NPR: A Hitch For Rail Riders: Getting To Final Destination
John Flaherty
NPR has been doing a series on High Speed Rail. This piece, however, represents a critical piece of the transportation puzzle for those of us promoting enhanced transit at the metro level.
NPR HSR story number 3: you need to connect the
dots...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112467963
September 2, 2009
Congress has approved $8 billion for high-speed rail lines that, according to advocates, will make traveling by train faster than driving. But for high-speed trains to live up to their potential, planners also have to consider how long it takes to get to your destination after you get off the train.
"What you really need is a door-to-door trip," says Susan Zielinski, managing director of the Sustainable Mobility and Accessibility Research and Transformation project at the University of Michigan, a center that promotes sustainable transportation. "You should be able to combine your modes of transportation."
Planners such as Zielinski refer to the concept as "multi-modal design," and they say without it, the whole idea of high-speed transportation begins to break down.
"It's about connecting the dots," she says.
Consider, for example, the recent experience of nursing professor Debbie Hancock and her 8-year-old nephew, Drew Wilson. They rode an Amtrak train within North Carolina, traveling from Greensboro to Raleigh, to spend a day visiting two downtown museums.
While they both said they enjoyed the 90-minute train ride, they faced a challenge after they arrived at Raleigh's train station, located about a mile from the museums.
They hoped to catch a bus to the children's museum, but the train station has no regularly scheduled bus service. Nor is there any other form of local mass transit in Raleigh, and a cab seemed too expensive.
"I knew we were going to have to walk a little bit," Hancock said, pulling maps out of her handbag. They decided to walk to the nearest bus stop, navigating along broken pavement on a street without a sidewalk. Then, they stood in 99-degree heat at a bus stop with no bench or canopy.
"This part's not real fun right now," Hancock said during their 15-minute wait for the bus. Indeed, she found that part of the trip so uncomfortable that she says she isn't likely to ride the train to Raleigh again.
"In the future, I probably would just drive it," Hancock says.
That's the kind of story mass transit advocates hate to hear — and it provides a cautionary tale as cities and states vie for federal money to build higher-speed train lines. In North Carolina, leaders hope to upgrade existing tracks to allow trains to go more than 30 percent faster. But Pat Simmons, the head of the state rail division, knows it will take more for travelers to choose the train instead of their cars.
"Clearly we need a more integrated public transportation network that would include buses, train stations, commuter rail, all of those aspects working closely together," Simmons says. "That's how you begin to substitute for the convenience of the automobile."
He says one challenge is getting different agencies to cooperate. In Raleigh, for instance, the train is operated by the state and federal governments. The local bus system is owned by the city, while a separate regional bus network is run by a transit agency.
"We think that technology is going to save us, but really what we need to be working on at the exact same time is the connection with each other and institution to institution," says Zielinski, the University of Michigan transportation expert. "This isn't about the train competing with the bus. This is about the train and the bus getting together and creating a better integrated system."
Cities with poorly integrated systems are easy to find. But some places have begun to embrace multi-modal planning — including Portland, Ore., and St. Louis.
Greensboro, N.C., where Hancock began her trip, also has built a multi-modal transit hub, and city officials say ridership has gone up almost 40 percent since train and bus services were consolidated.
"When the train station was located away from downtown, there really wasn't an effective way to get people from the train to their end destination besides taking a taxi cab," says Greensboro Transit spokesman Kevin Ellwood.
But Ellwood notes that making Greensboro multi-modal came at a hefty price — $32 million to renovate the city's historic train depot into a modern transit hub. And planning and construction for the project took more than a decade, which underscores what many cities have discovered: that building the infrastructure for fast trains can be a very slow process.
