Austin Urban Light Rail Phase 1 - Why Mueller? (Round Rock, Georgetown: how much, vs)

[Komeht]

Originally Posted by M1EK

Hearing rumblings that the Mueller plan has changed to:

1a - Hancock Center with Red Line station, down Red River as before and into downtown.
1b - extend to Mueller

from very reliable sources. This would make it nothing but a Red Line circulator. Mueller would add a thousand or two potential boardings a day on top of that.

Also, a temporary maintenance facility could (not saying will, but could) operate at Hancock or next to it under I-35.

Not sure I understand the purpose in breaking this into a couple of phases...Mueller isn't more than a mile from there and why build a service facility twice? Word I heard they were looking for 3-5 acres for a service facility and the only way to do that at Hancock is basically take away the entire parking lot.

[M1EK]

Originally Posted by gpurcell

Sigh.

You always claim this and it is entirely false. There is very little decline in ridership for single-transfer mass transit as long at the wait time between transfers is modest.

And you always rebut this and you're entirely wrong. Especially when you're talking about attracting new passengers, and especially in a city where it's pretty cheap to drive and park, the transfer penalty is big. Confirmed by actual people studying transit many, many, many times. One quick example here:

https://pedestrianobservations.wordp...cus-wont-work/

"One important thing to note, writes Reinhard Clever, is that for commuter rail, downtown-side transfers are much more inconvenient than suburb-side transfers. Suburban commuters will drive to a park-and-ride, but balk at a transfer at the city end. Clever’s example is Toronto, where commuter rail riders tend not to transfer to the subway at Union Station but only take transit to jobs that can be reached from the station by walking. This problem is what doomed the Austin Red Line. For all its flaws, ARC offered a one-seat ride from the Erie lines to Penn Station."

[gpurcell]

Ahem.

Did you miss the part that cross-platform timed transfers are fine?

[Novacek]

Originally Posted by M1EK

And you always rebut this and you're entirely wrong. Especially when you're talking about attracting new passengers, and especially in a city where it's pretty cheap to drive and park, the transfer penalty is big. Confirmed by actual people studying transit many, many, many times. One quick example here:

https://pedestrianobservations.wordp...cus-wont-work/

"One important thing to note, writes Reinhard Clever, is that for commuter rail, downtown-side transfers are much more inconvenient than suburb-side transfers. Suburban commuters will drive to a park-and-ride, but balk at a transfer at the city end. Clever’s example is Toronto, where commuter rail riders tend not to transfer to the subway at Union Station but only take transit to jobs that can be reached from the station by walking. This problem is what doomed the Austin Red Line. For all its flaws, ARC offered a one-seat ride from the Erie lines to Penn Station."

Of course you post only the one that agrees with you (even though the red line wasn't doomed, and is at capacity during rush hour), and not other experts that state transfers are fine/good

Human Transit: "transferring" can be good for you, and good for your city

even though you were involved in that discussion.

[M1EK]

Originally Posted by steve78757

If you want to see the actual studies you may have to do more than type something into Google. Just saying. I never claimed to have them myself. I was very clear that I was quoting someone else who I consider to be "a very knowledgeable source", and who I do not believe just pulled those three studies out of their ass. But I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise, which I'm pretty sure would be a waste off time.

The important point here is that there have been multiple studies done on that corridor that, apparently, refute your statement that 3 off 4 lanes would need to be removed. That's why I posted what I consider to be good evidence that the studies have been done. I was never expecting to go over them with you point by point. If you want to see them before you will be convinced that they A exist, and B refute your statement, well then that's on you.

I hate to say this, Steve, since I think we agree on more than Novacek and I do, but Lyndon himself was well aware of the reduce Guadalupe to 1 lane from 29th to 27th plan. The other options are far less feasible - running a train in a shared lane there is incredibly moronic, for instance. Rerouting auto traffic is actually easier than running trains down a different path there due to the tight corners.

[M1EK]

Originally Posted by Novacek

Of course you post only the one that agrees with you (even though the red line wasn't doomed, and is at capacity during rush hour), and not other experts that state transfers are fine/good

Human Transit: "transferring" can be good for you, and good for your city

even though you were involved in that discussion.

