“Tunneling Below Second Avenue

By KIM TINGLEY. Aug 1 2012

Unlike ants, moles, gophers and skinks, humans aren’t instinctively tunneling creatures. When we go underground, we are partly admitting that we’ve made a mess on the surface and partly showing off.

In Manhattan, where street traffic tends to stall, only one subway runs the length of the East Side. Every weekday, 1.3 million passengers — more than are carried in 24 hours by the transit systems of Boston, Chicago and San Francisco combined — cram onto the Lexington Avenue line. Yet the chaos above and below has inspired afeat: about 475 laborers are now removing 15 million cubic feet of rock and 6 million cubic feet of soil — more than half an Empire State Building by volume — out from under two miles of metropolis. In December 2016, that tunnel will make its debut as a portion of the Second Avenue subway — the great failed track New York City has been postponing, restarting, debating, financing, definancing and otherwise meaning to get in the ground since 1929.

This past spring, between 69th Street and 72nd Street on Second Avenue, cages descended every eight hours, five days a week, lowering roughly 50 men in neon vests and hard hats into a deep hole. Overhead, fluorescent bulbs provided a noonish light and yellow ventilation tubes undulated. A cool, roaring wind filled the void and carried the intense aroma of Emulex explosives, an ammonia like, Fourth of July smell. Men with tripods surveyed; men with blowtorches welded; men guiding hoses poured concrete (men outnumber women 100 to 1). They took brief lunch breaks and relieved themselves hastily where and when they could.

The hurry actually began more than 80 years ago, when city leaders first proposed constructing a new subway parallel to the Lexington line to serve the developing East Side. It would run from 125th Street south to Houston and cost $86 million. Then came the Great Depression. Then World War II. Then existing subways needed repairs. In the early ’70s, short sections of the Second Avenue tunnel were burrowed at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, between 99th Street and 105th and between 110th and 120th, before the city’s looming bankruptcy in 1975 halted all digging. The dream of a Second Avenue subway lay dormant until April 12, 2007, when contractors for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority again broke ground — to extend the Q line from 63rd and Lexington over to Second Avenue and up to 96th Street. That alone costs $4.5 billion. Eventually they will lengthen the Q to 125th and dig a new line, the T, from the Financial District straight up Second Avenue to 125th Street. At least that’s the plan.

One evening in March, Amitabha Mukherjee, an engineering manager at Parsons Brinckerhoff, the firm supervising construction at Second Avenue, led a small group through a tunnel headed from 69th Street toward 63rd. The tunnel was dark, but there was, in fact, a light burning at the end. Where the rock was naturally fractured, groundwater squeezed in, darkening the walls with Rorschach figures: here a stegosaurus, there a lady in a gown.

“Geology defines the way you drive the tunnel,” Mukherjee said. The bedrock below Second Avenue and for much of the rest of Manhattan is schist — a hard, gray black rock shot through with sheets of glittery mica. Some 500 million years ago, Manhattan was a continental coastline that collided with a group of volcanic islands known as the Taconic arc. That crash crumpled layers of mud, sand and lava into schist, lending it an inconsistent structure and complicating tunneling: in some places, the schist holds firmly together, creating self-supporting arches; in others, it’s broken and prone to shattering, forcing workers to reinforce the tunnel as they go to keep it from falling.”

Via: The NY Times

Photo: Richard Barnes for The New York Times

“Why U.S. Transit Systems Are Still So Far Away From Converting to Driverless Trains

Stephen Smith. July 9, 2012

With Google priming Nevada to be the first state to allow driverless cars on its roads, transit fans could be forgiven for asking: Where are the driverless trains?

The technology is relatively simple and has been around for decades. Unlike cars, which are autonomous and proceed on sight alone, railways must be centrally controlled to prevent collisions. So while a driverless car is limited by how far its sensors can “see,” the central computer that directs driverless trains is fully aware of all trains on its tracks, removing much of the guesswork.

The United States doesn’t yet have any fully automated trains outside of a few airport shuttles and small-scale “people movers,” but Europe and Asia have adopted the technology quite readily. European firms like Italy’s AnsaldoBreda and France’s Matra (now owned by Siemens) pioneered the technology, and which operates on six continents. Africa’s first system, in Algiers, opened in November of last year.

The obvious advantage of driverless trains over their manned counterparts is that transit agencies don’t have to pay drivers. Upgrading to driverless requires a large upfront investment, and still requires humans to act as engineers, maintenance workers, janitors, and station managers. But after the investment is made, eliminating the driver position offers agencies flexibility and riders much more frequent service.

