Transportation

In light of Hancock tunnel, whole northern segment of rail needs rethink

~ dankeshet ~ 14 Comments

I was appalled by the sticker price for a tunnel to get rail part of the way north from the Hancock Center to the Highland Mall.  This sticker price has come down: from a range of $230-290M to $220M.  But it is still truly appalling: the capital costs for that short tunnel alone would be about twice the capital cost of the entire MetroRail system which is forcing a tunnel in the first place and more than 4 times the capital cost of the entire MetroRapid bus improvements that led planners to rule out a route west of the University. It would cost more than going from Travis Heights all the way to 15th Street, including a brand new signature rail/bike/pedestrian bridge over Lady Bird Lake and tracks through dense downtown.

I wasn’t alone in being appalled. At a Transit Forum hosted by Austin Monitor and KUT, I asked a question of Council Member (and CapMetro board member) Mike Martinez on the Hancock tunnel via twitter, and he said that if we had to tunnel (as Project Connect says we must), the costs go up “exponentially.” Mayor Leffingwell has said in the press that he’d like to see the $1.4B price tag for the whole route be brought down to $1B. The Hancock tunnel is an obvious first place to cut. Many early supporters of Project Connect’s plans are now cautioning against including a Hancock tunnel on the ballot. And in project lead Kyle Keahey’s testimony, he sounded almost desperate to find a way to avoid the costs of a Hancock tunnel.  Even if decision makers hold their noses and vote to advance the entire $1.4B project, there’s little reason to believe that voters will do the same in November.

In light of this setback, we have to rethink more than just the tunnel, but rather the entire northern segment of the urban rail. Originally, Highland was sold as a low-cost segment with room for growth in the Highland Mall redevelopment, the old Concordia site, and along the newly re-zoned Airport Blvd Transit Corridor. Whatever you thought about the potential for these destinations to encourage ridership on a rail line (and I was skeptical), rail reaches none of them without the tunnel. Instead, it would merely run along a street not designated as a Transit corridor, through a neighborhood of mostly single-family homes that have largely struggled against becoming another University-adjacent density hotspot like West Campus, and then come to an ignominious end at a golf course and an auto-oriented strip mall.  Without the Hancock tunnel, the whole raison d’etre of this route goes away.

If that were all, that would be disappointing. A medium-cost, low-ridership train is not great.  But this low-ridership segment of the route threatens far worse: it could make future rail plans with higher opportunity impossible. This has happened to Austin twice already.  The low-ridership, low-cost MetroRail ended up badly hemming in this route, forcing a tunnel that cost twice as much as the system itself, something that few could’ve foreseen when MetroRail was being approved.  The low-cost MetroRapid gave planners reason to fear placing this rail route along the city’s most productive transit corridor.  A low-ridership segment from UT to Hancock could do immense damage to future flexibility in laying rail lines.  Funding a rail line that hits a hard stop before it reaches its density could end up preventing funding for parallel rail lines along more dense parts of Austin as “duplicative.”  And for what?  Unless city planners have a secret plan to get rid of MetroRail, we will face the same high tunneling costs next time we look into extending rail.  We will have essentially backed ourselves into a dead-end that will be very difficult and expensive to get out of.  Even for those who believe that rail should go to Mueller, this would remove routing flexibility from any planning efforts.

The best thing for CCAG and City Council to do is say that, in light of the new information they have on the costs of the Hancock tunnel, they will forego a vote on the more controversial, risky, poorer-thought-out northern segment of the route, advance the southern segment on its own, and come back to revisit the question of the northern route later.

Shocking New Sticker Price Takes Highland Route from Bad to Appalling

~ dankeshet ~ 17 Comments

When I compared Urban Rail corridors a few months back, my findings were pretty straightforward: the Guadalupe-Lamar corridor, including a growth-crazy West Campus, along with the Riverside subcorridor, would both have crazy high ridership.  Highland was middling at best, and only scored highly under the strange rules PC decided to use. Despite the main objection to it – that it would make it more difficult to come back later and ask for money for the powerhouse Guadalupe-Lamar corridor – few thought that it would in itself be a major cost driver as an addition to a Riverside-UT route.

No longer.  Project Connect has unveiled the price tags on the Highland subcorridor and they are jaw-dropping.  What was originally conceived of–and sold to the public–as a cheap project will contain a tunnel priced at either $230M or $290M in order to avoid a rail-rail intersection between urban rail and the existing MetroRail.

Cost Comparison 1

This project goes:

  • 3.1 miles from Riverside and Grove to Travis Heights
  • across the river on a brand new purpose-built bridge at Trinity ($75M)
  • 1.4 miles through dense downtown traffic ($100M)
  • 1 mile through the dense university setting
  • 3 miles up Red River
  • 8 blocks from Red River to Airport ($230-290M)
  • A final jaunt to Highland Mall

In that long route, about half of the entire project’s cost may come from that tiny 8 neighborhood blocks from Red River to Airport.  Half for 8 blocks, and the other half for 8 miles that includes a river crossing, a major university, and a major downtown!  Madness! [See update below.]

Comparison 2

$230M (let alone $290M) is the cost of the entire MetroRapid bus upgrade ($47M) and the entire 32 mile-long MetroRail project ($120M) put together, with tens of millions to spare.  We could have dedicated bus lanes all over the city, a whole network of efficient, traffic-proofed transit, for the cost of one measly rail tunnel out in a not-particularly-dense part of town.

