Who Will Ride the Train?

The newly funded 3C corridor rail service has been receiving a healthy dose of skepticism, including from the Dispatch story below.  I’m very much in favor of the project, but I think debate of major public investments is a good thing that ultimately leads  to better project outcomes.

So who’s going to take the train?
Even fans doubt slow travel times will attract riders
Saturday, January 30, 2010 8:47 AM
By James Nash and Marla Matzer Rose
The Columbus Dispatch

A business traveler hoping to take a train from Columbus to Cleveland would have to leave the capital city at 6:32 a.m. and wrap things up in Cleveland to catch the last train at 3:30 p.m.

That hypothetical passenger would end up spending 6 hours on the train, compared with less than six hours in Cleveland.

People wishing to catch the train from Columbus to Cleveland or Cincinnati for sports or other evening events are out of luck, unless they’re willing to stay overnight.

So just who’s going to use what’s being hailed as the greatest transportation innovation in Ohio in decades?

Nearly 500,000 people a year, according to Amtrak. Rail advocates say passengers would include college students, the elderly, people without cars, and business travelers who would work on their computers or phones while riding the rails.

…Fares are expected to be $18 to $25 for a one-way ticket between Columbus and Cleveland or Cincinnati.

http://www.dispatchpolitics.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2010/01/30/copy/RIDERS.ART_ART_01-30-10_A1_5RGF08Gx.html?adsec=politics&sid=101

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Admittedly, the line will initially be relatively slow with travel times from Columbus to Cleveland scheduled to be 3 hr 13 min and from Columbus to Cincinnati in 3 hr 7 min. If the proposed schedule in the Service Development Plan remains unchanged, then it will also be somewhat inconvenient for business and entertainment purposes due to a failure to provide any evening departures later 4:15 PM from any of the cities. Since business and entertainment (especially sports) are two of the biggest potential markets for the service, I hope the proposed schedule will be changed and/or special trains will be added for events.

Nevertheless, I think there are still plenty of people who will benefit from this service.  The Dispatch lists students, the elderly, business travelers, and people without cars as potential train customers.  I would also add households with only one car.  I know first-hand that if I were going on a trip, I would either take a train or bus to my destination or rent a car, leaving our one family car with my wife so she can still use it to get to work, take my son to daycare, and run errands.   I decided to dig into the 2000 US Census data to find out how many households in the four major cities served by the line are either carless or have just one vehicle available.  The data are as follows:

County	HH	0_VEH	PCT_0_VEH	1_VEH	PCT_1_VEH
Cuyahoga	571,457	78,005	13.7%	228,746	40.0%
Franklin	438,778	37,656	8.6%	168,620	38.4%
Hamilton	346,790	46,805	13.5%	128,051	36.9%
Montgomery	229,229	22,500	9.8%	84,061	36.7%
SUM	1,586,254	184,966	11.7%	609,478	38.4%

HH = Total households
0_VEH = Households with no vehicles available
PCT_0_VEH = Percentage of households with no vehicles available
1_VEH = Households with one vehicle available
PCT_1_VEH = Percentage of households with no vehicles available

What we find is that over 10% of the households in the four major counties with proposed rail stations have no vehicles available and nearly 40% have only one available.  That’s nearly 800,000 households, or 18% of those in the entire state, that could potentially benefit from this service.

What about the elderly and students?  The numbers really start to add up when you include them.  The Census Bureau’s 2006-2008 American Community Survey data show the following population figures in the counties of interest.

County	POPULATION	OVER_60	PCT_OVER_60	COLLEGE	PCT_COLLEGE
Cuyahoga	1,295,683	261,522	20.2%	84,975	6.6%
Franklin	1,117,702	154,619	13.8%	100,640	9.0%
Hamilton	850,869	153,962	18.1%	62,382	7.3%
Montgomery	537,700	107,095	19.9%	43,094	8.0%
SUM	3,801,954	677,198	17.8%	291,090	7.7%

The 677,198 elderly persons living in these four counties represent 5.9% of the state’s population (11,473,983).  That number is of course growing too as baby boomers age.  The college students in these four counties are an additional 2.5% of the state’s population.