During rush hour, the main impediment to more service is the number of trains an agency owns, and in some cases tracks that simply can’t handle any more traffic. But during off-peak hours, it’s the cost of putting drivers on each train that determines how often the trains come.

Driverless service eliminates these costs, “break[ing] the connection between frequency and labor costs,” as transit consultant Jarrett Walker put it. Vancouver’s driverless SkyTrain network, for example, has off-peak headways that would make Americans drool with envy. Riders on the Expo and Millennium trunk line never have to wait more than 5 minutes for a train, even late at night – a frequency that would be prohibitively expensive without driverless trains.”

Via: The Atlantic

Photo: Reuters

“L.A. — transit’s promised land

Which major U.S. city is at the cutting edge of forward-thinking transportation planning? Surprise: It’s Los Angeles.

By Taras Grescoe. July 7, 2012

I’ve spent the last three years traveling to 14 cities around the world, looking at how places as diverse as Copenhagen, Tokyo and Bogota are trying to escape congestion, pollution and sprawl by finding alternatives to the car. When people ask me which major U.S. city is at the cutting edge of forward-thinking transportation planning, they’re always surprised when I reply that it is Los Angeles — those “72 suburbs in search of a city,” according to the tired put-down — that is working hardest to improve transit. Some express astonishment that transit is an option in L.A. at all, which leads me to soliloquize, a la Joan Didion, on the “rapture-of-the-freeway” and the joys of strap-hanging in SoCal.

L.A. has a two-line subway, I tell them, running trains through cavernous stations, like the one at Hollywood and Vine, where the ceilings are covered with oversized film reels. (You can actually get to the Oscars by subway!) The Orange Line’s buses shoot into the heart of the San Fernando Valley along dedicated busways. The articulated, air-conditioned buses look like something dreamed up by the set designer of “RoboCop”!) Connecting on one of the city’s four light-rail lines can take you from Pasadena to Mariachi Plaza in East Los Angeles, or from Culver City to the Long Beach Aquarium. When you’re downtown, or in more than a dozen other neighborhoods, you can hop a ride on the peppy, pint-sized DASH buses. (And get this: The fare is only half a buck!)

If Gov. Jerry Brown’s plans go through, I add, someday your gateway to the city won’t be LAX but the gorgeous Mission Revival-style Union Station, after a ride on the nation’s most advanced bullet train.

Many Angelenos are surprised to learn that their city’s reputation is at an all-time high among international transit scholars. This is the place, after all, that consistently ranks first in measures of commuter stress, as well as in hours wasted in traffic. (According to the Texas Transportation Institute’s latest urban mobility report, traffic delays in Los Angeles now amount to half a billion hours a year.) Of the nation’s 10 most congested commuter corridors, seven can be found in Los Angeles.

But it’s important to remember that freeways, though they have become the city’s de facto conduits for commuters, came relatively late. Los Angeles was originally a railway city, its early form set by the Southern Pacific Railroad and Santa Fe Railway. Its dispersed industrial suburbs were laced together by the inter-urban Red Cars of the Pacific Electric Railway and the local Yellow Cars of the Los Angeles Railway, a public transit system that, before World War II, was considered by many to be the best in the world.

Outsiders may see freeway-driven sprawl, but metropolitan Los Angeles is actually more densely settled, over its entire urban area, than the New York-Newark metro area. That makes the area ideally suited for the transit revival its leaders are trying to foster.

Los Angeles’ problem, though, is that it also suffers from a chronic transit deficit. Although many European and Asian cities of comparable stature built urban highways in the 20th century, they did it in tandem with development of their metro and commuter rail systems. (Shanghai, for example, took just 16 years to build the world’s largest metro system — one now more extensive, in terms of track mileage, than New York’s subway.)”

Via: LA Times

Photo: Passengers wait for the a Metro Red Line in Hollywood. (Los Angeles Times / December 10, 2011)

“Has South America’s Most Sustainable City Lost Its Edge?

Flavia Halais. June 6, 2012

The southern Brazil metropolis of Curitiba built its reputation as an urban planning model thanks, in large part, to its innovative transportation system. But in recent years, the system has become overcrowded and expensive, pushing people into their cars.