It is precisely because I am a transit advocate who is personally transit-dependent that I am so appalled by these numbers. It is not the fact that this project is expensive; all infrastructure is pretty expensive.  It’s the fact that the project so wastefully spends our very rare transit dollars.  $230M is real money that could be going toward real infrastructure around the city!

Two caveats here: 1) Project Connect says that these numbers are still being refined, and 2) I have yet to see a number released for what would be necessary if they ran buses instead of rail (possibly much, much cheaper, because they’re eliminating the rail-rail intersection).

But if this is what it looks like, it just looks like Austin’s rail plans have hit a major snag.  If it’s going to cost $230M+ to extend this rail line so that it hits Highland Mall, the only reasonable course of action is: don’t do it.  Connecting the new ACC would be nice for $10M.  For $30M, that’s stretching it.  For $230M, that’s crazy talk.

Update:

In the comments, Novacek and Lyndon Henry give better cost estimates.  The total cost per both of their estimates comes to just about $1B, leaving the rail tunnel to be about a quarter of the cost, not a half.  I’m still struck by how, at the beginning of the process we were told that the Highland route was the ultimate low-cost and the Riverside route the ultimate high cost.  Instead, we’re seeing that inverted.  Riverside is looking low cost, even including a brand-new bridge, and Highland very high cost.

Quick-hitter on SXSW transportation

~ dankeshet ~ 11 Comments

Austin just hosted our largest annual conference / festival, SXSW.  This festival brings in many out-of-towners, as well as concentrating locals in central Austin. I think it can serve as a basic stress-test on our city’s infrastructure, to identify what issues we are like to see as our growth continues. The future will not look exactly like SXSW (I hope!), but it may well involve more and more people in our downtown. Here are my first-glance takeaways, based mostly on impressions from being downtown, rather than numbers:

  • The belle of the transportation ball at this year’s SXSW was Austin Bcycle, the new bike-sharing program deployed mostly in downtown, but scheduled to expand later. They have released more exact numbers, but impressionistically, there were a lot of these bikes downtown and yet it scaled very well. I passed tons of the bike racks and didn’t see any full (i.e. it can’t accept bikes parking) or empty (i.e. no bikes to rent). I do fear that as this program expands outside of downtown, it will hit the zoning straitjacket around downtown, as pretty much every direction around downtown is surrounded by neighborhoods where zoning is unwelcoming to new development, and therefore, the possibility of expanding to new residents or workers. Bike-sharing worked so spectacularly because of the short distances between dense destinations. It may have difficulty expanding to a longer “density-only-on-the-corridors” development model, of riding bikes on either large arterial streets or small, un-dense streets. Within downtown, the planned bike lanes will help a lot.
  • The other great winner was the Great Streets Program of, among other things, expanded sidewalks. This is the first year that I felt like downtown was a true walking city and the Great Streets program was a huge part of that. In part, this is simply because there’s more room to walk on the expanded sidewalks. But another of it is that there are so many more people out on the sidewalks at restaurant tables and the like, creating a much more pedestrian-friendly environment.
  • The downtown transit-priority lanes were overall a positive, but with some serious downsides. The positives:
    1. They really do work at getting buses moving faster.  I definitely saw buses moving past stopped traffic. Car-drivers really did follow the rules. This is only one item, but it’s a doozy.
    2. By putting the buses together on one street, it gives them a “presence” they never had when spread out among many streets.  Waiting at a bus stop with 40 other people, you really do get the feeling that taking the bus is a normal and accepted activity, rather than the weird activity it may have been perceived of in the past. It also simplifies catching the bus and gives people who can take multiple routes much better frequency.
  • The negatives:
    1. Putting them on Guadalupe/Lavaca instead of Congress was a fundamental and large mistake. During the urban rail planning process, the mayor has repeatedly emphasized that the center of downtown is moving east, meaning that it’s moving away from the transit-priority lane. One simple and cost-free way the city could ameliorate this is simply expanding CBD (Central Business District) or DMU (Downtown Mixed-Use) zoning to the rest of downtown. Just blocks from one of downtown’s two transit stops, there’s a large corner of downtown that looks pretty much like a suburb. More residents and workplaces there will mean more people able to take advantage of walking to those stops.
    2. Putting them on Guadalupe/Lavaca instead of Congress was a decision made to help automobile traffic on Congress, not to help buses. In the process, this has also made Congress a much worse pedestrian street. The buses may have slowed traffic on Congress, but slowed traffic was a positive for pedestrians. Congress is a very wide street at 6 lanes of traffic plus two lanes of parking. Without any buses to slow it down, walking along it felt less like it used to of walking along Austin’s front door and a bit more like walking along a highway. Running more transit (buses or urban rail) along the street and expanding the program to rent the current parking lane to local businesses would both make it more comfortable for pedestrians.
    3. Putting all the bus lines together may have helped route simplicity and created a more intangible presence, but it also created serious bus bunching problems. In just a few visits to the area, I saw buses backed up 6 deep. I saw buses blocking intersections for a full walk cycle, preventing any pedestrian crossing. This is a serious problem that needs to be addressed and fast, if the buses are all to move to Guadalavaca.
  • Parking infrastructure Austin’s parking infrastructure held up well. With tons of surface parking lots converted into concert spaces, people still managed to park. The cost of parking rose quite a bit, and this, along with the traffic, definitely induced some people to take public transportation instead of driving a car downtown. Downtown does not need more parking and, to the extent that prices rose, the private market will surely be able to decide to provision more if needed.
  • The real-time signage for both the 801 and the MetroRail were major failures. I heard story after story from friends of seeing signage that was wildly wrong for both. I myself decided to pass up taking the 801 because the real-time sign said the next bus would come in 22 minutes, only to have a bus pass me walking on foot 3 minutes later. I don’t see much of a policy issue, but c’mon, Cap Metro, get your act together. If you can’t get it right, then turn the signs off; putting out wrong information is 10X worse than putting out no information.
  • The MetroRail was a mixed bag. On the positive side, it ran more full than ever, including running an extra train. On the negative side: 1) the major issues that it has always been there remains: it’s just very expensive to run per passenger. In addition, it seemed to have scaled fairly poorly. The train ran late through most of the festival and many passengers at the closer-in stops were passed by as trains were already filled by the time they reached central Austin. The beauty of public transportation is supposed to be that, as more passengers ride it, it gets better, but the opposite seems to have happened with MetroRail.
  • The downtown automobile lanes were pretty much a failure. They came to a standstill during many hours of the festival. Unlike the public transportation, however, the car lanes seem like pretty much a lost cause. There is no way for them to expand easily and as we hit SXSW-style densities, they pretty much fail. Seeing how colossally they failed, highway expansions seems like a very questionable goal. The idea of spending gobs of money to revamp I35 in order to speed more cars into a downtown that can’t handle them seems like true folly. Much better to focus on cross-town connectivity, so that people can make shorter bike and transit trips from the East side across I-35 and the West side across MoPac. In addition, as the city expands, it seems that we are going to need to devote a greater percentage of our downtown roads to more efficient lanes that can carry more people than the current automobile-dominated lanes, such as transit-0nly or bike-only lanes.

