Category: streetcar

This time, Atlanta gets streetcar bucks

The news emerged last week, and official word came today. Atlanta won a $47 million U.S. DOT grant to help it build a proposed $72 million streetcar line. Here’s a link to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article with details. Salt Lake City also won a streetcar grant, for $26 million, and Los Angeles won $20 million for its Crenshaw/LAX light rail line. Yonah Freemark of The Transport Politic offers an analysis here. He notes that of the $600 million total in these so-called TIGER II grants most went to small-scale projects in small and mid-size cities for street improvements, building transit centers, and rehabilitating freight lines. Here’s a link to the USDOT site where you can find the list of capital project grants and the list of planning grants.

Asheville won an $850,000 planning grant for its East Riverside Sustainable Multimodal Neighborhood plan. The project will “integrate existing master plans and revise codes and regulations (emphasis mine) to create sustainable development.” For a bit more information, see Page 22 of the link for planning grants.

This time, Atlanta gets streetcar bucks

The news emerged last week, and official word came today. Atlanta won a $47 million U.S. DOT grant to help it build a proposed $72 million streetcar line. Here’s a link to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article with details. Salt Lake City also won a streetcar grant, for $26 million, and Los Angeles won $20 million for its Crenshaw/LAX light rail line. Yonah Freemark of The Transport Politic offers an analysis here. He notes that of the $600 million total in these so-called TIGER II grants most went to small-scale projects in small and mid-size cities for street improvements, building transit centers, and rehabilitating freight lines. Here’s a link to the USDOT site where you can find the list of capital project grants and the list of planning grants.

Asheville won an $850,000 planning grant for its East Riverside Sustainable Multimodal Neighborhood plan. The project will “integrate existing master plans and revise codes and regulations (emphasis mine) to create sustainable development.” For a bit more information, see Page 22 of the link for planning grants.

Transit, taxes and Tampa

This one is for transit and tax-policy wonks. It’s a piece from Yonah Freemark, in The Transport Politic, about the problems many transit systems are facing with sinking revenues. “When the recession strikes, little maneuvering room for transit” He points out that one reason for the problem is over-reliance on a very volatile revenue stream: sales taxes.

Most cities have been especially affected by the recession because of their reliance on the sales tax to provide revenue. Of the recent referendums on transit expansion programs, almost all have involved a 1/2 cent or one cent increase in that tax; few cities have looked to other forms of revenue, like an income tax or a payroll tax. The consequences of this decision, however, have been devastating because sales tax revenues have fallen considerably as a result of the recession and the reduced standard of living experienced by the majority of Americans over the past few years. A more stable financing program for transit, using other forms of taxation, would ensure that planned projects actually get built.

If you want to get deep in the weeds of transit finance, follow the link on “financing program for transit,” above. I haven’t read it all the way through yet, but it looks at the New York and Paris transit systems and how they get and spend their money.

In other transit-related news, here’s a piece about Charlotte that ran Sunday in Tampa, Fla., where voters next month will decide on – you guessed it, a sales tax – to pay for transit as well as roads and other transportation needs.

And here’s a fun contrarian piece from the Market Urbanism blog, “The Great American Streetcar Myth,” by Stephen Smith, who contends it wasn’t General Motors and Standard Oil who killed off streetcars as much as the Progressive Era and New Deal planners and politicians. Fare-increase restrictions, labor union requirements, publicly paid street-paving and road-building all combined to finish off streetcars, he writes. It’s an interesting perspective. Smith also points out:

“While the status quo’s more libertarian-minded backers will point to the gas tax as a user fee, the highway funds are hardly adequate to cover the true costs. Though state and federal governments do now cover most of the capital and operating costs of the highways, local roads are still paid for almost entirely out of general revenues. And when you consider the forgone taxes and opportunity costs, roads start to look severely underpriced – to say nothing of the last hundred years of subsidized road building (the mainstay of FDR’s WPA), eminent domain, anti-urban federal home tax breaks and lending programs, positive feedback loops, and density-limiting zoning and parking policies.”