Curitiba is now the Brazilian state capital with the highest ratio of automobiles per inhabitant, and its bike paths remain largely underused. In early June, news reports revealed that usage of its famous Bus Rapid Transit system has decreased by 14 million rides in the past four years, or 4.3 percent. This followed a series of road accidents involving speeding buses, and complaints about ever-increasing fare prices.

Car culture is growing in all of Brazil’s major cities, as the growing middle-class happily gives up inefficient public transportation. But the much-praised BRT, which inspired systems like Bogotá’s TransMilenio, wasn’t expecting to see its popularity decline. The blame, according to critics, lies with URBS, the city agency in charge of managing the system, which has failed to adapt to changes in usage patterns and evolving demographics.

The misfortune of the BRT speaks to the larger failings of the city governance in Curitiba. Once praised for its impeccable urban planning and innovative interventions – the city pretty much invented the term “urban acupuncture” – Curitiba now seems to be suffering from a certain inertia.

“In the past 15 years Curitiba has rested on its laurels,” says Clara Irázabal, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University, who has written at length about the Brazilian metropolis.

The city has failed to integrate its growing suburbs into a coherent regional plan. As a result, most of the planning interventions that Curitiba is known for – public parks and green spaces, pedestrian streets, preservation of the historic district – are not accessible to hundreds of thousands of suburban (and usually lower-income) residents.

Curitiba’s planning method also concentrates on the “formal” city, leaving thousands of low-income residents with no choice but to establish illegal settlements due to lack of affordable housing, says José Ricardo Vargas de Faria, an engineer working at Ambiens, a Curitiba-based urban planning studio operating as a cooperative. “The discourse about Curitiba deliberately leaves out certain things, and contributes to build an image of a city that solved all its problems through planning,” he says.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: Matthieu Struck/Flickr

“What Really Matters for Increasing Transit Ridership

• ERIC JAFFE
• MAY 21, 2012

At first glance Broward County, Florida, doesn’t look like the friendliest place for public transportation. The metro area just north of Miami has a couple downtown areas — Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood — but lacks a strong central business district. It also lacks much transit-oriented development. On the contrary, Broward has a very typical postwar, auto-oriented design marked by wide highways and sprawl.

Looks can, of course, be deceiving. As it happens, Broward County has one of the strongest transit systems among other mid-sized metro areas in the United States (population: 1 to 5 million). Compared to 26 other bus-only metros in its class, Broward trails only Orlando and Las Vegas in terms of cost-effectiveness, outperforming higher-profile places like Austin, Charlotte, Indianapolis, and Phoenix. Its buses are full, as measured by per capita ridership, and they’ve stayed that way in recent years, even as transit in general has struggled.

So what’s the key to Broward’s success? That’s the question at the heart of a report published online earlier this month in the journal Urban Studies. A Florida State research team led by urban planning scholar Gregory Thompson considered the history of Broward County transit and evaluated its performance on a number of metrics. What they found, in short, is further evidence in favor of multi-destination systems that get people from home to work rather than simply from home to downtown:

The analysis of transit work trip demand in Broward County indicates that the reason BCT [Broward County Transit] performs so well compared with most of its peers is that its multidestination route structure directly connects the county’s residential areas with the dispersed jobs to which they travel. … In Broward County, workers use transit to get to jobs in a multitude of locations that do not possess the built environment characteristics long thought to be important by most scholars in determining transit ridership.

It wasn’t always like this in Broward. In the 1970s the county’s bus routes focused on getting people to Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, and later down to Miami, as per the conventional transit wisdom of the day. When ridership failed to increase, the transit authority restructured the system into a grid that traversed high-density (if not the highest) employment areas. The shift made sense considering that most Broward residents are so-called transit-dependents: among riders, 60 percent are from households that make under $20,000 a year, and about half don’t own a car.

Thompson and colleagues analyzed more than 40,000 bus trips taken in Broward circa the 2000 Census. (While the age of this data is a drawback of the study, there’s evidence that Broward’s system changed little from 2000 to 2005.) Much of what they found isn’t all that surprising: population, median income, employment, and to some extent parking fees near work were all significant factors when it came to transit ridership.

So was in-vehicle travel time. While this isn’t surprising either, Thompson and company consider it perhaps the most critical aspect of Broward’s transit success. A short, direct trip means, first, that Broward residents can actually get to their jobs (or get out to find jobs), and second, that these same people don’t have to depend on friends or family to drive them to work (which in turn saves resources and frees these folks to get to jobs of their own). That travel time was a significant factor but transfer time was not underscores the efficiency of multi-destination grids. Contrary to popular wisdom, connections can often save time and reduce a system’s complexity (a point Jarrett Walker hammers home in his book, Human Transit.)

