A response to the DCR anti-bike statement

Recently, UniversalHub posted an exchange with the DCR regarding winter bicycling maintenance. I've seen this as an issue before, but the derision with which the DCR views cyclists is repugnant. I've been stewing about this all morning and have posted a line-by-line rebuttal to the last directive which really makes my blood boil. Not only is it derisive and dismissive, but it shows how little the DCR cares about anything that doesn't have four wheels and an internal combustion engine. I am going to go through it sentence by sentence and provide notes, in italics:

We should all be stating as a policy that DCR has no responsibility or intent of providing "safe" winter biking opportunities on any of our linear paths or sidewalks. 

Since when is this the DCR policy. Is there anything in state statute that directs them not to maintain safe winter conditions on their linear paths or sidewalks? Or is this an internal policy decision.

This is impossible! 

Simply not true. There are several examples of paths which are plowed and maintained in Boston. These include the Minuteman Bikeway, which is maintained by the towns it passes through and well-used. The Somerville Community Path is similar. MassDOT should be applauded for their efforts to keep the Longfellow clear of snow; they have done a stellar job and shown that it certainly is possible to provide a clear path for non-auto users. Additionally, if you look at cities like Madison, Saint Paul and Minneapolis, they have no issue keeping paths trails for cycling. It's been above freezing in Minneapolis 8 days since December 4. So don't give me the "it's too cold in Boston." It's been below 0˚ 42 days in that time frame. Spare me.

Any path or walk where we do snow removal is strictly to provide reasonable continued passage for pedestrians.

Why is the level of maintenance between these paths and the parallel roadways different? The roadways are pleasure roadways, yet they are maintained to the same level as any other roadway. If the DCR ran a single plow after the storm and let drivers fend for themselves, I'd understand them not clearing the pathways. However, that is not the case.

If anyone wants to bike our paths in winter they should assume variable and dangerous conditions, and know they are doing it at there own risk.

Then why call them bike paths? The Paul Dudley White Bike Path is called a bike path because it is a bike path. The Soouthwest Corridor is explicitly signed for bicyclists. We understand that paths might not be free of ice and snow, much like we understand that roadways may have patches of ice and snow on them. However, we expect that when we pay tax dollars these go towards maintaining the pathways—putting some effort in to it. It is clear the DCR does not feel that this is the case.

Frankly, I am tired of our dedicated team wasting valuable time addressing the less than .05% of all cyclists who choose to bike after a snow/ice event. 

Wow. Where to begin. First of all, the DCR is spending a lot of time defending not doing any work. How about spending some of this energy going out and actually clearing off the snow from their properties. Then they wouldn't have to waste this valuable time. Second, 0.05% of cyclists choose to bike after a snow/ice event? This is ridiculous. It's possible someone here doesn't understand math and meant 5% (0.05 is 5%, but 0.05% is 0.0005). They are saying that one in 2000 cyclists bikes after a snow event. I was out cycling this past week and rode with a group of five bicyclists on Main Street in Cambridge. By this calculation, there would be 10,000 cyclists on Main Street on a given morning. I can tell you that is not the case. This is dismissive and wrong. 

Sometimes during winter in Boston you can safely bike, and I do it when it is dry and safe. 

False equivalence. Do we say "sometimes you can drive in Boston, when it is dry and safe?" And just because you don't does that mean that no one should?

This is not one of those winters! 

Please go out and stand on a street corner in Boston and see if there are any safe cyclists. I can attest that there are many.

We should not spend time debating cyclists with poor judgement and unrealistic expectations, and stick with [the staffer]'s recommendation that they find other transportation.

Cyclists who want to be able to bike in the winter have poor judgement? Do drivers who drive in the winter have poor judgement? And is it really unreasonable to expect that bike paths designated as such would be maintained for bicyclists? If this staffer believes that this is the case, they are derelict in their duty and should be removed from their position.