Admittedly, many of these impressions are not far from what I believed previously, so perhaps I only saw what I wanted to see.  What was your impression?  What did you see?

Increasing frequency through better management

~ dankeshet ~ 5 Comments

Today is the first day that the 101, 1L, and 1M bus routes have been consolidated into the 1 and 801 routes. Let’s look at the new face of service along Austin’s central transit corridor: between downtown and UT.  There’s a lot of choices: routes 1,3,5,19, and 801 all have service between downtown and UT’s Westmall, for a total of 8 buses leaving from downtown for Westmall from 1PM until 2PM today (Sunday).  Not as good as peak UT shuttle service (15 buses per hour), but certainly not bad for Sunday service. Given how frequent they are and how variable on-time performance and walk-time from home to the stop can be, there shouldn’t be any point in looking up a schedule. 8 buses per hour is past the tipping point where it’s more effective to just show up and wait for the next bus than plan which bus you intend to take.

Varying Departure Points Hurts Frequency

If I were travelling from Westmall to downtown, that is exactly what I would do.  Unfortunately, my effective frequency northbound is much lower. Of those eight buses, two of them are route #3, which pick up on Brazos.  Three of them are route #801, which pick up on Lavaca.  One each are route #1 and #5, both of which pick up on Congress.  The last one is a #19, which picks up on Colorado or further north up Congress. No stop downtown has Westmall-bound buses coming more often than 3 per hour. From 8 per hour to 3 per hour changes transit-riding from being an easy, automatic, show-up-at-your-stop-and-don’t-worry mode of transportation to a riding-is-an-art mode where you have to keep an eye on the clock and the schedule, know which routes tend to run early or late, and have lots of knowledge of which routes run where and when.

There’s no good reason

During the years of road work on Brazos, routes 1L, 1M, 3, 5, and 101 all used to travel together up Congress, creating exactly the kind of easy transit corridor I’m discussing. Disappointingly, though, Capital Metro never spent the energy promoting the ease of use of this central transit corridor at the time as they did promoting the much-less-frequented Red Line. Indeed, during most of that time, Google Maps incorrectly reported the route 3 as still running up Brazos. Eventually, the 1, 5, and 19 will join the 801 on Lavaca and the 3 will be replaced by the 803 also on Lavaca, but they easily could have moved the 1, 5, and/or 19 over sooner.  Instead they chose to move other routes (the 7 and 20) from Congress to Lavaca first.

It’s About A System

As I said, this problem will be fixed.  What I fear for the future, though, is that this reflects on a pattern of transportation planners here in Austin doing a poor job of organizing the system as a whole. In discussing the introduction of the 801 route, CapMetro CEO Linda Watson and CapMetro staff go so far in removing the 801 from the context of the bus system they start to sound simply detached from reality–CapMetro staff can’t bring themselves to call the buses “buses” and CEO Linda Watson seems to share the delusion. (For the record, I don’t dislike buses; I just like reality.) Is it any wonder that when the organization’s leadership sees the 801 as not-a-bus operating outside the bus system, the new schedule fails to coordinate it effectively with its dowtown-to-Westmall bus siblings?