These two tables make me think that Amtrak’s estimate of 500,000 passengers per year is very reasonable, if not too conservative.  Not everyone in these groups will take the train.  Many students have cars and many elderly can will still drive for years to come.  To me though it is obvious that Ohio needs more transportation options for huge segments of the state’s population.  The 3C quick-start plan is a great way to begin.

3C Corridor Gets $400 Million Stimulus Grant

It’s official! Ohio will get $400 Million for HSR.  Here’s the post from the USDOT’s blog, including a map of the projects around the nation receiving funds.

January 28, 2010
President Obama delivers on American High-Speed Rail

I have looked forward to this day for a long time.

It is a great honor–a great honor–to have President Obama and Vice President Biden in Tampa, Florida, to announce our American Recovery and Reinvestment Act High-Speed and Inter-city Passenger Rail grants.

READ MORE

Rumor: Ohio to Get $400 Million for 3C Corridor

This would be really great news. Hopefully we’ll get confirmation tomorrow.

Ohio getting $400 million in federal rail money
Obama will announce grants Thursday in Florida
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 3:25 PM
Updated: Wednesday, January 27, 2010 05:51 PM
By Jonathan Riskind and James Nash
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Ohio’s long-planned passenger rail corridor is about to get a $400 million federal boost.

President Obama is going to Florida on Thursday to reveal how his administration will divvy up $8 billion in high-speed rail funding, but the good news will whistle all the way up to the Buckeye State, say Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Rep Mary Jo Kilroy, D-Columbus.

Ohio’s plan for passenger rail service linking Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Dayton is going to get a significant share of that funding, said Brown, though he said he didn’t know precisely how much.

But a separate, well-placed federal source told The Dispatch this afternoon that the figure will be $400 million.

“This is some of the best news we have had in a long time,” Brown said. “If I put my ear down to the rail I think I hear a train coming.”

Ohio officials are banking on federal stimulus money for most or all of the estimated $517.6 million they say they need to improve existing freight rail to passenger standards and to buy trains.

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Poll Finds 3C Rail Lacking Majority Support

Poll: Voters reluctant to invest in rail
By Howard Wilkinson • hwilkinson@enquirer.com • January 25, 2010

The bad news for proponents of a passenger rail line that would link Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland is that a new Cincinnati Enquirer/Ohio Newspaper Poll shows a majority of Ohio voters don’t support spending state dollars to run the rail line.

The good news, though, is that proponents don’t believe a public opinion poll will have any impact on whether Ohio gets the $564 million in federal stimulus money it is seeking to start up the project.

…The poll, conducted by the University of Cincinnati’s Institute for Policy Research, interviewed 808 likely voters from around Ohio between Jan. 13-19. The phone survey found that 52 percent said they oppose investing state money in the project, while 41 percent said they approved. Six percent told the poll they are undecided. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

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A 41 percent approval really doesn’t seem that bad to me. Rail and transit projects are always controversial for some reason, and it’s probably hard to find 41 percent support for any kind of government spending right now. I’m wondering what percentage of the people actually live near one of the proposed stations. It would be interesting to see how support varies by geography.

COTA Says Articulated Buses Not Necessary

About a year ago, we reported (based on a report from WOSU) that COTA was planning to purchase six articulated buses.  A Columbus Underground user recently asked, “What ever happened to those?”  I e-mailed COTA to ask and received the following response:   

COTA has discussed the possibility of purchasing articulated buses in the future but at this point in time they are not found to be necessary. It is something we keep in mind. For 2010, COTA is obtaining six hybrid buses. 

So there you have it.  You’ll have six new buses powered by hybrid diesel-electric engines.  This should improve ride quality, reduce emissions, and save COTA some gas money, but it won’t provide any extra capacity to relieve overcrowding.  Maybe someday in the future.

What do you think?  Is overcrowding a problem?  Are bigger buses necessary?

