Scattered Work

The oil tax

Streetsblog asks why no one in Congress is making serious proposals to deal with transportation funding, which on the federal level comes from a gas tax that hasn’t been increased in 20 years. I’m not sure we’ll get a solution from Congress, but RAND released a study in late February showing how the “federal government could fully fund its surface transportation infrastructure needs by levying a percentage tax on crude oil and imported refined petroleum products”—while eliminating the gas tax.

The proposal is intriguing in that it would replace several taxes with a single one, potentially be more politically palatable than increasing the gas tax, and fully fund the transportation system. Obama has shown a willingness to raise taxes on oil companies, proposing to cut oil and gas tax incentives in his budget proposal. But I don’t see Congress having the stomach for anything like RAND proposes at this point.

Tags: gas tax, Obama, oil tax, RAND

San Antonio’s real transportation problem

Lightrail in Houston from Flickr user Omar Omar

This article was originally published in Plaza de Armas.

When VIA hired its current Executive Director and CEO Keith Parker in 2009, he was fresh from a major success at his previous job: While he was at the helm, the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) launched a new light rail line which handily exceeded all ridership projections. Parker was hailed as a leader who could overcome political opposition from conservatives, and accomplish forward-looking transit goals efficiently.

Two years on, Charlotte’s Lynx system is still quite popular, but is running up against some of the same problems that plague many US light rail systems.

Cost overruns, coupled with declining tax revenues, are leading transit systems in Charlotte, Dallas, Denver, and other cities to scale back or eliminate expansion plans, lay off workers, slow down service, and make other painful cuts.

The problems run deeper than the economic woes sweeping every corner of our nation. Maintenance costs for Charlotte’s light rail have increased by 55 percent over four years; in Dallas, demographic trends unrelated to the economy have undercut the tax-derived funding necessary for planned expansion of the DART system.

San Antonio, meanwhile, is just getting started on the next phase of its transit system. While Dallas, Houston, and Austin already have at least limited light rail in place, San Antonio is getting ready to unveil its first Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line and laying the groundwork for a downtown streetcar rail system. Light rail is, at best, 10 years away — with federal stimulus funds evaporating and state budget negotiations getting ruthless, it’s hard to see where the necessary financial support for major new infrastructure would come from.

But at the same time, there are very real structural reasons so many other cities have been investing in advanced transit systems, and those incentives aren’t going to disappear just because light rail implementation is proving difficult.

The bottom line is that the ubiquity and convenience of gas-powered cars is not sustainable. Gas prices will continue to rise. That’s not really up for debate, regardless of your opinion about global warming, urban sprawl, economic dependence on dictatorial regimes, etc. Electric cars are a long way from having the range and refill times that make it possible to, say, drive to Houston and back on a whim. At some point in the not-too-distant future, regional transit systems are going to have to fill that gap.

So cities are busily building their local light rail networks, which will eventually be connected by commuter rail. But what happens when the regional commuter lines are being built, and San Antonio has nothing to connect to?

An organization called America 2050, which is a sort of infrastructure think tank, has ranked pairs of metropolitan areas on the viability of high speed rail connections. The only pair of cities in Texas that even ranks in the top 50 is Houston-Dallas (at #10). This is partly because the metropolitan areas of Dallas and Houston are so large (they rank as the 4th and 6th largest in the nation, respectively, while San Antonio comes in at 28). But the ranking system also heavily weights existing intracity transit. People aren’t likely to ride the train to San Antonio from Houston or Austin if they can’t find a convenient way to get around the city after arrival.

In most imagined configurations of regional commuter lines in the so-called Texas Triangle, a line runs from San Antonio up to Dallas, parallel to I-35. Another gulf region line runs alongside I-10, connecting Houston to New Orleans. The question is: how do these lines connect? In some proposals, they meet in San Antonio, like I-35 and I-10. But if San Antonio’s local infrastructure isn’t up to snuff, it’s easy to imagine the line going from Houston to Austin.

San Antonio’s slow movement on transit isn’t entirely due to incompetence. In one important way, it’s a result of the city’s engineering prowess. As I have argued on previously, San Antonio’s well-designed highway system, which offers the lowest congestion rates of any large city in Texas, obviates the need for transportation alternatives in the minds of many residents. Highway congestion has been one of those powerful structural incentives driving the adoption of new transit systems across the country, and here in San Antonio we just don’t have major traffic problems (note: as a general rule, I refuse to venture into the 281-1604 area).

Because of this, San Antonio needs to be especially aware of how its intra-city transit system impacts not just local residents, but people throughout the Texas Triangle mega-region. Although I have little doubt these issues are playing into VIA’s SmartWaySA planning process, I hear very little about mega-regional connectivity in the public transit discourse. I think that’s a mistake.

There are many reasons that San Antonio may want to continue taking its time implementing new local transit options, but the rest of the region isn’t going to wait. As this fact starts to dawn on the business community and the general public, we’ll see support for a comprehensive, diverse transit system grow, along with the will to overcome the inevitable obstacles.