Organization Before Electronics Before Concrete

Why do I care so much about this oversight, that will eventually be fixed?  Transportation blogger Alon Levy introduced me to the German idea of “Organization, before electronics, before Concrete.”  In the context of his post, he’s discussing how transportation planners in New York and Philadelphia have found it easier to spend lots of money on new tunnels than deal with the difficult political issues in coordinating different agencies.  We have had our own version of that in Austin, where transit planners argued against even discussing coordinating better with our funding partners in the federal government to better serve the central transit corridor. But if voters don’t have confidence that you are doing the most to organize with the money you have, why would they vote to give you more?

Full Text of Chris Riley’s amendments

~ dankeshet ~ 2 Comments

The full text of Chris Riley’s amendments to the Project Connect resolution:

WHEREAS, the Project Connect team has identified several sub-corridors which are appropriate for high-capacity transit investment; NOW THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED:

The City Manager is directed to work with Project Connect to identify future funding needs and potential sources to prioritize and continue critical Central Corridor project definition and development activities in the remaining identified sub-corridors, including the Lamar, Mueller, and East Austin sub-corridors, and report back to Council by August 1, 2014.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED:

The City Manager is directed to work with Project Connect and CMTA to continue cultivating a relationship with our regional Federal Transit Administration officials to cooperatively prepare for any future high-capacity transit investments in the Lamar sub-corridor.

Retrospective

~ dankeshet ~ 2 Comments

On Thursday night, City Council chose to endorse Project Connect doing a detailed study of an urban rail route running from somewhere along East Riverside to somewhere near Highland mall. At the same time, it declined to request a similar study of the East Riverside to North Lamar (via West Campus) alternative. As regular readers of this blog know, my analysis of the data led me to prefer the latter. But Thursday was the last opportunity for West Campus / Lamar’s inclusion in a November bond election. Going forward, I will be focusing on some of AURA’s remaining goals. Today, however, I’m going to look backward and do a little retrospective on things that stick out to me of the previous few months.

Emergence of a new (not “New”) urbanist community

The growing community of folks centered around AURA were often glossed as being “pro-transit” and the debate at Council as representing a “divide in the transit community.”  Pro-transit was a term AURA often used ourselves.  (I say “ourselves” as I am an executive committee member of AURA.)  But I think “pro-transit” has caused a lot of confusion.

An Urbanist Perspective

A better term for this community’s common perspective is urbanist. Not just any urbanism, either, but an urbanism influenced by ideas of market urbanism. This perspective takes on a long list of issues from liberalizing zoning to pricing parking to allowing short-term rentals to improving transit to allowing urban farms. Some of the same folks discussing urban rail were involved in issues like opposing rental registration, extended parking meter hours, or specific zoning cases like TacoPUD. The (market) urbanist perspective generally believes in light-touch city regulations. While urbanists believe there’s too much space around Austin dedicated to parking, the policy tool we reach for is not city regulations against parking, but removing city regulations that require building parking. While urbanists enjoy density, we don’t strive to prevent people from choosing to live in low-density suburban areas.  We object to zoning that requires central neighborhoods to remain at low densities, as well as regulations that subsidize suburban living over urban living.  Similarly, we tend to think that even in large parcels like the Mueller development, the city should have a lighter touch: lay out a connected street and utility grid and let the neighborhood develop organically instead of master planning a giant community down to minutiae of aesthetic decisions. This is a short, bad treatment of the variety of flavors of urbanism and I have perhaps done a disservice to the majority urbanist opinion on one or more of these issues. But The point I’m making here is that the thing that unites this community is not (merely) our shared love for riding transit, but our shared vision for the future of cities.

Urbanists on Transit

This urbanists’ community’s perspective on transit, while generally far more in favor of it than the average Austin resident, is much more complicated than simply “in favor.”  Urbanists tend to fall into Avon Levy’s technical camp, seeing poor-quality,  poorly-used, or poorly-managed transit as just as strong an obstacle to good transit as the general anti-transit political climate is.  To take my perceptions: I believe MetroRapid is a decent project that found federal money to make incremental improvements to all buses in Austin, even if its badly oversold and may have played a lamentable role in preventing what would’ve been a fantastic rail line on Lamar. On the other hand, I see MetroRail as an inefficient subsidy for suburban living, because Capital Metro spends so much more per suburban MetroRail passenger than it does per urban passenger, and additionally because the vast majority of the MetroRapid MetroRail operational budget is paid for by CapMetro, thus operating in a zero-sum, fixed-pie competition with funding for urban transit. This ties into the general urbanist idea that there’s nothing wrong with choosing to live in the suburbs, but it shouldn’t be so heavily subsidized. The point I’m making isn’t the particulars of the argument on particular lines; the point is that the urbanist community focuses as strongly on the quality of transit as it does on its existence.

Other pro-transit voices feel betrayed

At the Council meeting, I saw many pro-rail folks seem to feel betrayed by, as they saw it, the spectacle of supposedly “pro-transit” people announcing opposition to a transit line (the Highland proposal).  Many of the speakers in favor of the Highland proposal emphasized that they were disappointed in the route themselves, but they were team players who believed in transit, no matter where it goes.  A statement supporting rail no matter the route was relayed from the Austin chapter of the Congress for New Urbanism, and the sentiment is well-summarized in my friend Stephanie Myers’ column for the Austin Post.  The implication was that those who opposed the Highland route were not team players.  Outside Council chambers, the discussion was considerably more heated.  The word “selfish” was relayed to me as a description of those urbanists who oppose Highland, because we are demanding transit be on our terms alone.  A debate on Twitter emerged over whether, should the bond election fail in November, the primary blame for it should fall on AURA, for prolonging the debate over route choice.