If someone is completely depending on a bike for year-round transportation, they are living in the wrong city.

This is repugnant. The state has a goal of reducing SOV travel, but apparently the DCR is not on board. It is time for the DCR to work with the rest of the Commonwealth, not against it. And if Boston is the wrong city to be a cyclist in the winter, perhaps we should move to Minneapolis or Madison, a city with worse winters, but which actually invests in its cyclists.

Uber surge pricing: anti-congestion pricing and economic externalities

I'm a devotee of NPR's Planet Money podcast, but listening to a recent episode had me screaming at my—well, at my earbuds—when they described how Uber's surge pricing and business model was good for everyone. The episode is moderately informative, but I take issue with a major premise of their reporting: the argument that charging a lot for service and matching supply and demand is a benefit for all users. You can listen to the entirety of the episode here; the segment I take issue with starts around 11:00.

Here's a quick breakdown of the conversation:

• Uber benefits car drivers, because they can make more money when prices "surge."
• Uber benefits people with high disposable income ($150 for a trip from Manhattan to Brooklyn), because they can choose to pay a lot of money to get a car when demand is high.
• Uber benefits people waiting for cabs because Uber gets more cars on the road, so the wait time for other cars is less.

The last piece is where I take issue. In a closed system, this would be the case. But it's not. Here's a quote from the show: "when drivers see an area of the city where fares are high … they all go there." Remember, we're talking about New York City. When there's a congested area, Uber provides an incentive for more drivers to go to this congested area. This creates more congestion, which actually results in slower speeds for taxicabs, and—I would posit—fewer available rides for people not willing to pay a lot of money, not more, as they suggest.

Which is fine, in economic theory. However, when looking at traffic, "congestion" is shorthand for "demand." So by attempting to provide efficient transportation options, it is a transfer of utility from the poor to the rich. Taxicabs are strictly regulated because they serve as a part of the transportation network, both in fare and in number. By sending a fleet of expensive black cars to a congested area, Uber squeezes out the more affordable taxis from the street. Someone willing to pay triple the fare for a ride might call and Uber, but someone who can't afford that service now has a potentially longer wait for a cab (which can't get to the area due to congestion) and then everyone has a longer ride due to the congestion. Part of the taxicab regulations—at least in theory—provide enough cabs to provide service without gridlocking the city (obviously, here too theory and practice are almost mutually exclusive). Adding more and more cars to already congested streets creates crippling congestion. That's—to use economist speak—a major negative externality for everyone.

Now the argument could be made that people waiting for cabs should just take the subway. It's a good argument; in the podcast they interviewed someone waiting in a 30 minute cab line, in the snow, at Penn Station for a ride "downtown," an area well-served by the nearby subway (for lower prices, too). And for some of these riders, they might make that choice. But others probably have rational reasons to look for a cab: perhaps they have a bulky item. Perhaps they're trying to get somewhere not well-served by transit. Plus, the added street-level congestion might drive more people to use the subway, which will create more congestion below-ground too. Adding more vehicles above-ground doesn't seem like a great solution.

Uber's surge pricing, in my view, is the opposite of congestion pricing. What works in London and Singapore has faced stiff opposition in New York City (especially from interests outside the city). With congestion pricing, Uber (in theory) would make more sense, since the overall traffic would (in theory) be mitigated enough that surge pricing wouldn't send more cars in to already-congested areas. Until then, Uber's surge pricing is part of the problem, not part of the solution. And it certainly doesn't benefit the vast majority of travelers.

