Monday Morning Linkages

More on NOLA potentially removing I-10 through the City, this time by former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist (who removed a freeway himself) and New Orleans architect Clifton James:

Despite protests from predominately African-American neighborhood residents and business owners, construction of Interstate 10 erased the oak-lined avenue that had been a strolling route for Louis Armstrong and other famed New Orleanians. The 132 businesses the street supported in 1960 shrank to 35 by 2000. Restoring the boulevard offers an opportunity to fix an oppressive mistake and create rich soil for growing diverse, locally owned businesses, as well as creating jobs for people native to this community. It is the best way to make the corridor a prized asset that brings hope to Tremé and lower Mid-City and works for all of New Orleans.

Enough press and these things become runaway trains and that is a good thing.
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Take this for what it is worth, but a new Gallup poll shows that the longer your commute is, the lower your physical and mental well-being:

The results imply that many employers may need to reevaluate their options for helping workers manage those effects, particularly in light of the costs associated with low wellbeing. Those who are hesitant to allow telecommuting, for example, may need to consider balancing the physical and emotional toll of long commutes against the social benefits of having employees together in the workplace. Employers should also recognize that it's not just the time lost in commuting that may have adverse effects. Particularly in tough economic times, commuting expenses -- whether they go to gas and parking or mass transit fees -- may contribute to elevated worry levels. Helping defray those costs may help employees make the long trek to and from work with greater peace of mind.

I tend to ignore polls like these, and prefer reality based statistics such as measurable incidents. When people are polled and know they are being polled, their answers are often consciously adjusted to what they think the inquisitor wants to hear.

With that said, I do generally agree with their conclusions. Although with very little housing supply in and around downtown areas, lack of supply inflates housing price. Of course, if we were to individually measure Housing + Transportation costs accurately and consciously, we would probably see smarter decisions on where to live.
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Yours truly gets reviewed by a local blogger Metroplexian in a post called Loser Cruiser. I'm not sure if I'm the loser:

My only real criticism of Mr. Kennedy's blog is that he lives in downtown. He works in downtown...Most of us can't swing living and working in downtown Dallas. We have to live where most of the Metroplex lives, in the goddamn suburbs!

The rest of the blog gets into a personal account of the travails riding DART and its many limitations. It is worth the read.

A Clockwork Orange Line

Something to accompany your steaky-wakes and eggy-weggs this morning:


Eye-opening ideas.

With funding problems a plenty for not just the orange line, but virtually all planned transit lines the DMN Transpo blog has an excellent idea up from the awesomely Texan-named Garl Boyd Latham.

What we are learning is that we actually can't have our steaky-wakes AND eggy-weggs AND eath them too all at the same time despite knowing full well that transit capacity and hierarchy of service is necessary for the city's and region's long-term viability. The world is no longer made of funny money...and this is a good thing. Funny money makes for incredibly (and sometimes indelibly) stupid and short-sighted city planning. It gives us time to pause...and prioritize. What is most important?

Latham's idea is to finish the Orange Line to the airport and I agree with him that connecting downtown to the airport(s) should be a priority, representing a carfree link to the global economy. If your city doesn't have that, good luck in the competition of cities of the 21st century.

One issue with the Orange Line as currently planned is that once complete, it will create a logjam of trains on the existing downtown line along with the Red, Blue, and Green all converging along the same corridor of limited capacity and inherent (in)efficiency to move them all through the City. Hence the reason for D2. The thought was that D2 would run through the southern portion of downtown, alleviate pressure on the current line and leverage private investment in the neglected areas of town.

Sounds pretty good right. Of course, there are also financial realities. One D2 alignment costs approximately $300 million. That's the cheapest. The City's preferred alignment, to the new "bricks and mortar" project, the convention center hotel, costs approximately $600 million (jaw ->floor).

Oooooooh-Kay. Time to rethink. Rather than run a second line through downtown, Latham suggests running the Orange line directly to Union Station, eschewing the train traffic snarl on the current line.

A direct link from airport to Union Station immediately increases Union Station's significance within the city. Currently, it is an afterthought. If that becomes the single place for businessmen (and women) to catch their ride to the airport, it once again becomes a hub of activity. Furthermore, it is only two blocks from the Convention Center Hotel and provides the opportunity to leverage the value of land around Belo into functional urban fabric.

His other idea is to effectively replace D2 with streetcar. I like this idea for several reasons:

• Streetcar is cheaper than DART lines which are much closer to heavy rail than they are light rail. Streetcar can cost around $20mil/mile where DART lines could be anywhere from $80mil/mile or in downtown or subway type conditions upwards of $200mill/mile.
  
• Streetcars run on the street and help to calm traffic making downtown roads more walkable, which is necessary for urban investment and development.
• DART hasn't shown the ability to leverage much in the way of retail activity. My guess is the reasons are two-fold: it serves a much larger area meaning that, like highways, it serves macro-destination to macro-destination: 'burb to job center (downtown) whereas streetcar is much more fine-grained. Second, it hasn't shown the ability to "mingle" with cars and pedestrians alike the way streetcar can.
• The geometries of a heavier rail like DART make it difficult to turn and corner within the confines of downtown urban fabric. We end up with more spaghetti under in and around the freeway spaghetti which act as barriers, further disconnecting downtown from its foundations, the neighborhoods adjacent.
  
• Streetcar is best at leveraging investment in areas immediately adjacent to downtowns, which I'm slowly but surely leaning to the opinion that Downtown is so constrained that if you don't remove the freeways, you have to build up the value around downtown in order to make downtown viable.
  
• Because streetcar is more pedestrian friendly AND cheaper, it generates more bang for the buck by way of private investment, which means...

...take whatever money is alotted for D2 and:

1) Run streetcar from Union Station to Oak Cliff as is currently planned.

2) Run streetcar from Union Station down Canton/Young into Deep Ellum.

3) Do NOT move MATA off of St. Paul and extend it past Main Street Gardens to intersect with the new Canton/Young line with plans to eventually run it to the Cedars.



Everything is linked into Union Station, and if we ever plan on having High Speed Rail, Union becomes a true multi-modal facility serving the various necessary hierarchies of transportation in order to properly link downtown with the local, metropolitan, regional, state, national, and international economies and returning "pride of place" back to Union Station as downtown Dallas's front door to the world.

Thumbs up.