Invisible Parking

Tom Vanderbilt had an interesting post yesterday on his How We Drive blog about how the perception of parking availability may differ from the actual parking available to drivers:

‘Parking Availability Bias’

…I was thinking back to Donald Shoup’s reply to a question I had posed to him, which itself was related to Brian Pijanowski’s study of parking-lot sprawl in Indiana. Despite a huge and quantifiable overabundance of parking in the county he studied, he was interested to note that people still complained “there wasn’t enough parking.”

I asked Shoup, who of course from the groves of academe has helped ignite a quiet but fomenting revolution in parking policy, to what extent this question of perception in the parking equation had been studied or quantified — keeping in mind that perception is a crucial, if often under-appreciated part of the traffic/planning nexus (e.g., commute times, etc.). One part of Shoup’s answer stuck with me: He talked of studying a parking garage in West Hollywood. On the bottom floors, there were cars, and in the empty spaces, plenty of oil stains to indicate past users. On the upper floors, he noted, it looked as if the spaces had never been graced by a single car. And yet the word from drivers was that there was ‘nowhere to park.’ But the problem, Shoup noted, is that drivers’ perception parking supply is informed by the parking spaces they can actually see. Call it “parking availability bias” (ode to Tversky and Kahneman). And the spaces that are most easily seen, of course, are curb spaces, hence the importance of rational market pricing policies to ensure turnover and vacancy. A few empty spaces (15%) can go a long way.

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This got me thinking about the places where “there is nowhere to park” in Columbus. The first place that comes to mind is the Short North, where new parking garages are periodically discussed as a way to ease a supposed parking crunch.  But is is really hard to park in the Short North or is it just an example of parking availability bias?  I suspect the latter, mostly because I have never really had trouble parking in the Short North.  There are several lots (Columbusite has a great map here), meters on High Street, and an abundance of free on-street parking in the surrounding neighborhoods.

I think this last point is where the bias comes in.  People drive down High Street to their destination, but find no open spaces within sight distance and get frustrated that there is nowhere to park.  My advice is to circle around and check the side streets.  Even parking as far away as Neil Avenue seems completely reasonable to me.  After a few years of living in Chicago, I have found myself instinctively trained to take the first available on-street space I find within a half mile of my destination.  Then I start walking to the destination and realize that I could have parked about 3/8 of a mile closer because I’m in Columbus and parking just isn’t that big a problem.

Nevertheless, this parking availability bias illustrates the importance of street level parking for business districts, proper pricing of meters to ensure a few spaces are available at all times, and the futility of building 8-story parking garages where the top floors will never be used because nobody wants to drive around in circles that many times.  As Mr. Vanderbilt suggests, we should look into technology that can guide drivers to the open parking spaces in lots and garages.  This is not uncommon, especially in Europe.  If we did a better job of parking management, maybe the city could have saved itself $30 Million on new parking garages downtown.

Edit: If you haven’t read the book How We Drive, it’s a great read, even for non-engineers.  The book is a highly researched, well written, and fascinating account of the relationships between driving, traffic engineering, and human psychology.  I strongly recommend it.

MORPC Releases Pedestrian and Bicycle Crash Data

I considered calling this post, “Lies, damn lies, and statistics,” in reference to the following headline the Dispatch ran on Saturday.

Worst corridors to bike, walk
MORPC compiles list from 5 years of data on auto crashes with cyclists, pedestrians
Saturday, January 16, 2010 3:12 AM
By Jennifer Smith Richards
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Bikers and walkers were in accidents with vehicles 150 times on a 3-mile segment of High Street in a five-year period, making the busy strip the city’s most crash-prone corridor for those who don’t get around by auto.

The bit of High Street that runs from Clintonville to the Short North can be a bear, a study from the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission says. The agency looked at police reports from 2003 to 2007 to find the area’s trouble spots.

Roads along the Ohio State University campus and the Hilltop community on the West Side are the most troublesome. The five-year study, which is the first of this scale that MORPC has conducted, pinpoints both corridors and specific locations that are danger zones, including:

• Lane Avenue at High Street
• High Street at Long Street
• Broad Street at Central Avenue

READ MORE

Basically, the Dispatch failed to account for the element of exposure. 

