How _____ friendly is Sacramento? (Orange, Citrus Heights: middle-class, sales, rent)

[zen_klown]

Wrong wrong wrong. The problem with mass transit is that to make the system more appealing for riders, you have to offer frequent regular service on a lot of routes. This means in practice that for most of the day on most of its routes the mass transit system is running are fairly close to empty. Its extraordinarily unefficient during the day to have a bus driving its route to carry just a few riders.

So when you look at the actual cost per mile of transit its much higher than the actual cost per mile of cars.

Transport Costs Per Passenger Mile » The Antiplanner

see also

Where he makes similar arguments but also brings up the importance of how much we value our time. If it takes you an hour and half on a bus plus transfer to get somewhere when you can do it in 20 minutes in a car, you are still going to go with the car because your time is worth something.

ITS-Davis: Should We Try to Get the Prices Right?


Lastly because the transit vehicles spend a good portion of their day mostly empty, transit in practice isn't particularly green.

Is green U.S. mass transit a big myth?

As to your claim about the income of mass transit riders, see pg 13 here. The people who aren't taking a bus to work are the people to poor to own a car. The largest proportion of non-commute riders make less than 10,000 a year.

http://www.sacog.org/publications/transitsurvey.pdf

There are alternatives. If your goal was to illiminate freeway congestion you can either impliment congestion pricing or just build more freeways. There is no evidence that expanding mass transit works at reducing congestion.

Mass Transit: Separating Delusion from Reality

'Smart Growth' a major cause of traffic congestion - by Wendell Cox - The Heartland Institute

I agree with Ed Glaeser at Harvard. The Houston model of deregulating the housing market and connecting it by freeways would work probably work very well for Sacramento. We are a flat area with few geographic boundaries. Why not sprawl and let most people afford to own there own homes?

Houston, New York Has a Problem - July 16, 2008 - The New York Sun

[pba]

Originally Posted by zen_klown

Wrong wrong wrong. The problem with mass transit is that to make the system more appealing for riders, you have to offer frequent regular service on a lot of routes. This means in practice that for most of the day on most of its routes the mass transit system is running are fairly close to empty. Its extraordinarily unefficient during the day to have a bus driving its route to carry just a few riders.

I'm totally confused.....are you saying that mass transit is not gay-friendly in Sacramento? If not, then I'm not sure how this ties into the original post.

[Ludachris]

Originally Posted by pba

I'm totally confused.....are you saying that mass transit is not gay-friendly in Sacramento? If not, then I'm not sure how this ties into the original post.

Wrong thread pba, this one is the open ended thread. The how "__________" friendly is Sacramento.

[Ludachris]

Originally Posted by zen_klown

Wrong wrong wrong. The problem with mass transit is that to make the system more appealing for riders, you have to offer frequent regular service on a lot of routes. This means in practice that for most of the day on most of its routes the mass transit system is running are fairly close to empty. Its extraordinarily unefficient during the day to have a bus driving its route to carry just a few riders.

So when you look at the actual cost per mile of transit its much higher than the actual cost per mile of cars.

Transport Costs Per Passenger Mile » The Antiplanner

see also

Where he makes similar arguments but also brings up the importance of how much we value our time. If it takes you an hour and half on a bus plus transfer to get somewhere when you can do it in 20 minutes in a car, you are still going to go with the car because your time is worth something.

ITS-Davis: Should We Try to Get the Prices Right?


Lastly because the transit vehicles spend a good portion of their day mostly empty, transit in practice isn't particularly green.

Is green U.S. mass transit a big myth?

As to your claim about the income of mass transit riders, see pg 13 here. The people who aren't taking a bus to work are the people to poor to own a car. The largest proportion of non-commute riders make less than 10,000 a year.

http://www.sacog.org/publications/transitsurvey.pdf

There are alternatives. If your goal was to illiminate freeway congestion you can either impliment congestion pricing or just build more freeways. There is no evidence that expanding mass transit works at reducing congestion.

Mass Transit: Separating Delusion from Reality

'Smart Growth' a major cause of traffic congestion - by Wendell Cox - The Heartland Institute

I agree with Ed Glaeser at Harvard. The Houston model of deregulating the housing market and connecting it by freeways would work probably work very well for Sacramento. We are a flat area with few geographic boundaries. Why not sprawl and let most people afford to own there own homes?

Houston, New York Has a Problem - July 16, 2008 - The New York Sun

I think they planned out the light rail system here in Denver very well. There are a few lines reaching down into the suburbs at various points and they all meet downtown. However, Denver was probably pretty easy to design for with so many people working downtown and all 3 of our big sports venues are located within a mile of each other downtown. With the sports events alone the light rail system gets used by a ton of people. And all income levels use it out here for commuting to work, which is evident by the station locations and the types of cars you'll see in the parking lots at the stations. Again, most people out here work in downtown or a location south of downtown called the Denver Tech Center. So it was easy to see this plan working.

And when the line opened up that served our area you immediately saw a decrease in rush hour traffic. My office was too far from a station and I didn't want to spend twice as long getting to work with connecting bus routes, so I kept driving when I was working downtown.

If done right and well planned it could work in Sacramento. The major questions will be whether or not most of the people/areas targeted work in the same place or if you have enough major sports venues or other attractions that people would visit using the light rail system in order to avoid traffic. I don't know Sac well enough to answer those questions. As far as I know, the Kings are the only major venue in town and I know their future in Sacramento is in question. And I have no idea where the majority of people work in the area.

