2030 Transit Plan

[monsoon]

Here is what you asked

I went and researched that question and gave a serious and detailed response of all the goals that CATS is held accountable for. If you are wondering why people are not answering your questions, perhaps it is due to responses you give like this:

It doesn't address one thing that I asked but it is typical of the kind of response given when asked the question that I asked.

[Mobuchu]

Unlike John Locke and his cronies, I don't mind spending 9 Billion dollars on alternative transit, but in the process I want to get something for it. The 2030 Plan does not deliver.

.

.

Maybe you should read my post again because this is not what I said.

[monsoon]

Wow, way to have a conversation. Cherry picking a post is what you do when you find a fault with one point in a post and say you have addressed the others before in a 62 page thread and need not respond to them. I'd say I'm done with this thread...

[monsoon]

I will ask again. These are pretty simple questions that every taxpayer, who is being asked to support rail tranist in this county should be asking.

In 25 years,

• how many cars will the the CATS rail system take off the road,

• how much air pollution will it stop (if it doesn't cause it to go up),

• how much sprawl will be prevented by the 2030 plan,

• how are these things being measured and

• what are the goals that CATS will be held accountable to? (and to clarify this, by goals, I mean in regards to this set of questions)

Please someone try to address it. These are the real reasons that transit should be built and there probably are a few others. Transit should make the county a better place to live and I just don't see this happening in the 2030 plan. We get a lot of platitudes about transit, but when asked these rather simple questions on what specifically the 2030 plan is going to do, that is what one would hope for building a non-highway based system, we get blank stares, derision, and so forth. Why is that? We have not had this discussion though I have tried to start it several times.

[stadtguy]

[uptownliving]

• how many cars will the the CATS rail system take off the road,

  Are you are asking how many "choice riders" will there be? Choice riders being those people that have cars but chose to ride transit. CATS currently has about 40% of ridership as Choice riders. LRT tends to attract more choice riders than bus. The gold standard is Portland with 77% choice riders on its LRT so...lets just take the average and guesstimate that Lynx will have 60% Choice riders. So 60% of 36,000 ridership is 21,600 cars per day that LYNX rail is estimated to "remove" from the road. When you look at the entire system including bus...the Choice riders will number about 100,000 per day...therefore 100,000 cars removed from the road per day.

  I suspect that you are looking for a more precise answer and one does exist. You can contact David Leard at CATS. He oversees CATS travel model and will be able to give you precise answers as to how many choice riders they are projecting.

• how much air pollution will it stop (if it doesn't cause it to go up),

  Again I have to assume you are asking what is the pollution difference between 21,600 cars (choice riders) and a couple hundred buses (people on transit anyways) vs. 16 LRT cars. If the electrcity is coming from the nuclear power plants then the LRT vehicles will have zero air pollution...however if it is coming from gas or coal fired plants...then that would have to be calculated. I'm sure someone at CATS or Seimens can tell you the electricty needed to operate the cars and then Duke can tell you how much pollution their plants produce to provide that electricity. In any case there is a air pollution travel model that takes into consideration the rail lines so you can contact someone at CDOT and they can give you more exact answers.

• how much sprawl will be prevented by the 2030 plan,

  In my opinion the 2030 Plan doesn't really address sprawl. Instead sprawl is addressed in the Centers/Corridors/Wedges plan and the General Development Policy, and the TOD districts. Of course the final say exists with current and future city councils...and I don't want to try and predict what a future city council is going to do.

• how are these things being measured and

  There is an annual report put out by the city that tracks how well they are doing with sticking to the Centers/Corridors/Wedges plan as well as the Transportation Action Plan. For the air pollution that is monitored and controlled by the State of NC and the Feds.

• what are the goals that CATS will be held accountable to? (and to clarify this, by goals, I mean in regards to this set of questions)

The only goals that CATS is being held to that deal with the questions you asked is ridership. Increased ridership on CATS does go back and affect air pollution and replacing cars on the road. They also monitor route performance on a monthly basis and cut routes that are not meeting performance targets.

[Raintree21]

The University Political Action Committee will host a forum of Charlotte mayoral and city council candidates at 7 p.m. tomorrow (Tuesday) at Stonebridge Church which is at 3700 Prosperity Church Road. In addition, there will also be a discussion on the transit tax repeal vote. Jeff Taylor will speak for the repeal and Pat Mumford will speak against it. I'm sure the LRT will be a hot topic.

[monsoon]

.......

I like light rail. I think it

[Neo]

CATS is currently spending $101M/year to run empty buses around the county.

