The City is soliciting public comment on its draft "light rail" plan, so here's mine:
Either build reserved guideway or build nothing at all.
I could start from first principles here but it's better just to point you to Mike Dahmus, whose thinking matches my own.
I'll still give a brief defense of my opinion. What the city is calling "urban rail" (and which Ben Wear confusingly calls "light rail") is, in fact, a streetcar. Streetcars use fixed guideways but share travel lanes with cars. This means they get stuck in traffic jams just like cars. And just like buses, except streetcars can't maneuver around an obstacle in the travel lane, like a stalled or double-parked car. Because streetcars face this extra obstacle but fare no better in congested traffic, they are, on average, slower than buses.
The "bus vs. streetcar" is one of the liveliest debates in the transit blogosphere. Streetcars have passionate defenders -- e.g., here are 36 reasons streetcars are better -- and I'm not here to criticize anyone's motives or intentions; I have friends who enthusiastically support the draft plan. There are things about which reasonable people can disagree, and I think this probably is one of them. But streetcars cannot be defended as an improvement in mobility over buses, a point respected transit advocate, planner and consultant Jarrett Walker has put bluntly:
Streetcars that replace bus lines are not a mobility improvement. If you replace a bus with a streetcar on the same route, nobodywill be able to get anywhere any faster than they could before. This makes streetcars quite different from most of the other transit investments being discussed today.
Where a streetcar is faster or more reliable than the bus route it replaced, this is because other improvements were made at the same time -- improvements that could just as well have been made for the bus route. These improvements may have been politically packaged as part of the streetcar project, but they were logically independent, so their benefits are not really benefits of the streetcar as compared to the bus.
The draft Austin plan claims the streetcar system will improve mobility because it will "present an additional transportation option." (p. 5-17). This, of course, is trivially true -- if we are to count any new transportation option as a mobility "improvement," then streetcars certainly will be an improvement. But what we ought to care about is whether a new option provides faster, cheaper or more convenient service than buses. I've ridden the No. 1L down Congress Avenue during rush hour, sitting impatiently for the 15 minutes it took the bus to creep the five blocks from 6th to Cesar Chavez. A streetcar crawling through downtown Austin with the rest of the traffic would be no better than that bus -- actually, worse -- and therefore would not be a mobility "improvement" in my book.
Streetcar supporters give other reasons to support streetcars over buses (see above). And it is true that there are some people who will ride streetcars who would not use the equivalent bus service. But I don't think these reasons collectively justify a $1 billion investment without a genuine improvement in mobility.
But for the same reasons, I do support reserved guideway. Reserved guideway connecting the heart of the UT Campus, the State Capitol Complex, the CBD and SoCo would offer a genuine improvement in mobility. It is only a bit more than three miles from UT to SoCo as the crow flies, but that trip can take a surprisingly long time by car (and longer by bus). And parking is a headache at three of these places -- off-limits (UT, unless you have a parking sticker); expensive (Congress Avenue/CBD), or scarce (SoCo). Rail service that provided quick and direct -- and congestion free -- service between these dense population centers would knit these places together, effectively shrinking the distance between them. It would be a boon for central Austin.
But such a system must be designed and built for speed. It must be designed and built with a relentless, ruthless focus on speed. That will mean some trade-offs: fewer stops in downtown Austin than the draft plan envisions; fewer car travel lanes and less parking on some streets. Some of these things will be difficult to push across politically. But if we aren't willing to make these trade-offs for the sake of improving mobility, then perhaps mobility isn't bad enough at the moment to justify a $1 billion investment. I happen to think it is -- congestion in central Austin is bad, and will only get worse -- but the desire to avoid a political street-fight is not a good reason to settle for an expensive system that does not improve mobility. Better to do nothing at all.
NB. I'm a little disappointed that none of the people who support in-street rail for downtown have stepped forward to defend it. There are plenty of sensible urbanists who read my blog but who surely disagree with me on this point. Anyone care to defend the in-street rail plan?