In a word, Broward County de-centralized its transit system. Instead of clinging to the belief that all jobs were downtown, it accepted that people need to access jobs in all kinds of places throughout a metro area. We’ve seen this before: Tallahassee recently reached this conclusion, as Emily Badger points out; Atlanta’s transit system also demonstrates the effectiveness of a multi-destination approach, as Thompson and colleagues have found. But since this realization remains the exception and not the norm, it bears repeating.”

Via: The Atlantic Cities

Photo: Flickr/Elvert Barnes

“Public Transportation Systems Are Leaving People With Disabilities Behind

Sarah Laskow. May 10, 2012

To use New York City’s paratransit service—the on-demand public transportation system for people who can’t use the bus or the subway system—a customer must call one to two days in advance, between the hours of 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. She can request a pickup time or submit an appointment time by which she must reach her destination, but not both. The driver will pick her up anywhere from 30 minutes before to 30 minutes after the agreed-upon time. If anything changes, the customer must call three hours in advance to cancel the trip.

That’s more hassle than most people would put up with to visit a doctor or have dinner at a restaurant or go to the store. And that’s how the system is supposed to work. Before the Americans with Disabilities Act passed more than 20 years ago, there was no guarantee that public transit would serve disabled people at all. The ADA required paratransit service as a supplement to public transportation systems, as well as increased access on regular public transit routes for people with disabilities.

But advocates for disabled people are still fighting for better transportation options. At last count, there were 2 million people with disabilities in the United States who never leave their homes. More than a quarter—560,000 people—say that’s because of transportation difficulties. The American Association of People with Disabilities notesin a new report that only 20 percent of Amtrak stations have complied with ADA standards. Major subway systems are only required to make “key” stations accessible.

And for people with disabilities—particularly those who use wheelchairs—taxis are rarely an option. In New York City, for example, only 233 of more than 13,000 taxis are wheelchair-accessible, less than 2 percent of the city’s taxi fleet. The nonprofit Disability Rights Advocates brought a lawsuit against the city, which controls the taxi fleet through a licensing system, demanding that number be increased. Late last year, a district judge ruled that city must create a comprehensive plan for providing taxi service to the disabled. 

New York is in the middle of designing the “Taxi of Tomorrow,” a fuel-efficient cab decked out with USB ports and other luxuries. At one point, it looked like these cabs might be wheelchair-accessible, but the Mayor’s office wasn’t particularly interested in prioritizing that. Now, Comptroller John Liu (a likely candidate in next year’s mayoral election) says he’ll block the taxi contract unless all new cabs can accommodate wheelchairs. 

Part of the reason it’s so difficult for public transit system to serve people with disabilities is that they’re woefully underfunded. It’s important that cities make it possible for people to get around without cars in order to create dense neighborhoods and keep pollution down. But it’s also important that those systems don’t leave people with disabilities stranded in their homes or on a street corner, unable to get where they need to go.”

Via: GOOD Magazine

Photo: via (cc) Flickr user man pikin

“LA’S TRANSIT DREAMS COMING TRUE?

On the tracks of Los Angeles’ new Expo Line.

Alissa Walker. 4.17.12

At his State of the City address last week, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa made a surprise pledge to extend Measure R, the half-cent sales tax that is funneling an estimated $40 billion into transportation projects over the next 30 years. When the measure passed with a two-thirds majority in 2008, it represented a turning point for the city:  Angelenos not only wanted better transit, they were willing to pay for it. Extending the tax, Villaraigosa claimed, would complete planned transit projects in half the time. “We will measure traffic relief in years, not generations,” he said.

Believe it or not, Los Angeles is on its way to becoming a world-class transit city again, and there is a pivotal new light rail line opening this weekend to prove it.

On Saturday, April 28, the Expo Line will lead the city into a new transit era. This 8.6 mile route from downtown to Culver City will not only serve a traffic-weary swath of the city, but it will give Angelenos the rail line that will metaphorically make the city whole again—traveling the width of the LA basin to reach Santa Monica as early as 2015.

And unlike some recent additions to the system, like the Gold Line Eastside Extension, it will be likely heavily used: Metro expects 27,000 boardings per day. When the line is complete to Santa Monica, ridership could be as high as 67,000 per day.”

