Category: Transportation Planning

Big Flurry of End-of-Year Postings

Big Flurry of End-of-Year Postings 12/09/15 The combination of intense litigation activity and two personal losses resulted in the TRANSDEF website falling seriously behind in 2015. Taking advantage of a quiet spell after the filing of the STB Opening Brief, the site has been reorganized and updated with large amounts of new information. An entirely new Government Dysfunction section was created. It now contains a page on the proposed MTC-ABAG merger  and a page on agency failures to communicate with the public. We call it the Wall of Shame. Many of the previous navigation tabs have been consolidated into new Regional Planning and County-Level Planning sections. New pages have been added covering TRANSDEF’s Caltrain Electrification EIR Challenge and its involvement…

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Capitol Corridor Roseville Extension–A Waste of Money?

Capitol Corridor Roseville Extension–A Waste of Money? 11/08/15 Filed in: Transportation Planning TRANSDEF, the Train Riders Association of California and the California Rail Foundation filed a comment letter on the DEIR for the Capitol Corridor’s proposed extension to Roseville. We found the DEIR provided no justification for spending $250 million dollars to build a third track to Roseville. “We find it striking that the beneficial impacts in terms of VMT reduction and GHG emissions reductions of the $226 million Build Alternative are so small as to be unnoticeable at the regional scale.” The project would not accomplish the objectives identified…

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No One Wants To Invest in CA HSR!

No One Wants To Invest in CA HSR! 10/16/15 Filed in: High-Speed Rail The California High-Speed Rail Authority put out a Request for Expressions of Interest in building, operating and financing the HSR project. The FAQ provides cost estimates and assumes Cap and Trade revenues of $500 million per year through 2050. CHSRA’s list of responders. The 36 replies that came back said, in effect, “No thank you. We will need a guarantee of revenue before we will be willing to do that.” See the Los Angeles Times coverage. Because an operating subsidy is prohibited by Proposition 1A, that means that the proposed HSR system cannot be built. It also means the project should not be in construction…

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Marin Clings to Status Quo

Marin Clings to Status Quo 10/12/15 Filed in: Transportation Planning | Climate Change As the Transportation Authority of Marin was determining what projects to submit to the 2017 Regional Transportation Plan, TRANSDEF’s President testified, “Highway performance is at near-crisis levels. Mobility is severely impaired. Yet you are being offered more of the same.” See that testimony and the rest of the Marin page. TAM didn’t discuss whether there was a problem, and adopted staff’s status quo proposal. Tags: RTP, Marin, Congestion

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Mill Valley Traffic–Bursting at the Seams

Mill Valley Traffic–Bursting at the Seams 09/15/15 Filed in: Transportation Planning With traffic in Mill Valley reaching record levels of congestion, the City Council designated a Mill Valley Traffic Task Force to look for solutions. TRANSDEF’s President offered these thoughts to the Task Force, indicating that solutions would not be found that restore past conditions: I’d like to offer you a mental frame for the traffic issue, one you’ve probably never heard: We’re at the point where the roadway system in developed areas has reached a state of maturation. The fiscal and environmental costs of expanding capacity are so high that it is mostly out of reach. Yet vehicle trips…

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Walter Strakosch, 1928-2015

Walter Strakosch, 1928-2015 06/27/15 Walter Strakosch, long-time TRANSDEF Board member and Secretary, and former Federal Transit Administration planner, died May 30th, 2015 in San Clemente, CA, where he had moved to be near his grandchildren. Walter dearly loved roller coasters, and rode them till quite late in life. As a member of Marin Advocates for Transit, he proposed a reversible lane alternative for Highway 101. Caltrans adopted it, and was about to build it when additional funding became available, making it possible to add both north and south HOV lanes. Walter was passionately interested in the development of high-speed rail…

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Caltrans Leaps into the Present

Caltrans Leaps into the Present 04/07/15 Filed in: Transportation Planning | Climate Change Caltrans has released its draft California Transportation Plan, or CTP 2040. The draft plan is a dramatic change from decades of status quo thinking. The plan is specifically designed to answer a question posed by the Legislature in 2009’s SB 391: What is needed for California to reduce emissions from motor vehicles to meet the AB 32 and Executive Order GHG emissions reduction targets. TRANSDEF wrote a series of letters praising the Plan and suggesting improvements. They include overview comments, detailed comments, and their attachments. Streetsblog wrote…

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Bay Area transit ridership down despite subsidies, enticements

Bay Area transit ridership down despite subsidies, enticements 02/09/15 Filed in: Transportation Planning | MTC In today’s Chronicle, Matier & Ross write about how regional transit ridership in the Bay Area has been down for decades despite the many billions of dollars MTC has put into construction projects. This begs the question “Why?” For us, the answer is simple: MTC’s unique combination of indifference, incompetence and unwillingess to do the hard work of policy development has created a politicized unaccountable system that works great for contractors, but does little for Bay Area residents and commuters. See related several posts on this site: Bay Area Basics; a case study we did on MTC called Politics Trumps Outcomes; and a…

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TRANSDEF Files Caltrain Electrification Lawsuit

TRANSDEF Files Caltrain Electrification Lawsuit 02/09/15 Filed in: High-Speed Rail | Transportation Planning TRANSDEF today joined in two litigation coalitions to file suit. In the first lawsuit, it joined the Town of Atherton and the Community Coalition on  High-Speed Rail to challenge the Caltrain electrification EIR. TRANSDEF’s concern here is that spending $1.5 billion on electrification will not do much to help ridership. That same money would have a much bigger effect on ridership if it were spent to build the Caltrain Downtown Extension to the Transbay Transit Center. Worse, by trading its current surplus capacity to the California High-Speed Rail Authority for electrification funding,  it places a cap on its future ridership. In an era of climate change,…

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Cap and Trade Guidelines for Transit

Cap and Trade Guidelines for Transit 02/06/15 Filed in: Climate Change | Transportation Planning TRANSDEF filed comments on January 30, 2014 on the draft Guidelines for the State Transportation Agency’s distribution of cap and trade funds to transit and intercity rail. The program, called the Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program, will receive an ongoing 10% of cap and trade  auction revenues. The final Guidelines were adopted today, and differed from the draft in the areas highlighted in yellow. None of the changes responded to our comments. Our comments addressed the ongoing problem with large transportation projects: they promise too much and deliver too little, at a vastly higher price than initially promised. We wrote up…

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