Port Columbus to Recieve Body Scanners

Going through the airport is about to become a lot like a second date with Superman. The TSA has x-ray vision. I recommend that you start exercising.

Body scanners expected soon at Port Columbus
Wednesday, January 13, 2010 3:15 AM
By Marla Matzer Rose
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

If you plan to fly from Port Columbus when the weather warms up, there’s a good chance you’ll have to step into a full-body scanner first.

The airport expects to receive at least two full-body scanners by late spring or early summer to enhance its security screenings.

Airport officials are awaiting final confirmation and further details from the Transportation Security Administration, which will pay for and operate the scanners. Columbus had been put on a list by the TSA last year to receive the full-body scanners, said Rod Borden, chief operating officer of the Columbus Regional Airport Authority.

TSA spokesman Jon Allen said the 150 body scanners the TSA has already secured are manufactured by Rapiscan and cost $160,000 apiece. They will be distributed across the country in coming months.

The devices use a very low level of X-rays to show items that might be under a person’s clothing, but Allen emphasized that steps are planned to ensure greater privacy for travelers. For one thing, the person viewing the image will be at a remote location communicating with the TSA officer at the security point and will not be able to identify the person being scanned.

READ MORE

US-23 Warning Signs Permanently Removed

I always liked those signs and thought they were very useful, but perhaps ODOT is right and Delaware County has outgrown them.

On a practical note, you should drive more slowly on US-23 to avoid getting caught in what traffic engineers call a dilemma zone.  A dilemma zone can occur when the yellow light isn’t long enough to allow a driver to get into the intersection before it turns to red or to stop safely in advance of the intersection.  Since the yellow time is based on the assumed speed of a vehicle, a driver going too fast could be putting himself or herself (and others) at risk.

State won’t replace ‘Prepare to Stop’ warnings on stretch of Rt. 23
Tuesday, January 12, 2010 3:06 AM
By Dean Narciso
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Real-estate agent Robert Horbatt has seen his share of bad accidents at Rt. 23 intersections in southern Delaware County, including a fatality near Highbanks Metro Park last year.

So three years ago, when the Ohio Department of Transportation removed “prepare to stop when flashing” signs from seven locations with signals, he was confused.

The yellow flashing lights alert motorists to slow when traffic lights ahead are about to turn red.

“If a tractor-trailer has a warning, he’s going to slow down,” Horbatt wrote in an e-mail. “I’ve seen so many trucks go through the lights. They need the warning that the light is turning red.”

The signals are better-suited to rural areas where “there are very few traffic signals and are usually spread far apart of the unexpected signal ahead,” responded Nancy Burton, spokesman for ODOT.

Among the Rt. 23 intersections that lost the warning lights were Powell, Orange, Home, Lewis Center and Hyatts roads.

Delaware County growth created more stoplights, which “makes the warning signs less necessary,” Burton wrote. “Furthermore, some motorists may use the warnings to speed up to get through the lights before they change.”

Crashes handled by the State Highway Patrol along the 22-mile stretch of Rt. 23 in Delaware County did rise slightly initially, said Sgt. Steven Herron, from a low of 310 in 2005 to a high of 364 in 2008, before dropping to 325 last year.

COTA Operating Cost Comparison

In my post about transit service to Port Columbus (CMH), Ben commented that he thinks COTA’s operating costs are a problem:

One thing missing from all these posts is the issue of money, i.e., the money available to operate more and more service, and (B), is COTA’s cost per hour reasonable, i.e., are they managed well. When you compare their cost per our to the cities you include in your airport analysis, COTA rates poorly, i.e., their costs are high. This issue needs to be addressed so that more money is available to put into service.

I was skeptical of this claim.  It seems that every time I see a list of cities, including my airport transit tables, Columbus falls right in the middle.  To me, Columbus is the quintessential American city, typical in almost every way.  That’s why fast food marketers love to use Columbus as a test market and political pollsters converge on Columbus once every four years.  I expected that transit operating costs would be no different, with COTA’s coming in near the median.  However, Ben was mostly right.  COTA’s costs are at the high end of what you might expect for a city of Columbus’ size and location.