The absolute best way to reduce traffic and be more "green" is to telecommute.

[wburg]

Ludachris: The future of the Kings isn't that much in question, what is in question is where the Kings will play. The current arena is in North Natomas, aside from one bus route it doesn't have any public transit access. When our light rail system was built, the area was still open farmland. The current arena is not that great and the team owners want a new one. There was a proposition to build one at taxpayer expense downtown, but the plan was so bad that not even the team's owners supported it, so it went down in flames.

The current plan is to build an arena at Cal Expo, the site of the California State Fair. It isn't in the central city or adjacent to light rail, but it would be pretty easy to build a streetcar line from the nearby light rail line that would serve not only an arena but also the state fair, the nearby Arden Fair Mall, and the variety of office parks, apartment complexes and other retail uses near the site.

About 10% of Sacramento's jobs are in the central city, and about 4% of Sacramento's population live there. To me, it makes more sense for more people to live and work downtown than to commute, but unless the population of the central city triples or quadruples there will still be room for commuters to work downtown. Within the central city, it's pretty easy to get around without a car.

Sacramento, like most western cities (and most American cities period) is very spread out. 90% of the jobs and 96% of the population are outside the core, the end result of decades of freeway-driven suburban expansion and "urban renewal" in the central city. Using the traditional model with jobs at the core and residences at the periphery is becoming increasingly impractical, whether based on automobiles and freeways or public transit.

A lot of the criticisms of public transit, like those posted by zen_klown and pba, are based on that commuter metaphor. I'm more interested in the construction of neighborhoods where people can live, work and play in a relatively small area, reducing the need for long commutes.

[Ludachris]

Originally Posted by wburg

Ludachris: The future of the Kings isn't that much in question, what is in question is where the Kings will play.

That's what I meant to say... I've heard rumors of them leaving the area.

[zen_klown]

That is just it, transit isn't done right in Sacramento.

They built out the light rail system along heavy rail rights of way. That means that most of the system goes through warehouse districts where few people work and even fewer people live.

Neither the current facility for the Kings nor the proposed future facility for the Kings is adjacent to the light rail system. You can't take light rail to the airport.

As the crow flies, Sacramento State, the major local unversity isn't far from the light rail network, but if you were trying to keep kids from taking the mass transit to school, you would have had a hard time picking out a worse location for the nearest light rail station. There is a levee, there are more warehouses, plus all of the athletic fields to cross before you get to locus of campus life at Sac State.

Moreover these planning errors keep on happening.

In one of the few places where there was greenfield space near the light rail system they built an automall.

To drive the riders to the light rail system that is built in the wrong location, most of the bus lines are fed into the light rail system. This means that most potential transit users would have to make at least one transfer and that means a delay from the bus to lightrail or from lightrail to the bus or both.

If you are poor and don't value your time much and don't have any alternatives, it might be worthwhile. If you live really close to downtown, you just don't have to spend much time on transit it also might sort of work. But almost everywhere else in the Sacramento region it doesn't make sense to use transit. This is why only 1 percent of all trips in the Sacramento region are on transit.

[wburg]

The Folsom line runs along a former heavy-rail corridor, but it does pass through a lot of residential and commercial areas too. Maybe that's why the Folsom line seems pretty successful, and when I ride it I see as many people in suits as in sportswear. I'd agree with zen_klown that there has not been enough effort to date to build residential units close to light rail lines--known as transit-oriented development--and that good public transit and denser neighborhood design go hand in hand. Good public transit and sprawling suburbs, on the other hand, don't go together at all.

[zen_klown]

Originally Posted by wburg

About 10% of Sacramento's jobs are in the central city, and about 4% of Sacramento's population live there. To me, it makes more sense for more people to live and work downtown than to commute, but unless the population of the central city triples or quadruples there will still be room for commuters to work downtown. Within the central city, it's pretty easy to get around without a car.

Sacramento, like most western cities (and most American cities period) is very spread out. 90% of the jobs and 96% of the population are outside the core, the end result of decades of freeway-driven suburban expansion and "urban renewal" in the central city. Using the traditional model with jobs at the core and residences at the periphery is becoming increasingly impractical, whether based on automobiles and freeways or public transit.

Wasn't this Wendell Cox's point? Transit does an awful job of getting commuters to work when employment is concentrated outside of the central business district.

Mass Transit: Separating Delusion from Reality

[wburg]

Originally Posted by zen_klown

Wasn't this Wendell Cox's point? Transit does an awful job of getting commuters to work when employment is concentrated outside of the central business district.

The problem is that it isn't concentrated at all! The past century's land-use policies have spread employment centers as thinly as housing and commercial uses, leaving them nearly useless for modes of transportation other than the automobile.

And THAT IS EXACTLY THE PROBLEM. People don't use transit very often because most of our cities are designed for use with cars.

The article you cited seems to argue that the purpose of public transit is to relieve traffic congestion. Public transit is not intended to reduce road congested, any more than cars are intended to relieve crowded public transit vehicles. They are a separate mode intended to deal with the increased capacity needs that come with city growth. Build more freeways, and more suburbs get built farther out, until they are at capacity again. Or build more densely along transit corridors in the first place, and start designing cities around public transit, with cars as one possible mode of transit instead of the only one. The article seems to argue that cities with the least traffic will be the most economcally healthy. Please, give me a list of the cities that are the economic powerhouses of the world, and then tell me how many don't have traffic jams!