Via: The Architect’s Newspaper

Photo: Metro

“FIGUEROA COMEBACK

James Brausell. 4.23.12

One of LA’s most important urban projects is back on track after the dissolution of California redevelopment funding almost shut it down for good.

Since 2010, the MyFigueroa project had tried, through street, landscape, and land-use planning studies, to pave the way for the city’s most innovative pedestrian and bicycle environment along Figueroa Boulevard between LA Live, on the southern end of Downtown, and Exposition Park, adjacent to USC. It included separated cycle lanes and improvements to streetscape, pedestrian infrastructure, and transit stops.

The Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles had served as custodian to the $30 million Proposition 1C grant funding the project. But once the California State Supreme Court dissolved the state’s redevelopment agencies at the end of 2011, it fell into limbo.

But in early April, the LA mayor’s office and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (DOT) struck a deal to move administrative oversight of the project to the DOT. Now MyFigueroa appears primed to move forward quickly. According to Tim Fremaux, a city traffic engineer, DOT will bundle the project’s environmental review with that of the city’s plans to build 40 miles of bike lanes. DOT would serve as lead agency on MyFigueroa’s construction, overseeing work by a yet-to-be-determined contractor. The Proposition 1C grant money will fund it, and additional Metro Call for Projects money could be used to improve connections between the Figueroa Street and the new Expo Line.

All told, the project will add pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure improvements on 4.5 miles of streets along the Figueroa Corridor. LA-based landscape and urban design firm Melendrez Design Partners has already completed initial designs. The centerpiece of the project would be a separated cycle track (SCT) running in each direction along Figueroa Street between 7th and 41st streets. The SCT would slide parking spaces out toward the street, leaving curb, sidewalk, and drainage infrastructure in place.

Grant funding for the MyFigueroa project also targets improvements for 11th Street from Broadway to Figueroa, Bill Robertson Lane between Martin Luther King Boulevard and Exposition Boulevard, and, finally, MLK Boulevard between Figueroa and Vermont. Eleventh Street, which feeds into LA Live, would add a bike lane and enhance pedestrian infrastructure—including a possible 19-foot-wide sidewalk. Improvements along Bill Robertson Avenue, currently flanked by a sea of surface parking lots and the LA Coliseum, could become a pedestrian promenade. MLK Boulevard would see improvements to sidewalks, setbacks, and lighting.”

Via: The Architect’s Newspaper

Photo: COURTESY MELENDREZ, GEHL ARCHITECTS, AND TROLLER MAYER ASSOCIATES

“11 Transportation Officials Who Are Changing the Game

by Angie Schmitt

“U.S. Poised For Passenger Rail Boom

Jeff McMahon. March 15, 2012.

Of planes, trains, and automobiles, only one can accommodate America’s growing need for urban and intercity transportation, according to a panel of transportation officials who gathered in Chicago Wednesday.

Transportation officials from Chicago, Denver and Washington DC gathered at the headquarters of the Metropolitan Planning Councilto discuss the need for “fun and functional transit centers.” Underlying fun and function, however, was a common assumption that U.S. transit centers are about to become much more crowded.

“If you look at the current dominant modes of transportation—highways and aviation—they are capacity constrained, capital starved, and there is not much in the way of optimism about either of them,” said Tom Downs, the Washington-based chairman of Paris-based Veolia Transportation.

“Your capacity seems to be pretty much unlimited for rail.”

Downs led Amtrak from 1993-98 and served as executive director of the Federal Transit Administration, a White House fellow to the U.S. Dept. of Transportation, president of New York’s Tri Boro Bridge and Tunnel Authority, director of the District of Columbia Department of Transportation, among other roles.

The coming boom in passenger rail is so palpable, he said, that traditional rail companies that long ago abandoned passenger service are demanding a return to the business.

“If you think about the business participation in passenger railroads, it’s coming back. My suspicion is that it’s going to come back very strongly.”

Downs’s comments were backed up by Luann Hamilton, deputy director of the Chicago Department of Transportation—who said Chicago estimates it will see a 40 percent increase in train traffic by 2040—and by Frank Cannon, president of Denver’s Union Station Neighborhood Company, which is revitalizing Denver’s historic train hub.

From the day Denver’s light-rail system opened, Cannon said, it exceeded its 20-year ridership projections.

And railroads can accommodate dramatic increases in traffic more easily than highways or aviation.”

Via: Forbes

Photo: Denver’s Union Station. Image via Wikipedia