Both sides need more communication on urbanists’ goals

But, to me at least, the criticism doesn’t sting very much. When somebody is playing a dangerous game of chicken, in which they pretend to oppose a route they actually support in order to force others to get behind the route they support even more, it’s possible to shame that person into backing down and agreeing to compromise on the first option.  But it’s much more difficult to shame somebody about signalling their true opposition to a plan they really do oppose.  That, I believe, is the case with the anti-Highland activists.  They (we) simply believe the Highland route is a negative for the city*, so we will oppose it. We don’t oppose the Highland route out of vindictiveness or disappointment, but simply because we believe its bad policy. No amount of telling people that they’re selfish or “hurting rail” will get people back on board for what they believe is bad policy.  Nobody is ashamed to be the reason a bad project failed.

I do feel bad, though, that AURA’s messaging seemed to have failed to get our position across, leading many people to feel misled.  When AURA said, for example, that it stood for a successful urban rail project, I always took that to mean that our goal was to see an urban rail project with high ridership at the center of a walkable, urban central Austin.  Although I still think that’s possible if we start on Riverside first, for many of those who spoke at Council, the possibility for a successful urban rail project died on Thursday.  Although it’s always dangerous to assume what others think, my impression is that others read AURA’s goal of having a “successful urban rail project” as meaning “passing a bond with money for rail.” Understandably, they feel misled when AURA supporters threaten to vote against a bond, as that would clearly violate what they believed we said we wanted.  I believe many would have been able to better anticipate AURA opposition to Highland if they had believed AURA to be a fiscal responsibility watchdog who would only support an urban rail project with anticipated subsidy / ride below $X.

AURA is not a “pro-Lamar group”

Similarly, I believe that many of the people in the Council chambers on Thursday believed AURA to be a “pro-Lamar” group in the same way that the speakers who lived in Mueller were “pro-Mueller” or that two of the other “anti” speakers (Scott Morris and Lyndon Henry) are.  While its true that many of AURA’s supporters came to the conclusion that Lamar would be a fantastic location for an urban rail route–some before and some after the release of public numbers–few of us live and work along that route.  Zero of AURA’s four executive committee members would take an East-Riverside-to-Lamar route as a commuter.  I am the only one who lives near the route, but I live downtown so I’m near all routes under consideration and I work to the west, not north.  I struggle to think of more than one non-student member who would be personally served by the route. We supported Lamar because of our belief in its success, rather than because that’s the neighborhood we represent. Despite the fact that inclusion of Lamar was one of AURA’s prime goals for this last Council meeting, we have other goals. I believe I actually heard more support for East Riverside from those signed up “against” the item than from those signed up for! AURA’s goals, stated plainly in the resolution linked above, include a lot of goals that have nothing to do with Lamar and instead focus on trying to make the route as successful (by our use of the term) as possible. I do hope that others who are working with us see those goals and work with us to accomplish them.

Urbanists need a new Organization

For urbanists, I think the real lesson to be learned here is that the time for building an urbanist advocacy organization in Austin is now, if not sooner. There may be far less confusion about the position of the Transit subgroup of #ATXUrbanists than there was about Austinites for Urban Rail Action.

What does “Data-Driven” mean?

The other big area of confusion in the last few days for me has been the issue of a “data-driven process”.  There is clearly a large gap between what I took this to mean and what many others involved in the process mean by the same words.  Neither AURA nor others fully defined what it means, but I’ll do my best to parse what I see the differences are.  My overall impression is that for AURA, data-driven was shorthand for “give enough data and analysis to let the public and decisionmakers make their own, informed conclusions.” For many others, I believe data-driven was shorthand for “make a decision in an unbiased way.”

AURA, for example, from before the process even started, requested an iterative process from Project Connect, in which data and analysis were released at checkpoints in formats that the public could play with and draw their own conclusions.  This did not happen, at least not as I see it. An extensive dataset with West Campus and no-highway alternatives was in fact released in a format that allowed manipulation, but three weeks after Project Connect’s final recommendation was made and just one week before CCAG was to make its decision.  Even then, it took me hours to figure out how to bypass the copy locks on it and I never did manage to figure out how to copy their formulas, though they were not difficult to reverse-engineer and reproduce. Project Connect’s public website, in which they asked people to weight criteria indices themselves, did more to frustrate than inform. Rather than giving the public information about the data driving the decision and then letting them decide, Project Connect sought information from the public and then told them what outcome they should want.

I received some negative feedback for doing an independent analysis of the data. This is a criticism that makes perfect sense in the “data-driven = fair” mindset: the decision had already been made by the time I started my analysis.  As there was no evidence (in their mind) the decision was unfair, my decision to do independent analysis was evidence that I in fact was biased, and merely trying to come to my own pre-determined conclusion as sour grapes because my preferred route wasn’t chosen. In the “data-driven = let the public decide” mindset, this criticism is bizarre.  The whole point of having a data-driven process was to enable exactly this type of independent analysis. I was merely making good on the promise of being data-driven in the first place.

