Utility of Transit vs Cost of Transit

I have long preached on the need for our city's transit systems to have high utility.  By that I mean that people who use transit can get where they want to go (or at least nearby) easily and quickly.  Low utility is what we have now for the majority, not just in Atlanta but in most of the world.

Here are some of David Henry's ideas on how the new Atlanta Streetcar project can be better.  The first one, especially, is absolutely correct - the higher the frequency; that is, the less time a person has to wait for a car -- the more useful the streetcar will be. 

Atlanta will have four streetcars, but right now only plans to run two at a time.  This likely means headways of up to  20 minutes.  In 20 minutes a potential customer could very likely walk to his or her destination.  Most certainly they could drive that distance.  Of course the obstacle is not a lack of streetcars, but rather the high cost of people to operate the cars.  I'm not against paying a fair wage people to drive our buses and our trains, but this is why we can't have nice things.  We simply cannot afford enough people to give our bus lines high utility, and we barley afford to keep headways on our heavy rail within decent intervals. 

And therein lies the rub.  If we cannot run enough buses on enough routes to feed the rail and then distribute from the rail,  then we have low utility.  Low utility put fewer buts in the seats, which reduces farebox income and increases dependency on the public purse.

As it's said, it takes money to make money.  If we are not willing to raise the utility of the streetcar, much less all of our transit systems in and around Atlanta, then we are left with a system that costs the taxpayers more because we are not willing to make the needed investment on the front end.

I'm not sure what can be done about this.  Education isn't working, as touted as that solution to everything is -- we are still electing people to office who ought to know better to and yet do not.  Perhaps when gas gets up to $5 a gallon, we might...perhaps...start to see a change in our public policies.  But I'm not going to hold my breath for that either.

Catch-22 in Minnesota

Minnesota's Northstar Commuter Rail 'System' (I'm not sure that one route constitutes a "system", but I digress) is seeing growth in ridership, though it has not increased as much as supporters -- and even those who do not support the project -- would like, writes Sarah Horner in the Pioneer Press on July 21st.

The Catch that Northstar finds itself is this: "Ridership must reach 4,000 average weekday rides before talk of extending the line to St. Cloud can be restarted."  Although June's ridership hit 3,000 trips, its year-to-date average is down around 2,700.

The unfortunate thing about this requirement is that if the line went to St. Cloud now, it would likely average far more that 4,000 weekday rides. 

I am encouraged by the realism of opponents as expressed by Anoka County Board Chairman Rhonda Sivarajah, who never supported the project:  

"The gains make it easier to make "lemonade out of lemons," she said. "We now have an obligation to try and bring that subsidy per rider down as much as possible. That's the only thing we can do as a county board to try and improve what I think is kind of a bad situation."

This is a good strategy for her and her fellow malcontents.  If Northstar ultimately fails, they can all wag their fingers and scold the rest with "I told you so!"  But if, as is more likely as the price of gasoline continues to rise, it succeeds brilliantly, they can say that much of the success is due to the efforts they made to make lemonade out of  lemons.

Also, it makes sense from a political point-of-view, which in the halls of 'gummint' is the one that often counts more than any actual success or failure. 

Across the aisle, those who favor transit initiatives tend not to have a good fall-back position like Chairman Sivarajah's, and when presented with a defeat or setback often resort to whining about how the world will end if their project isn't approved and built the way they want. 

It must be noted, of course, that Minnesotans are generally a less vitriolic bunch than most of their fellow Americans.  After all, they elected Al Franken, a known Comedian, to the United States Senate.

But regardless of the relatively level heads in the Land of Cheese, supporters of transit initiatives nationwide must develop similar strategies. If they do, they will find even more success at the polls for transit initiatives and expansion than they already do.

For Northstar, incremental improvements in ridership are better than none of course.  I just hope they will be prepared to handle the crush of riders they'll get when they do finally get to St. Cloud.

A Christmas Wish for Atlanta's Transit

By Doug Alexander

There was a time, not so long ago, when a person could get nearly everywhere in the City of Atlanta on transit.

Of course, that was when the transit system was privately owned by the Georgia Power Company and consisted entirely of streetcars.

The system was enormous; tracks went up and down most major streets, and extended out as far as Marietta and Stone Mountain.

The streetcars were safe and reliable.

When Harry Norman Real Estate Broker Necia Kelleher was just six years old, she could get on the streetcar near her home in West End and ride downtown all by herself to do her Christmas shop-ping at Rich’s Department Store.

She wasn’t unsupervised, of course: her mother, Thelma Knight, put her on the streetcar at the stop near her home; her Aunt Lucy welcomed her downtown (and took her to lunch at the famed Magnolia Room); and the streetcar motormen kept an eye out for the young lady throughout her trip.

Children were not the only ones who took “the Car” with ease. My grandfather, Cecil Alexander, Sr., had a hardware store on Pryor Street. He also had a little black Scottie dog named Snuff.

Each day, he and Snuff would walk a block from their home on St. Charles Avenue to catch an inbound streetcar on Ponce de Leon, and then walk another block to the store to open it up for business.

After the day was done, Cecil and Snuff would lock up, and catch the Car for home.

According to family lore, as Snuff “got on” in years, he began sleeping in at home. An hour or so after my grandfather had left for the store, Snuff would head out by himself. The streetcar would rumble and squeal to a stop, the door would open with a woosh as the steps dropped down with a whump, and the little dog would bound up into the streetcar and sit himself down for the trip.

Family lore also tells us that after a year or two of this, as Snuff became elderly (for a dog), he decided that he didn’t need to stay at the store until closing. Snuff began leaving about an hour before closing to catch the Car for home. Georgia Power even gave Snuff a lifetime pass to use the system as he pleased, though his master still had to pay full fare.

Of course, one has to take family lore with at least a few grains of salt, but we do know that the part about the pass is true; years ago the late historian Franklin Garrett found and showed my Dad and me the entry in Georgia Power’s pass records for “Snuff – a dog.”

By the time I came along, Atlanta’s streetcars and the trolley buses that succeeded them were long gone, replaced by buses owned by the city. They didn’t go to quite as many places as the streetcars had gone, and as years went by they became less frequent too.

Fortunately, I was blessed with a grandmother in New Orleans, so on visits as a youngster I did get to know what it was like to ride a real streetcar, and it saddened me that we didn’t have these wonderful rolling park-benches on our streets.

 When I was a member of the City Council in the 1990s, I began a conversation about bringing street-cars back to Auburn Avenue to help in the redevelopment of that famous street. That conversation has at last borne fruit: a brand-new streetcar line is being built from the heart of downtown to the heart of our civil rights heritage at the Martin Luther King Center.

And so, on this Christmas Day, my wish for our city is that this will be the first of many new streetcar lines, and that they will help to re-connect our neighborhoods and knit Atlanta back into to a place where six-year-olds – and the occasional dog – can get around town in safety and with ease.
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Published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Christmas Day - December 25, 2012

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