Design in isolation

There are several recent projects in the Boston/Cambridge area—some of which have been covered on this page—that have been in the conversation recently. One major flaw of all of these is that they do little to combine the features of multiple projects but rather are viewed in isolation, even though they often border each other and, in many cases, deal with the same roads, paths and transitways. These include:

• The Allston Turnpike "straightening"
• Harvard's Allston Campus
• The Cambridge Street Overpass
• The DCR Connectivity Study
• The Bowker Overpass
• The DMU plan
• The Grand Junction path

These are all worthy projects, and it's mildly infuriating that there is no overarching planning agency which can corral these in to one cohesive plan. Right now, it's an alphabet soup which includes MassDOT, DCR, Cambridge, Boston, the MBTA, Harvard and MIT (they own part of the Grand Junction right of way). The issue is that these projects are often viewed as singular entities, and not in relation to the greater transportation ecosystem. For instance, I see the Allston campus, Cambridge Street Overpass and Turnpike Straightening as inextricably linked, with no small connection to the DCR paths and, down the line, the Bowker overpass. A vehicle driving over the Bowker Overpass may well have come from Harvard Square, via a DCR roadway and through the Turnpike interchange. And, heck, with better transit or bicycling connections, that vehicle might not be there at all. 

Instead of single-item traffic studies, we need to take a holistic view of the transportation infrastructure in the region, and decide what we want to see in 20 or 30 years: slightly realigned roadways which still prioritize funneling as much traffic as possible to the detriment of other uses, or a more complete transportation system. Most of the infrastructure in question is 50 or more years old, and will need to be rebuilt (or reconsidered) in coming years. Instead of rebuilding the broken infrastructure we have, we need to take a broader view of what we could create. Since we're going to have to spend the money anyway, we might as well spend it wisely now, rather than have to fix yesterday's problems tomorrow.

This page will attempt to do so in the near future.

Anecdotes in the Globe

When I write a letter to the Globe—which happens relatively often, it turns out—I try to throw something more than a personal anecdote in. I figure they don't want to hear my story in response to Joan Vennochi's (hers: "I was in traffic and a bike passed me, therefore I hate bikes"), but want me to add something their readership might be interested in. So I pick out one of her more ridiculous points ("We need more parking spaces for cars and fewer for bikes so people can go shopping.") and show why it's folly.

Which is why a couple of recent letters to the Globe regarding the DMU plan are dismaying. They get the gist of the argument right, but they anecdotes they use seem to say "look at this transit system we have, it's so bad that I can't use it because _____." Except the fill-in-the-blank of that blank is a single personal experience which is not really verifiable. (I, at least, cited a study.)

Here's letter #1. Nathan Banfield from Concord writes about taking the train from Concord. "I can drive to Porter Square from my home for, at most, $4 in gas, the same trip costs twice as much by commuter rail while taking considerably longer." Let's examine this. Yes, it's $4 in gas. Then what do you do when you get to Porter? You park—somewhere. Probably at a meter. That costs money. A garage? That costs more. And if you factor in only the cost of gas, yes, it's probably cheaper to drive. I think the 55¢ per mile (or whatever it is these days) figure quoted for cost per mile is high (it figures in fixed costs like insurance and assumes you have an expensive—and more quickly depreciating—vehicle) but it's certainly more than the cost of gas alone.

But, oh, Nathan. Taking the train takes considerably longer? You picked one of the commuter rail lines where that's not actually the case! The drive from Concord to Porter takes 22 minutes. If there's no traffic. The train? 27 for an express, 34 for a local. That's longer, but not by too much. But what if you happen to drive Route 2, say, between 6 and 10 a.m., or 2 and 7 p.m.? All of the sudden the 27 minute train ride seems like a breeze since you might spend that long waiting through the lights at Alewife. Yes, frequencies should be better. And, yes, on weekends it's probably faster to drive. But for commuters, the train is certainly faster than driving, especially along Route 2.