Transit, taxes and Tampa

This one is for transit and tax-policy wonks. It’s a piece from Yonah Freemark, in The Transport Politic, about the problems many transit systems are facing with sinking revenues. “When the recession strikes, little maneuvering room for transit” He points out that one reason for the problem is over-reliance on a very volatile revenue stream: sales taxes.

Most cities have been especially affected by the recession because of their reliance on the sales tax to provide revenue. Of the recent referendums on transit expansion programs, almost all have involved a 1/2 cent or one cent increase in that tax; few cities have looked to other forms of revenue, like an income tax or a payroll tax. The consequences of this decision, however, have been devastating because sales tax revenues have fallen considerably as a result of the recession and the reduced standard of living experienced by the majority of Americans over the past few years. A more stable financing program for transit, using other forms of taxation, would ensure that planned projects actually get built.

If you want to get deep in the weeds of transit finance, follow the link on “financing program for transit,” above. I haven’t read it all the way through yet, but it looks at the New York and Paris transit systems and how they get and spend their money.

In other transit-related news, here’s a piece about Charlotte that ran Sunday in Tampa, Fla., where voters next month will decide on – you guessed it, a sales tax – to pay for transit as well as roads and other transportation needs.

And here’s a fun contrarian piece from the Market Urbanism blog, “The Great American Streetcar Myth,” by Stephen Smith, who contends it wasn’t General Motors and Standard Oil who killed off streetcars as much as the Progressive Era and New Deal planners and politicians. Fare-increase restrictions, labor union requirements, publicly paid street-paving and road-building all combined to finish off streetcars, he writes. It’s an interesting perspective. Smith also points out:

“While the status quo’s more libertarian-minded backers will point to the gas tax as a user fee, the highway funds are hardly adequate to cover the true costs. Though state and federal governments do now cover most of the capital and operating costs of the highways, local roads are still paid for almost entirely out of general revenues. And when you consider the forgone taxes and opportunity costs, roads start to look severely underpriced – to say nothing of the last hundred years of subsidized road building (the mainstay of FDR’s WPA), eminent domain, anti-urban federal home tax breaks and lending programs, positive feedback loops, and density-limiting zoning and parking policies.”

Streetcar planning (or not), the Texas way

Charlotte as a model of planning? When it comes to its new federal streetcar grant, if you compare the Queen City to Fort Worth, Texas, the QC looks positively Swiss in its efficiency.

Fort Worth was another of the cities to win a $25 million federal grant for a streetcar project, reports Yonah Freemark in his piece in The Transport Politic, “Fort Worth Wins Grant for Streetcar, But Whether It’s Ready Is Another Question.” But Fort Worth doesn’t even have a route chosen for its streetcar from among six it’s studying. The city hasn’t yet decided on how its share would be funded. And without a route chosen, the exact costs are difficult to project.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram (disclosure, a fellow McClatchy Co. newspaper) editorialized that the city should leave the grant on the table. A local pro-transit blogger, Forthworthology, takes the editorial board to task for what it says are inaccuracies, such as saying the city’s cost would be $26.8 million, when no reliable cost estimate can be made until a route is chosen.

In the Transport Politic piece Freemark writes, “Unlike the streetcar lines proposed for Charlotte and Cincinnati, which are basically ready for construction, Fort Worth’s line is under-planned. The fact that the city has yet to settle on a final alignment is problematic since it means that Washington is agreeing to finance a project that has yet to be fully defined. Is that sound policy?”

It’s a good question. Many U.S. cities (including Winston-Salem and Columbia) are looking at launching streetcar projects. But until the Obama administration, streetcar projects were all but frozen out of any federal funding. That’s one reason the Federal Transit Administration took unspent transit money and created the pool of streetcar. With so many cities that could use the money, why give a grant to one that doesn’t seem ready?