You keep stating this as if it were fact which is it not. For FY2006 CATS had a ridership on their bus system of over 19 million. There really is no need to keep stating the false statement that CATS simply runs empty buses when we all know that isn't true. Do some buses likely need to be rerouted to gain better ridership? Yes, I don't think anyone is opposing that move, but blatantly stating false information about total ridership really isn't needed.

[Justadude]

The problem with light rail is that it does not have much capacity and hence does not really make much difference in the scheme of things.

[uptownliving]

I would like a heavy rail system as much as the next person but I don't think it is currently realistic for Mecklenburg financially or politically.

I think it will take a sea change in the FTA before cities of our size and density will be funded for Heavy Rail. Even if a Democrat wins the next election and a Democratic Congress stays in power I still don't think the FTA will be funding heavy rail for cities our size. Do I think they should? YES. But realistically speaking I think we have a long ways to go politically in this country before we get to that point.

I think that the 2030 Plan is the best we can do under the current financial and political environment. Am I completely happy with it? No of course not.

I don't think we can build a heavy rail system with just the 1/2 Cent Sales Tax. Just the capital costs to build a system similar to what Atlanta has would eat up all of the 1/2 Cent Sales Tax for the next 25 years and not leave any money left over for bus capital/operations or rail operations. So with the half cent sales tax we could build the heavy rail but would not have any money left over to operate it. If we were to go the route of heavy rail we would need at least a 1 cent sales tax in my opinion so that we could have bus operations while the heavy rail is under construction and to implement a bus feeder system for the rail once it opened.

But again I don't think talk of Heavy Rail in Charlotte is really even worth it until the FTA changes their funding rules. Cities larger and denser than ours, such as Dallas and Denver are using a Full Cent Sales Tax to fund a light rail based network. If the FTA wont even approve Heavy Rail for cities like that, then they certainly arn't going to approve it for Charlotte.

[Miesian Corners]

Author James Kuntsler (The Geography of Nowhere) calls North American suburban development, "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world". He goes further saying, "America has squandered its wealth in a living arrangement that has no future." I think he's right on target. Our obsession with the automobile and freeways made possible by cheap oil has allowed us to live far away from where we work, shop, and play. Is there any other form of living that requires more energy in order to function than suburbia? This way of life is not fueled by an infinite well of resources. Looking globally, North American society is most at risk when the abundance of cheap oil comes to a crashing halt; many of the things we take for granted will come to an abrupt end. Furthermore, the effects of energy depletion go way beyond paying more at the pump. It will literally get down to the question of how you will feed yourself and your family.

What does that have to do with transit? It is extremely short sighted to look at this debate only in terms of how many cars the system will take of the road, its effect on air pollution, and even how much sprawl it will prevent in the near future. It this has been said before, but it bears repeating, CATS is offering transit alternatives, not reinventing the wheel. Those of us living in far flung neighborhoods will be left out in the (literal) cold when driving an automobile is no longer economically viable. Those with transit options to do the seemingly simple and mundane will be the winners. Look no further than the title of this thread. We are building a system for the future, not a system for next week. Even those who champion the sales tax and transit (and I, for the record, am pro on both of those) have not opened their eyes to what is really at risk here. Nowhere does the threat of the inability to drive an automobile inexpensively come into play. In the absence of A2, I'll say it: the end is near. Either adapt to the realities of the 21st Century, or become extinct. The measly half billion dollars spent on the South Line is nothing when you view it in terms of what will really be needed to keep our city viable in the coming decades. We, along with every other Sunbelt city, will need billions upon billions. We all need to wake up.

[orulz]

A light-rail line like the south corridor could be upgraded quite easily to have heavy-rail-like capacity. It is largely grade-separate, and in an entirely dedicated right-of-way.

1. Buy more vehicles.

2. Run trains more frequently.

3. Lengthen platforms

4. Run three- or four- car trains rather than one- and two-car.

However, no matter how great the alignment, or how high the capacity, or how many lines there are, adoption of transit will not be high unless there is sufficient incentive for more people to use it. And in the US, that means allowing car ownership or operation to become more expensive or less convenient.

It is therefore my opinion that the key to getting transit adoption to rise above the level of mediocre lies not in transit modes or alignment. It lies almost entirely in the realm of land use, parking policies, and TDM.

A couple ways to move towards this (some simple, some quite politically impossible here in the southeast US)

1. Un-bundling of parking and residential units in multi-unit buildings. The overall cost of a unit plus parking space remains the same, but now you have the choice of doing without a car, or with one less car, and saving $25,000. Force people to realize that "free parking" really isn't free.