The award for taking a single experience and mistaking it for data, however, goes to letter #2. Sherry Alpert writes in from Canton. "I've been riding these trains for 30 years" (reminds me of this Seinfeld clip). Good for her—and she doesn't even try to claim that the train is so much slowed than driving. So, on January 8, the train was an hour late, and she missed a class. Therefore, the trains are unreliable. That may be the case, but just one late train on January 8 does not mean the train is always late. And would you rather drive at rush hour from Canton to Boston? Because that's always going to take an extra hour. Again, the sentiment that more reliable service is understandable, but stating that the system is unreliable because one train was an hour late is like saying "traffic is really bad because I got stuck in one traffic jam." If you get stuck in a traffic jam every day, then, yes, traffic is bad. If you get stuck in one specific traffic jam because, let's say a tractor trailer jackknifed, then traffic is not bad—there was an accident.

Now, if only there was somewhere to see the MBTA's arrival data. Some sort of, I don't know, monthly scorecard. Oh. Wait. The MBTA has a monthly scorecard. You know what doesn't have this kind of monthly data? The highways. But no one is writing letters saying "it took an hour to drive 12 miles on 128 today." Because, frankly, that's not really noteworthy, except maybe on Twitter. Which is where complaints about your train being delayed belong, anyway. But not in the newspaper.

Massachusetts' DMU plan could well provide better rail service

Last year (oh, wait, in 2012—gosh) I wrote about the sorry state of affairs of the MBTA's commuter rail system. Outside of rush hour, trains travel infrequently and on seemingly random schedules. Even in closer-in, denser areas, service is provided only every couple of hours. (Oh, yeah, and service is slow, too.) There is probably demand for better service but little supply, and it's partially a cost issue: running full, 1000-passenger commuter trains (with poor acceleration) is a losing proposition when few seats are filled.

Enter the DMU. The diesel multiple unit, while sparsely used in the US, is a frequent sight abroad, providing service at times when a full trainset is not needed. They leverage the direct connections between town centers that exist along rail lines, allowing fast service to the city center without rolling empty cars through the midday and evening. The plan imagines several lines utilizing DMUs on rail segments inside 128—most of which do not have paralleling subway service:

 (The full report, which appears to have been scanned as a PDF, is here.)

If implemented, this would go a long way towards improving service on several underserved corridors. The Fairmount Line currently is served infreqently by full-length commuter trains, a complete mismatch of service. Lower capacity and better acceleration would provide a much better benefit there. The Worcester Line—which will soon have added service—provides very little service in Newton, the most densely-populated portion of the line (it is served by express buses, which crawl through traffic on the Turnpike). Better service to Lynn will provide some of what a far-costlier rapid transit connection would—faster and more frequent service to Boston, and service to Woburn will provide better connectivity north of Boston, as well as further reducing the run times for trains to Lowell, currently one of the faster trips in the system, and one which, if the state of New Hampshire pays, could be extended northwards to the granite state to provide an alternative for the traffic-choked I-93.

The most interesting piece here is the inclusion of the Grand Junction through Cambridge. This page would argue for a complete rebuild of this line, with grade separation and electrification, and its operation as a crosstown link between North Station, Cambridge and Allston, currently a serpentine trip by car, much less by transit. It also would provide better access to the fast-growing Cambridge area which is currently poorly-served by highways and at the whim of the over-capacity Red Line. Currently, commuting from west of Boston to Cambridge is a bit of a black hole; there is no good connection between the Worcester Line and Cambridge without going all the way to South Station and backtracking across the Red Line. The Grand Junction is an underutilized piece of infrastructure which could be put to very good use.

What really matters is how the MBTA decides to implement DMU service. (That is, if it can be funded and overcome local opposition; double-dipping Cambridge City Councilman and State Rep Tim Toomey helped to quash a plan to route some commuter service over the Grand Junction in 2010. Needless to say, he did not receive my vote in recent council elections). If it uses it as a cost-saving measure to run the same level of service with less equipment, it will simply maintain the status quo. For instance: there are only eight commuter rail trains from the stations in Newton to Boston daily. And the Fairmount Line has 60 minute headways with no evening or weekend service. Running the same level of service with different equipment would be a wasted opportunity (if a minor cost savings).