Similarly, I was surprised to hear many members of CCAG praise Project Connect heavily for the strength of their analysis immediately on receipt of the final recommendation. Not because I thought the analysis was poor, simply because I was still waiting for analysis to be presented. In the “data-driven = unbiased” mindset, the burden on the project team was to show that they really did take all routes seriously, and that their methodology wasn’t intentionally tilted toward a predetermined outcome. The sheer volume of numbers used showed that they really did apply their methodology to many different routes.

In the “data-driven = inform the public” mindset, though, the important thing is for the staff to prepare enough information that, even if they included no final score or recommendation, the decision-makers would be able to decide for themselves.  What route would be best for ridership?  What route would relieve the most congestion?  How much would they cost to build? These are factors that the project team did consider internally, but I do believe that my cursory 20-hour analysis of the data may have presented far more digestable information about how each route scores on the different metrics than Project Connect did in any report.  Project Connect did present alternative weighting scenarios. This fits with the idea of attempting to prove that their weightings were done in an unbiased way. However, I was less interested in divining a final score than in looking at each of the metrics to understand what the numbers meant for how the different subcorridors would differ on the ground.

Again, I think that this is an area AURA needs to be far clearer on. I’m not entirely clear what “data-driven” means in my own head beyond “I know it when I see it” and we have, for the most part, failed to articulate what the advantages of our flavor of the policy would be.

Going forward

I’m very excited for the future of this emerging urbanist community.  I have met many fantastic people both in, around, and completely outside the community through this process. The process has uncovered many of this community’s strengths: analytical skills (if I do say so myself), social media presence, and, most importantly, we struck a nerve with a large corps of folks who feel unserved by the current political process.  But it has also uncovered many of our weaknesses: we did a much better job of communicating to our supporters than to others in the process, let alone the general public. We lack a solid organization and all the perquisites that come with that. We lack much in the way of support in City Hall. Many of our supporters feel jaded or angry, something that I think comes from being both interested in city politics and feeling unrepresented. These are all things a new urbanist organization can improve on.

* I believe that I find myself more in favor of the Highland route than many of my fellow activists.  I share the opinion that it would simply be a terrible project as a first leg.  But I do believe that, for similar reasons as Levy discusses here, it could be cost-effective as an extension to a successful Riverside-UT line.

HighlandMueller

~ dankeshet ~ 8 Comments

Tonight, I will be putting out the text that I will use to address the City Council to argue for the ideas in AURA’s resolution.  One argument I will not be making, but that has been made by people whom I agree with most of the time and who I consider my friends, is that Highland is the same as Mueller.

I don’t understand the argument completely, but here are my reasons for not using it:

  1. It isn’t true.  At the most basic, simplistic level, Highland is a route that goes one place; Mueller is a route that goes someplace nearby, but different.  They share part of the same route, but not the whole thing.  AURA has emphasized that we should use actual, true facts in this process.  This isn’t an actual, true fact.
  2. It’s not clear why it matters.  There’s been a similar argument regarding the Red Line that Lakeline == Cedar Park.  In that case, the argument is that most of the passengers who take the Red Line from Lakeline station come from Cedar Park.  This matters because Cedar Park is not in the Cap Metro service area, so they are not paying taxes.  But Mueller is a part of Austin.  It’s not a priori obvious why having a route go to Mueller is bad.  My analysis says that Mueller is a less advantageous first route than Lamar or Riverside.  But then again, my analysis says the same about Highland, so bringing up Mueller just seems to confuse the issue.
  3. It makes Mueller sound evil, without explaining why.  I know a lot of people in the urbanist community are disappointed that Mueller didn’t become more urban, but most people in Austin don’t have some gut-level hatred for Mueller.  It’s a nice, growing neighborhood.  If you are implying that Highland is a stalking horse for Mueller, you either need to explain why that’s a bad thing or you sound like you just have an irrational hatred for one neighborhood.  Certainly, you can’t expect any politician to share in your concern.

Perhaps I’m missing something obvious.  But if so, maybe the argument needs to be fleshed out a bit better.  From my perspective, the fact that 2 years ago staff’s analysis chose Mueller and today’s staff analysis picks Highland, tells me that either: a) it’s a really good thing the public doesn’t just take staff’s word for granted because different staffs might come up with different answers, or b) projections can change rapidly, even in the span of just 2 years.

The Austin Precedent: Bus improvements block rail

~ dankeshet ~ 13 Comments

The discussion on where Austin’s first urban rail route should run has switched tracks.  The Friday meeting of the mayor’s advisory group did not open with a discussion of the questions which have occupied this blog lately: which area of central Austin would best support an urban rail route (or vice-versa).  Instead, many advisory group members addressed emails from the public supporting studying a Lamar route by discussing what has been an elephant on the tracks: FTA funding for bus improvements.