An aside – I noticed reading the Star-Telegram editorial that the “Regional Transportation Council” has given money to the streetcar effort. Yet another metro region with a sane planning structure: The regional council of governments (known as a COG to planning technies), which does regionwide planning, is the same organization as the metropolitan planning organization (MPO), which does regional transportation planning. Well, duh.

Of course, in Charlotte we have four to six MPOs in our metro region, and they’re all separate from the COGs. So our transportation planning is both fractured and disconnected from land use planning.

Insanity. It’s one thing that helped give us a state-designed outerbelt in southern Mecklenburg designed with the state-held delusion that nearby land would remain rural.

How Charlotte competitor builds its streetcar

St. Louis, one of the four cities in the running with the QC for the probably-not-very-exciting 2012 Democratic National Convention, was also a recipient of one of those $25 million federal grants for a streetcar project. In “St. Louis’ Loop District Gets Endorsement from Feds with Grant for Streetcar,” Yonah Freemark at thetransportpolitic.com gives more details about the project – the only one of nine cities whose streetcar projects got federal money this year that plans a project outside of its downtown.

Some interesting tidbits: St. Louis plans its project to use both overhead wires (like Charlotte) and battery power, which will let it run through some segments of the route without the wires. “This could make St. Louis the first city in the U.S. to experiment with this sort of alternative propulsion for rail vehicles,” Freemark writes. Indeed, in talks about Charlotte’s streetcar and the problem of how to deal with The Square (at Trade and Tryon in the heart of downtown) if the project’s next phase is built, the idea of batteries has come up. Looks as if St. Louis will be the guinea pig on this technology.

Also interesting is the way it’s being funded: In addition to the feds’ $25 million grant, the project will get $6 million from the local Council of Government/MPO (Imagine this: In many, many metro regions the “regional planning” body and the “regional transportation planning” body are the same – duh!). Private money, estimated at $5 million to $8million, is expected from donors McCormack Baron Salazar, a national urban development firm with headquarters in St. Louis, which committed $2 million in tax credit equity, and the St. Louis Development Corp., which has pledged $3 million.

And, writes Freemark, “Operations will be covered by a transportation tax residents in the surrounding area approved by 97%. This strong show of local support, both financial and political, is likely one of the reasons St. Louis won the grant from the U.S. DOT over so many competitors.” That tax is in the form of a 1-cent sales tax in a transportation development district.

Charlotte folks should be paying attention to several lessons here: Look to multiple revenue sources such as special districts and getting the private sector which will reap some benefits to pay in. But this part needs to be in neon, with flashing red arrows pointing to it: Combine the region’s splintered MPOs (Metropolitan Planning Organizations for those of you not deeply into transportation policy) and the region’s COG, so there’s one regional planning agency doing the planning for the region.

Why conservatives should love streetcars

“‘For cities, conservatives’ banner should read, ‘Bring Back the Streetcars!’ ”

Read on. It’s from an article in The American Conservative, “What’s so conservative about federal highways?” by William S. Lind, director of The American Conservative Center for Public Transportation and coauthor of Moving Minds: Conservatives and Public Transportation. Reader Mason Hicks, who grew up in Lancaster County, S.C., but now lives in Paris (France) shared it with me recently.

Lind’s piece talks about the folly of a national transportation system that requires us to depend on foreign oil, and on only one transportation mode, and points out how it was government intervention in the marketplace (via billions spent on highways) that helped kill the passenger rail business.

And here’s another provocative excerpt: “The greatest threat to a revival of attractive public transportation is not the libertarian transit critics. It is an unnecessary escalation of construction costs, usually driven by consultants who know nothing of rail and traction history, are often in cahoots with the suppliers, and gold-plate everything.”

He writes of the importance of “avoiding the foxfire allure of high technology,” and says, “All the technology needed to run electric railways, and run them fast, was in place 100 years ago. It was simple, rugged, dependable, and relatively cheap. In the 1930s, many of America’s passenger trains, running behind steam locomotives, were faster than they are now. (After World War II, the federal government slapped speed limits on them.)”