John A. Flaherty
Director of Research & Communications
235 Promenade Street, #550
Providence, RI 02908
Fax 228.6594
About Grow Smart
Grow Smart Rhode Island is a diverse non-profit alliance of community leaders from the business, labor, academic, environmental, housing, development and other sectors promoting sustainable and prosperous growth and development. In its eleven years of advocacy, the organization has championed a number of incentives and tools to steer future growth to revitalized urban, town and village centers and to reduce development pressures on farms, forestland and the environmentally fragile areas of our coastline. Grow Smart Rhode Island's work has been honored with awards from the U.S. EPA, the RI Chapter of the American Planning Association, Rhode Island Housing, Preserve Rhode Island, the Providence Preservation Society, the Environmental Business Council of New England and the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission. Get our free monthly e-newsletter HERE.
james celenza
James Celenza
RICommittee on Occupational Safety & Health
751-2015
jasce...@gmail.com
Chris Wilhite
Jim,
I agree with you whole heartedly. I believe that we need to really put a LOT of pressure on RIPTA’s public information and marketing department.
tom sgouros
From Sierra Club's "Here to There" (2007):
There are some common experiences to trying to get around
Rhode Island on foot. Traveling without a car in Rhode
Island means committing to scrambling over berms and guard
rails between bus stops and destinations, walking across
fourlane streets with no crosswalks, wading across marshy
median strips, climbing over unplowed sidewalks, and
more. Bus stops are out by the road, with gargantuan parking
lots to trek across before you get to the store. Standing
next to the road in inclement weather means getting wet from
cars passing four feet away at forty miles an hour, and
crossing the street means matching wits with aloof and
occasionally hostile drivers. And there is not a "walk"
button in the state that perceptibly changes the light when
you press it.
Bringing these experiences to officials' attention is rarely
productive. One is told that too few people walk to make it
important (the very definition of a self-fulfilling
prophecy) or that slowing down the traffic would make
"people" wait, as if the pedestrians do not qualify as
people. Putting in additional crosswalks is thought to
create unnecessary traffic tie-ups and even though municipal
comprehensive plans may require commercial buildings to be
next to the sidewalk, and therefore convenient to
pedestrians, planning commissions and town councils seldom
insist on these kinds of restrictions, and regularly trade
them away for other amenities. After all, few of *them*
walk. In other words, to be a pedestrian in Rhode Island is
to be a second-class citizen, constantly reminded that your
safety and comfort are rated far behind those of your fellow
citizens in cars.
(http://whatcheer.net/ripr/reports/HeretoThere.pdf)
I once met Rob Freeman (of sainted memory, director of
Providence Foundation years ago) while clambering over a
snowdrift on an unplowed piece of sidewalk on a bridge
crossing the river, and we agreed that what Providence really
lacked was a lobby for pedestrians. That really deserves to
be part of NuPTA's portfolio.
-tom
james celenza <jasce...@gmail.com> wrote:
> very important points
b> if we are to replace the car we need to make moving about almost as
> hub.
>
> build higher-speed train lines. In North Carolina, leaders hope to
> upgrade existing tracks to allow trains to go more than 30 percent
> faster. But Pat Simmons, the head of the state rail division, knows it
> will take more for travelers to choose the train instead of their cars.
>
> "Clearly we need a more integrated public transportation network that
> would include buses, train stations, commuter rail, all of those aspects
> working closely together," Simmons says. "That's how you begin to
> substitute for the convenience of the automobile."
>
> He says one challenge is getting different agencies to cooperate. In
> Raleigh, for instance, the train is operated by the state and federal
> governments. The local bus system is owned by the city, while a separate
> regional bus network is run by a transit agency.
>
> "We think that technology is going to save us, but really what we need
> to be working on at the exact same time is the connection with each
> other and institution to institution," says Zielinski, the University of
> Michigan transportation expert. "This isn't about the train competing
> with the bus. This is about the train and the bus getting together and
> creating a better integrated system."
>
> Cities with poorly integrated systems are easy to find. But some places
>
> Greensboro, N.C., where Hancock began her trip, also has built a
> multi-modal transit hub, and city officials say ridership has gone up
> almost 40 percent since train and bus services were consolidated.
>
> "When the train station was located away from downtown, there really
> wasn't an effective way to get people from the train to their end
> destination besides taking a taxi cab," says Greensboro Transit
> spokesman Kevin Ellwood.
>
> But Ellwood notes that making Greensboro multi-modal came at a hefty
> more than a decade, which underscores what many cities have discovered:
> process.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Jonathan Harris
--
Jonathan L. Harris
Design and Planning, LEED-AP
116 Edgehill Road
Providence, RI 02906
(401) 837-6570