Starting in January, Austin’s #1 bus route will see various improvements paid for by the FTA: longer buses, real-time information on bus location, wifi, longer spacing between stops.  Another bus route will see many of the same improvements a few months later.   As a frequent bus rider, I’m happy to see buses improve!  It’s a modest improvement–the buses will still get stuck in traffic through much of their routes.  But its benefits will not be limited to the #1 and #3 routes: the restricted-car lanes through downtown will eventually be used by most routes.  The heaviest costs of the real-time bus information system is setting up the system itself;  once the grant has paid for the upfront IT costs, Cap Metro will be able to expand it relatively inexpensively to the rest of the fleet.   Even the most expensive part of the system–the buses themselves–will save Cap Metro the cost of replacing the existing buses.  FTA is not funding *additional* buses along the #1 route, merely the routine cost of replacing buses, although the buses it’s replacing them with are nicer and more expensive than the buses Cap Metro would otherwise have bought.  Viewed this way, the FTA grant is less a massive upgrade to a couple of bus routes and more a clever way for the federal government to help pay for incremental improvements in Austin’s bus system, to be first deployed on Austin’s most popular bus route, the #1.

But was it too clever?  The argument at the mayor’s advisory group made was that FTA’s funding for these improvements would need to be paid back and reapplied for on a different route before the FTA would agree to upgrade a portion of the #1 bus to rail.  Furthermore, the FTA would not look kindly on Austin for applying for a larger, better rail project in an area they have already received funding and probably refuse to fund the rail.  Friend-of-the-blog Niran Babalola offers an interesting comment (via e-mail):

This example will be used around the country to demonstrate that investments in better buses push off rail for decades. This is counter to both the city of Austin’s interests (where MetroRapid in other corridors will probably be a good idea, but won’t be supported) and the FTA’s interests (who want cities to make bus investments until the money for rail appears, but will face more reluctance with this example).

So is it FTA policy that using FTA grants to improve your bus service endangers your ability to get funding for rail?  I don’t know; the most definitive piece of evidence on this question at the meeting was a sidebar conversation at a conference.  Julio believes this couldn’t possibly be right.   I hope an enterprising reporter can get the FTA to answer the question for us.  It’s a question with importance beyond Austin.

(In case it sounds like this is a novel worry; it’s not.  The furthest back I could find comment on this issue was Mike Dahmus’ blog posts from 2004, when the system was first proposed.)

Some more visualizations of Criteria and indices

~ dankeshet ~ 3 Comments

Another day, another few new charts! 🙂

I have included 4 charts here.  When I presented the traditional, explanatory criteria, I created a visualization of how each subcorridor performed along each of these criteria.  But I began to wonder: which indices were driving the performance of each criteria?  So in these charts, I stack the contribution of the indices to the criteria:

Traditional criteria, normalized to min but not max

What can you learn from this?

  1. Weightings really matter.  Looking at the congestion chart, you can see the pink index ( Travel Demand Index) dominates the brownish one ( Congestion index ).  This is mostly because of the 5:2 weightings that Project Connect selected for those indices, and I maintained the same.
  2. If you track the orange “Affordability Index” at the base of the “Connections” criteria around the compass point, you can see it grow from a tiny amount in West Austin, peaking in East Austin, then start dropping again as it makes its way back around the compass.  This is a large driver of the “Connections” index, and is definitely making me question whether “Affordability” should be its own metric, separated from the rather junky “Centers” and “Consistency” metrics.
  3. The Ridership criteria is a more self-contained picture into one factor than the Connections criteria.  Although they both have multiple colors, picking a single color for the Ridership criteria will give you a similar picture as picking all 3: the 3 measures covary.  For the Connections criteria, this criteria may be useful for scoring, but not so much for gaining insight into characteristics of the subcorridors.

The next thing I began to wonder was about normalization.  As I discussed earlier today, Project Connect uses min-max normalization on all measures.  That is, it finds the minimum and maximum values any subcorridor score on a measure, then scale all the values from the minimum to the maximum.  I mentioned that I think 0 to maximum might be better, an idea I got from a coworker of mine.  The idea is that if you take, say, a measure like population density (measured in say, residents / acre), with 4 subcorridors scoring 65, 75, 95, 110 then normalize it along a min-max scale, you get the same values (0, .22, .67, 1) as if you have 4 subcorridors scoring 5, 15, 35, 50.   But in the first case, the subcorridors are within a factor of 2, while in the second case, the subcorridors are within a factor of 10!  Normalizing by max alone would result in scores of (.60, .68, .86, 1) versus scores of (0.1, 0.3, 0.7, 1).  A clear difference!

So I decided to rerun the whole analysis, normalizing by max rather than max and min.   That results in this chart:

Traditional criteria, normalized to max but not min
Traditional criteria, normalized to max but not min

What did we learn?  A lot!  We can see that the congestion criterion, while showing dramatic differences above, shows very mild differences below.  Basically, all subcorridors are within a factor of 2 of one another.  Twice as much traffic is important, for sure.  But now look at the ridership criteria: the dramatic differences from one subcorridor to another maintained themselves.  While traffic might change as a factor of 2, ridership might change as a factor of 6!  Focusing solely on the blue “Current Ridership” index, we can see that MLK goes from non-existent (by definition, as the smallest subcorridor) in the far above chart, to a very small value in the near above chart.  It really is the case that Lamar and ERC score large multiples higher than MLK; that is not an artifact of min-max normalization like the large differences in congestion were.

Now, some caveats: some of this may be a result of the types of measures that went into each index.  I have not yet assessed that.