It’s a provocative piece, especially in light of the Charlotte debate over whether the city should accept a $25 million Federal Transit Administration grant to help it start building a proposed streetcar line. Here’s what the Charlotte Observer’s editorial board said in today’s newspaper:
“Think streetcar vote was hard? Just wait.”

Why conservatives should love streetcars

“‘For cities, conservatives’ banner should read, ‘Bring Back the Streetcars!’ ”

Read on. It’s from an article in The American Conservative, “What’s so conservative about federal highways?” by William S. Lind, director of The American Conservative Center for Public Transportation and coauthor of Moving Minds: Conservatives and Public Transportation. Reader Mason Hicks, who grew up in Lancaster County, S.C., but now lives in Paris (France) shared it with me recently.

Lind’s piece talks about the folly of a national transportation system that requires us to depend on foreign oil, and on only one transportation mode, and points out how it was government intervention in the marketplace (via billions spent on highways) that helped kill the passenger rail business.

And here’s another provocative excerpt: “The greatest threat to a revival of attractive public transportation is not the libertarian transit critics. It is an unnecessary escalation of construction costs, usually driven by consultants who know nothing of rail and traction history, are often in cahoots with the suppliers, and gold-plate everything.”

He writes of the importance of “avoiding the foxfire allure of high technology,” and says, “All the technology needed to run electric railways, and run them fast, was in place 100 years ago. It was simple, rugged, dependable, and relatively cheap. In the 1930s, many of America’s passenger trains, running behind steam locomotives, were faster than they are now. (After World War II, the federal government slapped speed limits on them.)”

It’s a provocative piece, especially in light of the Charlotte debate over whether the city should accept a $25 million Federal Transit Administration grant to help it start building a proposed streetcar line. Here’s what the Charlotte Observer’s editorial board said in today’s newspaper:
“Think streetcar vote was hard? Just wait.”

Envisioning streetcar stops

What should the stops look like for the city’s proposed streetcar project? You can weigh in next Thursday, Feb. 18, 6-8 p.m., at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center in Room 267.

A press release from the city and from the Charlotte Area Transportation System (CATS) quotes John Mryzgod, civil engineer with the city: “It is important we understand what the public would like to see because it gives us the tools to not only design a streetcar stop, but to design a stop that ties in with the fabric of the community.”

(Background: The CATS plan for transit for 2030 includes a streetcar. The city of Charlotte doesn’t want to wait that long so it is going to try to build the streetcar without CATS funding. So far, it is working on planning and engineering but doesn’t have construction money. It is, though, applying for a federal grant to build a 1.5-mile segment of the proposed 10-mile project.)

I will add my two-cents’ worth here, instead of at the hearing:

• Why does a streetcar line need “stops” that must be “designed”? On other streetcar systems I’ve seen – most recently Toronto, but including Rome and New Orleans – you just got onto the streetcar in the street, as you would a bus. Obviously, thought must go into things such as where it stops, how to sell the tickets (or maybe just use machines that take money, as buses do?) and which stops will be busy enough so benches and shelter might be offered. Other than that, don’t spend money on anything more than an easily spotted sign and the same amenities you’d offer at a bus stop.

The stations on the Lynx Line were way, way over-designed, IMHO, and more reminiscent of subway (aka “heavy rail”) stops or commuter rail stations. Maybe CATS figured that in a city of transit newbies we’d need something prettier and more noticeable than just a spot to buy tickets and some shelter while we wait.

• That said, shade, shelter from the rain and a spot to sit would be welcome at the busier streetcar stops. So, too, would be system maps plus route and schedule information about the streetcar. The maps should show what major attractions are at each stop – the arena, the county courthouse, police station, Central Piedmont Community College, Presbyterian Hospital, Johnson C. Smith University, etc.

• And I will take this opportunity to lodge a gripe about something that’s bugged me for years about CATS bus stops, although to be fair I’ll note bus stops are much improved in recent years. But why not a shelter with a roof that shades you from the sun? Bus shelter roofs should be opaque, not tinted plastic. This is the South, for crying out loud. It gets mighty hot here. Shade is vital.
To learn more about the Charlotte Streetcar Project, please visit http://www.charlottefuture.com/ or try this link.

