists win, the cities of the
future will be more congested and polluted, have higher taxes and
housing costs, and less open space within them than you are used to
today.

>
>
>Rob
>
>Sydney (Australia)
>
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