Tags: bus rapid transit, Keith Parker, lightrail, megaregions, traffic, VIA

BRT to the future

To those of us keeping an eye on San Antonio’s transit system, the slow development can be a bit painful. If voters had approved San Antonio’s light rail initiative over ten years ago, when it was on the ballot, we’d be running about on pace with Austin and Houston, with probably a limited system in operation today. But that didn’t happen, and city leaders pretty much forgot about mass transit at that point, focussing instead on improving the highways and the conventional bus system. We’re just now getting back to it. Dallas, meanwhile, has a pretty extensive light rail system that runs to a number of suburban communities, and even out to Fort Worth.

But there may be a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel here for San Antonio, and a silver lining to boot. Many of the light rail systems in the US are facing serious challenges. I just looked at a few for a piece I was working on for Plaza de Armas — Dallas, Denver, Charlotte — and they are all looking at cutbacks, in some cases major.

San Antonio is on track to finish a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line by next year. A line is not a system, of course, but this line looks almost identical in its configuration to Austin’s MetroRail line (travelling between downtown and the northwest side of the city). Houston’s METRORail is also just a single line, running from downtown to the southside. So when San Antonio’s BRT line opens, the level of rapid transit service should be about equal Houston and Austin, but at a much lower cost.

BRT has the potential in many situations to be as good as light rail, but is much less expensive, both in terms of infrastructure and maintenance. It’s not as sexy in the US, but the tide is starting to turn there as well. Earlier this month, the Brookings Institution put together a panel discussion on BRT which is worth a look (audio here, transcript here). They point out that Latin America has actually been the driving force behind development of these systems, due to rapid population growth, strained infrastructure, and budgets that won’t allow for rail investment. Sound familiar?

Now Austin is also jumping on the BRT bandwagon (actually, reviving a proposal that had been stalled for years while the city focussed on MetroRail). They say by 2013 they’ll have two new BRT lines with about 70 stations. So the good news for San Antonio is that some of this light rail investment may not have been an especially good idea. We’ll see. At the very least, BRT was long given short shrift by US cities. It will be interesting to compare ridership, speed, and reliability between Austin’s light rail and BRT lines. BRT is certainly not perfect. Cleveland’s HealthLine, often considered a model for the US, is going 33% slower than expected, barely faster than the old, conventional bus line.

But the good news is that the systems can come online much faster and much cheaper than light rail, while providing many of the same advantages. Those advantages include speed gains (though this depends on both a dedicated right of way for the busses and coordinating traffic signals so that they don’t have to wait at lights), a shift in social stigma surrounding busses, realtime schedule information, and increased development around the stations.

So while San Antonio may have dropped the ball on transit, it’s now much easier to make up that lost time—and the city isn’t straddled with an expensive rail system that needs to be maintained indefinitely.

Tags: Brookings, BRT, light rail, MetroRail

Low traffic, expensive downtown

The Express-News reports that San Antonio’s congestion rates are lower than any big city in Texas. A trip in San Antonio during rush hour takes 16% longer, on average, than it does during free traffic flow times; in Dallas, that figure is 22%, Houston clocks in at 25%, and Austin is the worst at 28%. (The number of hours each person wastes in traffic each year is lower in Austin than in Houston or Dallas, however, presumably because people living in Austin have shorter commutes.)

Anyone who spends time in these cities knows that San Antonio’s traffic is pretty mild, especially if you manage to avoid the area around 281 and 1604. But it occurred to me as I was sitting in SmartWay SA meetings last year that this low level of congestion could be hampering San Antonio’s will to diversify transportation options. After a light rail plan was voted down in San Antonio in 2000, the idea was effectively killed for a decade. Now we’re coming back around to the idea, although it looks like a slower (and probably more politically savvy) strategy is in place: start with Bus Rapid Transit and downtown street cars, and slowly warm voters up to the idea of light rail. Meanwhile, Dallas, Houston, and Austin already have functioning light rail systems in place.

I wonder if there’s an analogy here with downtown San Antonio’s reliance on tourism. I’ve heard that because the city can fill big hotels downtown, real estate is pricey, so offices and residential developments are difficult to finance. (Although developer Ed Cross thinks it’s possible, and certainly has put his money where his mouth is). So while the tourism industry has kept the core of the city somewhat lively during the decades of urban decay experienced throughout the United States, it may be holding back growth now that people are actually ready to move back into urban centers. We usually see the number of downtown residential units pegged at around 3,000 (although depending on what you consider “downtown,” the figure could be as high as 23,000); it’ll take a lot of Vistanas — at under 300 units a pop — to get to Cross’ magic number of 10,000 downtown residents.

If San Antonio’s successes in highway infrastructure and downtown tourism are analogous in that they both create a risk of complacency, they are also linked in a more literal way: a thriving downtown will partly be driven by a robust and diverse transit system. The City is working on both these problems simultaneously, as are developers prescient enough to see the long-term trends and ignore the immediate lure of Stone Oak’s high income levels. But educating voters about the need for these improvements will be that much harder; after all, traffic isn’t that bad, and downtown seems more like a nice tourist stop than a rotting core in desperate need of attention.

Tags: development, downtown, Ed Cross, hotels, light rail, tourism, traffic