Finding that streetcar money

Just finished an interview with Charlotte budget director Ruffin Hall (NOT Ruffin Poole, just in case you’re confused by the Ruffins), to find where in the budget this $12 million was hiding. What $12 million? See yesterday’s post. Or read on.

Of course, it isn’t really hiding. The city staff is pointing to a variety of city funds (listed in the city budget) that still have money in them, funds set aside for just this sort of thing: a project that arises unexpectedly for which elected officials would like to find money.

In this instance, the city is considering whether to set aside $12 million, which it would spend if it gets a $25 million federal grant. The $37 million total would build a 1.5-mile first segment of a proposed 10-mile streetcar line. The City Council is to vote Monday on whether to apply for that grant (plus another one that would add hybrid electric buses). If the city can’t find/isn’t willing to spend the $12 million there’s no point in applying for the grant. Here’s a quick rundown of the $12 million:

First, it is capital expense money. That’s a separate, $803 million budget apart from the overall $1 billion operating budget that pays for things such as police officers and garbage collection. (You may or may not like the idea of spending the $12 million but it isn’t money that could be used to hire more police.) Remember, too, the airport and the water/sewer departments, while counted in the budget, are self-sustaining “enterprise funds.” (Also here’s the perennial reminder: The city doesn’t pay for schools, parks and recreation, welfare, mental health facilities or a variety of other needs paid by the county or state.)

– $2.5 million in streetcar planning funds. Last summer, in a controversial vote, the City Council allocated $8 million for streetcar planning and engineering. The contract came in for less, and $2.5 million is available. You can find it on page 166 of the city budget. Here’s a link. This comes from a pot of money called PAYGO (pay as you go). This budget year the city put roughly $96 million into this fund, which is spent for things like transit maintenance, street improvements, roof replacements, etc.

– $10.5 million in reserve for economic development initiatives. This isn’t PAYGO money. It’s money set aside to repay debt the city might choose to take on. The council’s transportation committee members Thursday said they’d use $5.5 million of this fund. Look on page 163 of the budget.

– $ 7 million in business corridor revitalization funds. These, too are PAYGO funds, as yet unspent. The committee didn’t want to do this.

– $4 million in Smart Growth fund. That brings us to a multimillion “Smart Growth” fund, which the committee recommends using as part of the needed $12 million. Many folks wonder: The city just has $4 million sitting around that we didn’t know about? I asked Hall. It turns out the money isn’t just sitting around in some secret account. It’s been used to help with transit-oriented development along South Boulevard.

Hall said it’s a revolving fund (i.e., the city replenishes it with money the fund itself generates) that the council hasn’t put money into for years. Because it doesn’t get money allocated to it, it’s not a line item on the budget. It would be on the city’s financial statement, he said. Here’s a link to that. I ran out of time to do more than a search for “Smart Growth” which turned up nothing. (Other writing deadlines loom larger and larger as I type this.)

Hall said the Smart Growth fund was used, for instance, when the city spent money for its proposed Scaleybark transit oriented development project. When the city sold the land to a developer (the project is stuck in the recession and is delayed), the money went back into this fund. I have a call in to Economic Development director Tom Flynn, in whose department Hall said, the fund sits. Hall didn’t know whether taking $4 million would drain the fund.
Update: Flynn just called. He says that when Scaleybark Partners, the developer, repays the city in February the Smart Growth fund will have $4 million in it. It was set up as a revolving fund 9 or 10 years ago, he said, to be used for projects of that sort.

Bottom line: Money is fungible. A smart city manager will always keep things flexible enough so he or she can find funds for projects the elected officials want – or for things that arise unexpectedly midyear. I want managers who can do that. At the same time, I think the public (and elected officials) are owed more transparency about how much money is sitting, awaiting expenditure. It’s smart to have some reserve money. It’s also smart, if you’re a council member, to know just what your reserve money is and where it lives in your budget.