Classification of Transfers by Headway Length - Seattle Transit Blog

In technical circles this is call a “transfer penalty” and is a number that is factored into a transportation demand modeling disutility function (for more info go to one of my old post on mode choice modeling over at oraphanroad). This transfer penalty is relatively high and is why many small and medium sized transit systems try to maximize the number of trips that can be made without transferring. This is also one reason, among many, why many transit planners don’t believe in circulator routes. They force riders to transfer and riders hate that. So its pretty easy to see why both riders and transit planners trend to be skeptical about changing one seat based systems to transfer based systems.

Keep reading on and you get to "in a world where somehow we're talking about a 5-minute headway rail line transferring to another 5-minute headway rail line, transfer penalties are small" which is true, but almost completely irrelevant to the real world, and especially the real Austin.

The scenario for Red Line to urban rail would be "every 30 minutes (at best) to every 15 minutes (at best)". That's a high transfer penalty right there.

As for the Red Line - it's carrying 2000-2500 boardings/day at a $20-$25 operating subsidy. Most of which is going to people who don't even live in cities that pay Capital Metro taxes. And this level of performance was only achieved after cancelling the best express bus competition and spending more money to run the service all day. It's prevented the actual residents of Austin from having rail service until the 2020s, at the earliest. Sounds pretty much like doom to me.

[M1EK]

Originally Posted by gpurcell

Ahem.

Did you miss the part that cross-platform timed transfers are fine?

Did you miss the part where no system in the USA has ever pulled this off? If we're talking about magically becoming Munich or something, then sign me up.

[Novacek]

Originally Posted by M1EK

Classification of Transfers by Headway Length - Seattle Transit Blog

In technical circles this is call a “transfer penalty” and is a number that is factored into a transportation demand modeling disutility function (for more info go to one of my old post on mode choice modeling over at oraphanroad). This transfer penalty is relatively high and is why many small and medium sized transit systems try to maximize the number of trips that can be made without transferring. This is also one reason, among many, why many transit planners don’t believe in circulator routes. They force riders to transfer and riders hate that. So its pretty easy to see why both riders and transit planners trend to be skeptical about changing one seat based systems to transfer based systems.

Keep reading on and you get to "in a world where somehow we're talking about a 5-minute headway rail line transferring to another 5-minute headway rail line, transfer penalties are small" which is true, but almost completely irrelevant to the real world, and especially the real Austin.

The scenario for Red Line to urban rail would be "every 30 minutes (at best) to every 15 minutes (at best)". That's a high transfer penalty right there.

Your own link says that if you time that transfer, it's okay. (case D, if you're counting 15 minutes as a "long headway").

Originally Posted by M1EK

As for the Red Line - it's carrying 2000-2500 boardings/day at a $20-$25 operating subsidy. Most of which is going to people who don't even live in cities that pay Capital Metro taxes. And this level of performance was only achieved after cancelling the best express bus competition and spending more money to run the service all day. It's prevented the actual residents of Austin from having rail service until the 2020s, at the earliest. Sounds pretty much like doom to me.

We were talking about transfers "dooming" ridership. The ridership is basically as high as it can be during rush hour. So how did transfers adversely affect it?

[jb9152]

Originally Posted by steve78757

Then I hope it's not a deal breaker, a nail in the coffin of Guadalupe-Lamar, as some have mentioned. Can you shed any light on that aspect of the debate?

Well, there are some observations that the federal government might not entertain a second high-capacity transit investment in the selfsame alignment as one that they just invested in. This, as far as I can tell, is not based on actual conversations with potential federal funding agencies, just a "conventional wisdom" sort of thing.

There are some compelling reasons to look at Guadalupe-Lamar, and some compelling reasons to invest in another alignment (thereby spreading high-capacity transit investments rather than concentrating them in one place). I think, given the project leadership's agreement on a more robust analysis of route options, with a "route agnostic" approach, that G-L will certainly get another look.

[jb9152]

Originally Posted by Komeht

Not sure I understand the purpose in breaking this into a couple of phases...Mueller isn't more than a mile from there and why build a service facility twice? Word I heard they were looking for 3-5 acres for a service facility and the only way to do that at Hancock is basically take away the entire parking lot.

1b might actually go beyond Mueller in that scenario. But none of this has been decided. I was in a meeting today at City Hall that confirmed that yet again.