2. Eliminate all minimum parking requirements, starting in more urban zoning districts and eventually moving to the entire city.

3. Limits on maximum parking allowed first for areas close to transit, and eventually for all developments.

4. Increase the gas tax. Use this windfall to build out the transit network more quickly.

5. Or, instead of #4 above, put tolls on freeways. Use that money to matintain them. Reallocate the gas tax money freed up to build out the transit network more quickly.

6. Rather than widening freeways & thoroughfares in a commitment to ever increase highway capacity, take lanes away and allocate them to buses & streetcars.

[monsoon]

You keep stating this as if it were fact which is it not. For FY2006 CATS had a ridership on their bus system of over 19 million. ....

[orulz]

BTW, there are a lot of people on this forum who don't regularly ride the buses either, so if you can't get this audience to do it, then I think that pretty much states the case for the present state of bus service as provided by CATS.

[monsoon]

I do agree with both 1 & 2. Unfortunately it would seem to me that in order to achieve either one, you need to have a comprehensive transit /urban development plan that actually addresses transit which we really don't have in Charlotte for the reasons that I listed above.

[uptownliving]

This statement was based on the fact that they are now carrying 7 people/passenger mile instead of almost 11 a decade ago. They are also spending twice as much (after inflation adjustments) per passenger to carry these people. As a result, one can conclude just from the mathematics they are running buses that are either too big, or empty a lot of the day....

[Charlotte_native]

Pointing out a problem with busses and one reason people that don't have to ride them often don't. They move in traffic so there is no savings in time. I'm not trying to imply that this rail system alleviates all problems. But rail does save time for commuters in many cases where busses don't. I know we have dedicated lines on Independence to help with this some, but that doesn't change the fact that bus lines are ways to not drive, but don't really cut commute times.

[monsoon]

I am still waiting for the questions that I asked earlier to be addressed but my assumption and expectation is they won't be (except for one forumer) and instead we are getting these meaningless posts about bus ridership that have already been thoroughly discussed in this thread. I don't understand why there is such an unconditional defense of CATS when by almost any measure they are not very good at what they are doing, have no effective oversight of funds they are getting, and are of by and for a plan that won't make any difference in Mecklenburg county.

Back to my questions. When someone wants to have that discussion I will be glad to engage in it.

[Spartan]

It seems like some stats are being thrown around about the CATS system that while true, are just one part of the larger picture. I learned at the Bike Plan Meeting last Wednesday that since CATS added bike racks on to all of their busses and since they expanded their routes- bike riders on busses has more than doubled to something like 62,000 trips per year. Thats a significant number of trips that are multimodal in nature and that don't require a car, and that weren't being taken before CATS expanded its route options.

I also don't see a distinction being made for the amount of growth that Charlotte is expecting. Has anyone thought to check the passengers per mile each year? Perhaps that number has dropped, but my guess is that it is likely going back up.

As I opined before, you can only get so far by making buses and transit more convenient and you reach a point of diminishing returns on investment. Cars are just so damn convenient, that without them becoming less convenient, transit won't capture much of the population other than those who have no other choice.

This can be achieved with two fundamental public policy changes.

1. Dispel the myth of entitlement to roads that are uncongested and delay-free 24 hours a day:

DOT has the goal of zero congestion delay on all roads, even at rush hour. They aim to achieve this goal through never-ending capacity increases. They certainly can't afford to build their way all the way out of congestion, hence we have congestion now, but the goal remains.

This goal should be done away with. Some level of rush-hour congestion should be acceptable, and there should be a point where we say "That's it - this is all the vehicular capacity we will build in this corridor." - at least without tolls. As that limit is reached, vehicular travel times increase, and transit (which is unaffected by road congestion and can scale capacity-wise MUCH better than roads) becomes attractive.

For this reason, the "unbalanced" equity formula may actually be a blessing in disguise - provided that we can get funding for transit construction from a separate pot. The equity formula restricts DOT's ability to construct more highway capacity resulting in ever increasing road congestion.

2. Dispel the myth of entitlement to unlimited "free" parking:

Minimum parking requirements are essentially laws mandating that everyone drive everywhere. They are designed to provide more parking spaces for businesses / residences / offices etc than could ever be used on even the busiest of days.

Un-bundle parking spaces in residential buildings.

Let the market decide how many spaces to build and where, and let the law of supply and demand dictate whether and if there is a charge for parking.

