Next City recently published a piece by Aaron Wiener called "Why Streetcars Aren't About Transit." Wiener used the pending launch of D.C.'s system to consider the role that streetcars play in a city's overall transit network — if any. The story is behind a paywall, but the tease hints at the core question: "are they legitimate ways of transporting a city’s people, or novelty items meant to deliver gentrification to voguish neighborhoods?"

Whether streetcars are a tool for city mobility or economic development might seem like a needlessly nuanced discussion. In fact, it has very practical implications. America's streetcar renaissance is being paid for largely with money that would otherwise go to traditional forms of public transportation. So if money for transit is going to projects that chiefly promote economic development, city mobility is going to suffer.

Transport scholar Jeffrey Brown of Florida State University made some progress toward answering this question with an analysis of seven streetcar lines [PDF]. Brown considered streetcar systems in Little Rock, Memphis, Portland, Seattle, Tacoma, Tampa, and New Orleans for their role as a public transit mode. His goal was to gain insight into their "level of integration with and role within the larger transit system in the community."

At some level, writes Brown, all these streetcar systems can be considered transit; after all, each one operates under the city's transit agency. (TransitKC, a streetcar supporter, tweeted as much in response to Wiener's piece.) Brown also found that most of the systems (five out of seven) allowed free transfers to buses, suggesting an expectation of connectivity between streetcars and the larger transit network.

But this level of integration didn't hold up as strongly when Brown looked at streetcar ridership as a share of fixed-route ridership in each city (i.e. bus or rail). In New Orleans, for instance, 40 percent of all fixed-transit passenger trips occurred on streetcars — an indication that the system is integral to the city's larger transit network. Elsewhere, however, streetcar's transit trip share was quite low, only cracking double digits in Memphis.

Related statistics were equally discouraging for every system but the historic one in New Orleans. While that streetcar accounts for more than 30 percent of all passenger miles taken on city transit, no other system exceeds 2 percent. (And while the streetcar accounts for about 20 percent of all transit vehicle revenue miles in New Orleans, it makes up less than 5 percent everywhere else.) Even within the context of transit's already low share of overall travel, a streetcar trip is a rare bird that doesn't fly far.

There are optimistic ways to interpret this data. The low shares of unlinked trips and system mileage could mean people are using the streetcar primarily for that critical first and last mile of travel. Indeed, average streetcar trip lengths are less than a mile in Seattle and Memphis, according to Brown. (New Orleans, meanwhile, has an average trip length of nearly 2.6 miles.)

Still, Brown suspects that even transit agencies don't necessarily see streetcars as integral parts of the transit network. The fact that Tampa didn't even track transfer activity between buses and streetcars, for instance, gave the impression that streetcar ridership was a bit like a bonus. Brown concludes that agencies themselves probably view the streetcar "more as development catalysts or as devices used to serve tourists and shoppers as opposed to regular transit riders":

Whether this is an effective strategy or not is also something beyond the scope of this study, but it is indicative of a dilemma in these fiscally-constrained times, given that streetcar projects funded by the federal government's resource-strapped capital grants program use resources that might have been used for other projects designed primarily to transport regular transit riders.

This gets back to the heart of the discussion. Streetcar systems are expensive to build. They cost more to operate per passenger mile than buses (a range of $1.58-6.18 versus $.78-1.65, per Brown), run slower (half the average speed, per Brown), and generally don't stretch across a whole city. Some cities will choose to make these sacrifices for the benefits of economic development — though these too have been challenged — and charming, walkable cores. They should understand that mobility at large may suffer as a result.

Top image: Julie Botnick of New Haven, Connecticut works on her smart phone as she travels down the St. Charles Ave. Street Car line in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Sean Gardner/Reuters)

WOOH. Technically, there are some glitches in the early archives, so I don't actually know which comic this is. BUT, the longer I do this, the closer the large round numbers get to being correct.

Thanks for giving me the best job ever, geeks.

<3, Zach

When the I-5 bridge over the Skagit River collapsed last week, after hearing everyone was okay, my next thoughts were of prevention. How do we stop that kind of accident from happening again? What’s wrong with our priorities that it wasn’t prevented?

At first glance, prevention seems easy – fund our backlog! There are several categories of unsafe bridges in Washington: “structurally deficient” and “fracture-critical” are the two basic categories in the most need. Structurally deficient bridges are unsafe just sitting there. They’re the highest priority. Fracture-critical bridges aren’t immediately unsafe, but they’re not resilient – they can fail easily in earthquakes or from impacts. The I-5 bridge that collapsed wasn’t structurally deficient, but it was fracture-critical: It could (and did) fail after only a small impact.