Also, some notes about these charts:

  • I have moved from showing the subcorridors in alphabetical order to using the order Project Connect prefers, around the compass from West Austin to MoPac to Lamar, etc.
  • I realize the colors are too similar.  Sorry.  Fixing that takes time and I wanted to get this out there tonight, before I go to bed.
  • In these charts, I have used the “Including West Campus in Lamar and MoPac” and “Eliminating negative weighting on present” data variants presented in this post.  I could rerun them for the other variants if there’s interest.

I also present Project Connect’s criteria, broken down by index (using min-max and max-only normalization):

Project Connect criteria, normalized to max and min
Project Connect criteria, normalized to max and min
Project Connect criteria, normalized to max
Project Connect criteria, normalized to max

What else do we learn from this?

  1. Constraints and growth is a ridiculous category for getting a handle on subcorridor performance.  These are two unrelated indices thrown together for no good reason.
  2. Similarly, the System criteria is mostly Ridership, but oddly diluted by throwing the unrelated Connectivity index in it.
  3. The “Core” metric is almost entirely affordability, along the familiar compass pointing East toward affordability.

 

Accurate charting and impact of West Campus

~ dankeshet ~ 2 Comments

Project Connect has released a new FAQ.  In it, they show a comparison between Lamar with West Campus and without:

West Campus Comparison

Somehow, my numbers don’t add up the same as their numbers.  Any number of reasons could cause this discrepancy: I could have made an error in my hurry; their spreadsheet could not match the data they are using; I have found one such instance so far, but in that case, it was obvious.   A less obvious difference could easily have gone unnoticed.  They could’ve made an error, or they could be using a subtly different methodology than the one I believed to have reverse engineered.

However, the table they have produced above is at best sloppy.  At worst, it shows a lack of understanding of their own methodology and its implications.  Every single measure that Project Connect has produced has been normalized: that is, all the scores are rebalanced from 0 to 1, with the lowest-scoring subcorridor ranked 0, the highest 1, and the rest in between.

The “Diff” column in the above chart is not always meaningful, because each number in the “before” column and the “after” column may be set on different scales.  For a trivial example, take the “Consistency with Plans” index.  Lamar’s score without West Campus was 6.   6 was the highest score of the 10 subcorridors, so normalized, it becomes 1, and scaled up it becomes 20.  After adding in West Campus, Lamar’s score is 8.  This is of course still the highest of the 10 subcorridors, so normalized it also becomes 1, and scaled up it is still 20.  Lamar adds 0 to its score, as shown above.

However, scores only have meaning relative to one another.   East Riverside has a pre-normalized score of 4, a normalized score of 0.60, and a scaled-up score of 12.  After inclusion of West Campus in Lamar, it’s new normalized score is 0.43 or, scaled up, 9.  So, although Lamar’s “score” didn’t go up as a raw number, it did  improve by +3 relative to East Riverside.   Consistency with Plans is an unimportant, lowly-weighted index.  However, Future Ridership Potential is neither.  When including West Campus, Lamar scores highest on this metric as well.  That means that the “+9” difference is actually higher than +9, relative to the other subcorridors.

Unfortunately, these issues pervade the analysis.  Sloppy use of language in communications and sloppy charts such as the above don’t necessarily mean that their metrics chose the wrong subcorridor; it could just mean that they don’t take the time to write accurate communications.  However, it’s hard not to lose confidence in the choices that they made when they make elementary mistakes in the way that they present it.  Did they think through the implications of choosing to normalize from min to max, rather than what seems like the more obvious choice of 0 to max?  I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt that they had a good reason, but when I see sloppy charts like the one above it definitely shakes my confidence.

Update

So I set out to figure out where I disagree with Project Connect.  And, the first thing I find is data inconsistency between Project Connect’s online tool and the spreadsheet they released, on the very measure I discussed above:

Raw Criteria from tool

Consistency Spreadsheet

Note the ERC’s score for consistency: 40 (0.4) on the online tool, and 0.6 in the spreadsheet.  This is the second such issue I’ve found; the first was an error in the spreadsheet.  Trying to reconcile difference between your calculations and theirs is nothing if not frustrating when there are data differences between two different versions of their own.  Identifying issues such as this are relatively easy in the Consistency criteria, as it consists of a single measure.  If there are errors in other measures, identifying them will be much more difficult.

Update 2

I misread the Project Connect FAQ.  My calculations are consistently very similar to theirs, and given the minor data issues like the ones above, I’m not surprised that they aren’t exactly equal.  Their wording on the effect of adding West Campus to Lamar is very squirrely: “Nevertheless, the overall impact improves the standing of the combined area by one position.”  From 3rd to 2nd.  From behind Highland to in front.   The same analysis as I found.  How they can repeatedly say adding West Campus doesn’t make a material difference and also say that it changes which the top two scoring corridors are is beyond me.

Update 3

Project Connect has updated their comparisons:

This is a step in the right direction, I think, though I’m still not completely sure what this means;  was this in a 11-way direct comparison?  Or was Lamar compared to Highland successively with and without Lamar?  (If so, there really need to be two columns for Highland: before and after.)   I did notice a disclaimer in a chart in Kyle’s presentation to CCAG that “numbers in columns cannot be compared to one another” which I appreciated.

But the basic message here is clear: inclusion or exclusion of West Campus makes a large impact on the final analysis.