Institute parking maximums near transit. The space wasted on excess parking should instead be used to accomodate people and businesses.

[Raintree21]

• how many cars will the the CATS rail system take off the road,

• how much air pollution will it stop (if it doesn't cause it to go up),

• how much sprawl will be prevented by the 2030 plan,

• how are these things being measured and

• what are the goals that CATS will be held accountable to? (and to clarify this, by goals, I mean in regards to this set of questions)

Please someone try to address it.

[Justadude]

I am still waiting for the questions that I asked earlier to be addressed but my assumption and expectation is they won't be (except for one forumer) and instead we are getting these meaningless posts about bus ridership that have already been thoroughly discussed in this thread.

[monsoon]

I'll address the first two.

You are asking questions that everyone knows can't be answered accurately. No one will ever know how many cars will be taken off the roads directly because of LRT. Sure, we can say, 25,000 people will ride it a day. That could be 25,000 cars. Or that could be 12,500 cars because they might have rode with someone else. What if a thousand of them actually rode with 3 or more other people. How many of those walked or rode a bike? Does a homeless person who rides the train count? What if it's a rainy week or month and some people don't feel like dealing with parking lots at the stations and choose to just drive to work for convenience. Will those cars that are taken off the road simply be replaced by more people who move to Charlotte? Will they ride the train instead?

The same thing goes for pollution that would be reduced. How many cars are actually on the road. How many people were already carpooling as opposed to driving by themselves. Was it an SUV or a Hybrid? Were they driving at highway speed or in stop-and-go city traffic. What about the MPG regulations that increase every few years. Does that factor in? What if the Federal Clean Air Act expires?

I ask a bunch of questions on purpose to prove the fallacy of the original question. They are impossible to answer and the powers that be have done their best to give an educated guess. It is obvious that LRT is a good thing. It will remove vehicles from the roads of Charlotte and will provide convenience to many people. It will undoubtedly remove pollution because for every person on the train, there is obviously not a car associated with them. Each car off the road is less emissions and one less car to add to the gridlock. The goods far outweigh the bads.

[Miesian Corners]

^No transit system is going to solve traffic problems. The greatest and most expansive mass transit systems in the world are not capable of doing that. London, Berlin and Tokyo--all face gridlock on streets.

[monsoon]

I can't speak to Berlin because I have not been there, but London has something like 12-14M in its metro and Tokyo has 32M+. In London's case there are plenty of streets there that were built before the automobile that simply can't handle significant traffic. This is why traffic is jammed in central London and why now there is a congestion charge to stop cars from driving into the city. As you point out the tube system has allowed them to handle millions of people without vast urban renewal projects that took place in American cities where they built super highways right thorough the city to handle traffic.

In Tokyo's case the city was completely destroyed after WWII. When they built it back, they did so with relatively few highways. If you look at an overhead view of the Tokyo megalopolis you will find there are almost no highways there and there are major suburbs where it is not possible to drive a car. This is why there is traffic congestion on the few roads that do exist. Tokyo is completely dependent upon its municipal subway systems (there are 3 including the one in Yokohama), it's monorails, the private train lines, and the extensive surface network operated by JR. If these trains were shutdown the entire metro would just stop and there is no way they could support that population with the space they have, if 60% of the space were devoted to the automobile. Most people don't realize that it is Tokyo that has by far the biggest train system in the world when you add up all of the trains there.

In both cases, traffic problems were effectively solved by building a usable train system that addressed traffic needs.

When I say traffic, I mean the movement of people from one place to another. In Charlotte's case we solve this problem by building more roads and adding capacity to existing roads. If you want to solve this problem by a different method, so that Charlotte does not end up being another Atlanta, or Houston or Phoenix, etc, then your only real alternative is to build a trains system that is focused on this traffic and build systems that facilitate the movement of people. As a quick example of that look at a road map of Charlotte if you see where people need to go and imagine if the road system instead looked like what CATS has done for the trains. The CATS system has not been designed with that thought in mind given that nobody can quantify in terms of getting cars off the road (in 25 years) and doing something different. Another way to look at it is to look at the NCDOT TIP. There are absolutely no changes being made in highway construction because of the CATS transit system. And that is because it does not provide an effective alternative to most of the people in the county in 25 years.

BTW, in speaking of London and Tokyo I encourage you to look at their transit maps. In neither case do they converge down to a single point as we have done here in Charlotte and in both cases there are extensive lines that completely bypass trips into the central cities.