The Seattle Times has an interactive map of all the structurally deficient and fracture-critical bridges in the state.

So with a good understanding of what’s needed to prevent disasters like this, what’s the legislature doing? What’s the governor doing? Highway expansion, of course! At the Cascade Bicycle Club breakfast a few weeks ago, Governor Inslee spent much of his time at the podium talking about the Columbia River Crossing project (which Cascade opposes) – a massive expansion, replacing a bridge that’s not on either of those lists. And at the 36th District Democrats straw poll a week and a half ago, Senator Ed Murray touted the SR-99 tunnel project as one of his accomplishments – a project that requires the structurally deficient Alaskan Way Viaduct to be kept open for four years longer than the other (cheaper) options that were on the table – not only increasing risk, but using money that could have been spent to fix dozens of other bridges.

There are legislators who disagree. On Transportation Advocacy Day in February, Reuven Carlyle, one of my two representatives in the 36th, talked about how a majority of the House transportation committee Democrats don’t want to build more megaprojects. But, unfortunately, the current House transportation package is mostly new highways. It barely begins to work on our safety problems.

This isn’t easy to solve. Legislators need to be re-elected, largely by a voting population that doesn’t have the time or energy to pay attention to the details of what their representation is doing in Olympia. Big, flashy projects mean more PR for less outreach work. And when a bridge on an Interstate falls down, the federal government steps in to fund most of the replacement – 90% for the Skagit bridge. This is true for direct votes as well – as Prop 1 in 2011 showed us, a lot of small projects doesn’t do anywhere near as well as a handful of large ones. There isn’t much incentive for legislators in swing districts to get their hands dirty.

However, Democratic legislators in safe seats don’t have good reason to ignore safety issues and support megaprojects. They’re the ones who have the power to take difficult votes and to be more progressive without as much risk. So I was pleased to hear Rep. Carlyle speak against megaprojects – and very disappointed to hear Senator Murray, in possibly the safest Senate seat in the state, speak in favor of the highway 99 tunnel, when it was his leadership of the House Transportation Committee that chose to fund expensive highway expansion projects over replacing bridges like the one that collapsed.

As transportation advocates, our job is to hold our policymakers’ feet to the fire – so that they can’t use safety, gridlock, or transit as buzzwords to push a tiny number of expensive highway expansions instead of making sure the hundreds of unsafe structures in the state are repaired or replaced.

You can help us – without actually going to Olympia. CREDO Mobile reached out to us (I had no idea they were so active) to help us petition legislators to fixing unsafe bridges *before* building new highways. Add your name and we’ll make sure your voice is heard by the governor and House Transportation!

Lots of interesting things have been announced at Google I/O this week, including a major update to Google Maps, a Google product that’s familiar to almost everyone, and used by many on a daily basis. Most of the news coverage has revolved around visual, social or privacy aspects of the Maps experience, but I want to talk about a major upgrade to the transit functionality of Maps.*

This new transit feature is known as Guidebook Routing. The catchy explanation is that the new Google Maps will give you the kind of directions you’d get from a guidebook: simple, intuitive and convenient. When you ask for directions between two points, rather than getting an itinerary that minimizes travel time for a handful of particular departure or arrival times (as you do today), you’ll be offered an itinerary that gets you between those points, as frequently as possible, for as much of the day as possible.

To put it in transit nerd terms, Maps will evaluate all the possible ways to get between two points to figure out the effective all-day frequency and span of service (accounting for connections between services of different frequency), and show you itineraries which prioritize those qualities over a naive minimization of scheduled travel time. It will still be possible to look at departures or arrivals at specific times, but the general guidebook itineraries will be the first thing users see.

The screenshot at the top, taken from the public preview, shows an example of this. To travel on transit from the PacMed building to downtown Fremont, take bus 36 and then transfer to 26, 28 or 40 in Pioneer Square. This itinerary works at least every 15 minutes from 6AM to 11PM, every day; within those time periods, it’s a general solution to the problem of getting between those two points. An alternative route, using the 5, 16 or 26X to get off at 38th & Bridge Way and walk down the hill is also available.

In both cases, note that even though a single route determines the baseline daytime frequency for the connection, Maps notices that other routes also serve an identical pair of stops origin destination stops, so if one of them comes first, you should take it.

After the jump, another example.