If the state provides faster and more frequent service to these lines, say, with 15 or 20 minute headways all day, it will come much closer to providing a transit level of service, and actually providing service to these communities. With new stations at Yawkey, near New Balance and the intermediate "West Station" the Worcester Line would provide better connections through an underserved portion of Boston and Newton (with frequent, timed shuttle service across the Grand Junction a dramatic bonus). And the Fairmount Line, which currently provides piss-poor service to one of the states most disadvantaged communities, could prove an economic lifeline, if only the trains ran more than hourly.

And if DMUs are successful, they could be implemented in other parts of the system. Why run a full trainset at off-peak hours from Newburyport to Boston when a transfer at Beverly would provide the same level of service? Perhaps instead of the hourly locomotive-hauled train from Boston to Lowell, half-hourly DMUs would double the service at a minimal additional cost. Perhaps DMUs could provide service further west of Worcester to Springfield and Amherst. Hopefully, the state sees DMUs as a tool, not as a cost-cutting measure. If they implement this service better than they photoshopped the map, they could dramatically improve travel in Massachusetts.

Failures in stock photography

In relation to the 10-year transportation capital investment plan the state of Massachusetts just announced (more on that soon) I was poking around the New Hampshire plan to extend transit to Concord, potentially piggybacking on better infrastructure in Massachusetts.

As I was scrolling through, however, I found a set of images which might inadvertently show why Massachusetts really needs to improve its infrastructure. At the bottom of the seventh page of this document, there are three images of commuter rail in North America. Here they are:

Let's go right-to-left. On the right, we see the Long Island Railroad, gliding through the snow in New York. On the rails. In the center, there's Tri-Rail, complete with commuters walking towards their destinations. The train is, of course, on the track. And on the left, there's the MBTA's service, uh, derailed outside South Station! The image, which appears to be from this story from the Boston Herald, shows a minor derailment outside of South Station in 2008. Setting aside copyright issues (perhaps they bought the photo from a stock site), it certainly seems like there are plenty of images out there that, you know, don't show the T running off the tracks.

Well, maybe the Keolis contract will result in fewer derailments.

Take the (train/bus/car) to the ballgame

When the whole melee about Cobb County Braves broke last month it got me thinking about a long-thought project of mine: calculating travel mode share to baseball parks. Ballparks see the most visits of any sport (a multipurpose arena with hockey and basketball only has as many home games as a baseball team, with half the capacity), and ballparks are often (although not in the case of the Braves) seen as means to revitalize downtown areas.

So, I created a chart of each stadium, and how far it was from various transit modes. And then I mapped it out:

Green shows transit options within ¼ mile, or a five minute walk. Yellow is within ½ mile (10 minutes) and red within a mile (20 minutes). Note that bus stops more than half a mile form the stadium are not shown. Here is a Venn-ish diagram of the same data:

A few notes:

• 28 ballparks lie within half a mile of some transit option. (The exceptions: Arlington, Texas—which doesn't even have transit within the city limits!—and Kansas City, have bus stops less than a mile away.)
• 3 cities have no rail transit but do have bus service. Miller Park, built with huge parking lots for tailgaiting Wisconsinites, is the only one of these ballparks more than a quarter mile from the nearest bus stop.
• Boston, Baltimore and Toronto have all four transit options within half a mile of the stadium. (In Boston, the Green Line, despite carrying more passengers than several subway systems, is classified as light rail; the Orange Line, half a mile away, is the heavy rail option.)
• Denver is opening a multi-modal station near the current ballpark, this reflects the projected opening next year.
• The Braves new ballpark will be nearly a mile from the nearest bus stop, putting it in the company of Texas and Kansas City.
• Historically, ballparks were often further from the city center, and served mainly by streetcars, even in cities with subways. Braves Field, Shibe Park, Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds were all closer to streetcars than to subways. (And note that Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium, and both ballparks in Chicago are not in the downtown core.)