There are three ways you could get between these two places: walk to Eastlake and take the 70-series buses, or the 66, or wait for the 25, which makes this trip almost door to door. The 70-series runs every 15 minutes all day and night, the 66 is every 30 minutes, and the 25 is every 60 minutes. Nobody capable of walking is going to bother waiting up to an hour for the 25, and the results reflect that, directing you towards the most frequent service, rather than the nominally fastest service, which would be the 25 at 19 minutes. If you really do want to see the door-to-door trips, you can click the “More options and times” links and find them.

Guidebook routing more closely reflects the way the vast majority of people actually use transit, prioritizing frequency and span of service on generally-useful routes over infrequent one-seat rides that just happen to provide doorstep service. Its works best, of course, in transit systems full of truly high-frequency, reliable all-day routes, but to the extent that we have such service here, the same ideas apply. Frequency is freedom, and the most commonly-used private sector mapping tool increasingly reflects that. There are still some kinks to iron out of the new routing engine**, but this is a huge stop forward to more comprehensible transit.

The new Maps is being rolled out gradually; sign up here to get on the waiting list. I think you’ll love the new maps.

* Disclaimer: I work at Google, but in a completely unrelated area, and all this information is based on the public preview of the new Maps, not inside knowledge. Please don’t ask me questions about unreleased Google products or features, I can’t answer them.

** For example, the 7 is prioritized over Link for Rainier Valley trips because Link’s all-day frequency is considered to be 20 minutes, due to the post-9pm single-tracking that’s currently happening for repair work. The 7 runs every 15 minutes until much later, and is thus considered a superior service by the routing engine, even though during most of the day it’s is actually an inferior service for most trips.

This guest post is by Mike McGinn, mayor of Seattle, in response to state senator Ed Murray's guest post yesterday that was ostensibly about sub-area equity funding of Sound Transit but focused largely on the mayor's race — Eds

If Senator Ed Murray wants to meet the person responsible for Seattle not having more transit, he can simply look in the mirror. And while he tries to attack me, proposing to end sub-area equity is the equivalent of starting a political bar-fight among local elected officials. He's jeopardizing Seattle's transit future just as we've made more progress than ever before.

Sound Transit has made great progress toward building a rail network in Seattle and the Puget Sound region. For 30 years we had tried and failed to make progress. Forward Thrust was voted down and we struggled to break the political deadlock around transit.

But we got there. We broke the deadlock by uniting voters and politicians from Seattle and the suburbs through the policy known as sub-area equity. That policy has generated political support and votes for building more rail in Seattle as well as around the region.

The results are clear. We’ve got one rail line open in Seattle, with two more under construction to connect the U-District and Northgate. We are getting close to groundbreaking for the East Link, and have funded routes that take us toward Lynnwood and Federal Way.

Through regional cooperation we’re also making big strides in planning even more rail in Seattle. I won approval from the Sound Transit board to advance the planning for the following routes so they can be ready to be funded, potentially in Sound Transit 3 in 2016:

• Ballard to downtown (jointly with City of Seattle)
• Downtown to West Seattle
• Ballard to the Eastside via 520

In fact, at the urging of myself and others, the Sound Transit board accelerated all of their planning around the region so we are prepared to go to the ballot in 2016 if the legislature gives Sound Transit revenue authority to support expansion.

All of that work falls apart if a Seattle mayor suddenly decided they wanted to change the deal. By attacking sub-area equity Ed Murray threatens to blow up Sound Transit. Sound Transit's board was willing to advance these rail planning studies in Seattle in part because I pledged Seattle's support to help complete the regional system. Communities outside of Seattle have been banking on future rail while the central portion has been built in Seattle. Proposing to end sub-area equity and take the money for Seattle is guaranteed to destroy the regional political coalition for rail and doom the chances of putting Sound Transit 3 on the ballot in 2016.

Further, sub-area equity protects Seattle. The recession significantly reduced Sound Transit's revenues too, and they are working hard to meet their commitments elsewhere in King, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties. We need to ensure revenue raised in Seattle stays in Seattle to support our projects - which is why Seattle needs to defend sub-area equity, not attack it.

If Murray wanted to do something productive to help Seattle build more transit, he would have supported giving Seattle the ability to tax ourselves to build transit here faster. But he refused do that. Under his leadership the legislature has done a great job investing in suburban highway expansion while starving cities of the revenue we need to repair our roads and expand our transit.

By working together with regional leaders I’ve helped get Seattle closer than ever to building out a rail network that connects our neighborhoods. Murray wants to jeopardize that to serve his political ambitions. I think the choice for Seattle’s transit future is pretty clear.

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