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The Sierra
Club recently sponsored a debate between the PRO and CON factions
of SMART.
The PRO argument amounted to no more than one statement: "If you care about
Global Warming you need to support SMART". |
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But it is the opposite that is the truth.
If you care about Global Warming then you need to vote
against
SMART.
For so much money will be diverted away from
a far more cost effective way of reducing traffic congestion,
(a bus system utilizing car pool lanes),
to a rail system that will make no significant change to congestion.
Global Warming will be more benefited by the Bus Alternative
than by the relative increase in congestion from SMART rail.
This applies even
more in Sonoma than Marin
Sonoma's traffic problems ,
especially future problems from relatively more development,
will be far more adversely effected by
diverting much needed finance away from comprehensive Bus Systems
(think how many new clean and quiet buses can be bought for
$548 million
with bus routes that can be more flexibly changed to meet that new
development
than can any fixed rail system).
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SMART's
1,392 Peak Time Boardings
will make little dent in the
current 39,000 out-of-County daily commuters coming to work IN Marin. But SMART will have redirected $548 million away from
a comprehensive Bus System & Freeway
expansion.
Marin AND
Sonoma is nowhere near developed enough
to argue justification of rail. Even if Sonoma
were more developed, the argument for rail would still be futile,
looking at the damning data for rail elsewhere in the country and the
relative cheapness of Hwy101 expansion HERE.
On Hwy 101 at San Rafael -
in One
Lane during the morning rush hour - 2,300
vehicles pass thru per hour. One Hwy101 freeway lane
"conducts" more than 25,000 vehicles per day. Compare that to
the SMART rail prediction of saving a maximum of 1,900 car
trips per day. Put Rapid Bus in that lane and you get 40,000 passengers
per day. So you can see how MUCH MORE COST EFFECTIVE investing in the
Freeway and a Bus System is compared to any rail alternative.
Lets not divert our our money away from a far more cost
effective way of reducing traffic congestion to a rail system, that it has
been admitted by SMART itself, will have an insignificant effect on traffic
congestion.
Finally Hwy101 Expansion Costs are
available. It is
expected that the freeway lane's cost to be not more than
$15 mil. / mile (excluding Novato-Petaluma narrows). This equals $750 mil.
for 50 miles from San Rafael to Cloverdale. But one freeway lane offers at
least 6
times more person-miles per route mile than rail. Which is
$125 mil for the freeway Vs $200 mil for the rail per the same
person-miles. (One HOV(carpool) lane in places
"conducts" 40,000 commuters per day with Express Bus, which would be 8 times
SMART ridership).
The added flexibility of HOV lanes plus bus makes freeway expansion by far the
better alternative.
Rail induces development away from the freeway in farmland and countryside (Like
St Vincents + Silveira).
Instead of a railway from Sonoma to Marin Civic Center,
another freeway lane would offer over 9 times
more passenger-miles (later plans include rail to
Larkspur or San Quentin), but to quote straight out of ABAG's Briefing (Pg16): "without
development that is sufficiently intense to support the rail system, it
will not succeed".
A SMART commuter rail doc called "SMART FACTS" refers to 2 cities as good rail examples:-
St Louis
and Portland. Click
here for the facts on Portland and St Louis. They also quote a study by the
Texas Transportation Institute (which I cant find) but
here is the damning data Texas has on rail:- http://www.tppf.org/transit/transit.html
Also they
say the $548 mil cost of SMART is less than the cost of increasing Hwy101 from 4
to 6 lanes between Petaluma and Novato. This is
misleading. The Novato-Petaluma
narrows is currently not freeway and needs to be converted, rail or not. (It
includes rebuilding the bridge down to Petaluma and 4 interchanges, $485 mil.).
What we should be comparing is the cost of widening the EXISTING freeway V SMART
Rail, (other than the Novato-Petaluma
stretch).
To quote a Marin County
Supervisor: " for rail to be financially viable, there needs to be a
higher than current intensity of land use (development) within
close proximity to the stations or the system will be highly inefficient
economically. That is the time-proven reality of this mode of
transportation." |
SMART
COSTS first 12 years.
Cloverdale to San Rafael in 2006, service
enhancements in 2011; (Alt 1 has mid-day service)
Source |
| Planning/Design |
$14 way
higher |
| Capital Costs (inc. EIR/EIS) |
$162 $360
$548
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|
with bond interest $1.2 billion |
| net Interest Payments |
$34 higher |
| Operating Costs |
$133
higher |
| Farebox Revenues |
$45
higher |
| Subsidy reqd. over 12 years |
$122
higher |
| Subsidy per year |
$10
higher |
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County
unveils plan for reducing traffic
Transit Referenda and Why They Succeed or Fail
Is light rail popular elsewhere in the
U.S? -No
Is there a cheaper way to get people out of their
cars? -Yes
Will light rail improve air quality? -No
How long will the increased sales tax be in
place? -Forever
Is light rail
less expensive than building freeways? -No
A
BART Director & County Supervisor on RAIL
They tell us that
"Annual 2007 Rail Fare Revenue will be $3 mil while
operating cost will be $9 mil giving an annual loss of $6mil".
But the table opposite shows the
loss (subsidy) to be $10 mil. |
ABAG,
Marin ounty,
Sonoma
County, City
of San Rafael,
SMART MTC Marin Congestion Management Agency
Bay
Area Alliance for Sustainable Development all have MAJOR development plans for Marin
A lot of this planning is not based on Cost
Effectively reducing Congestion. |
Here is the
Mis-Information
SMART rail from Sonoma justifies itself with: "Upon arriving at their destination stations, riders would
be willing to take either shuttle buses (provided by employers) or transit, or
would be willing to walk 1/2 mile to their workplaces."
Unfortunately the planned Civic Center Station is 2 miles from downtown San
Rafael, a long walk. (Although the
SMART
documents continually refer to a station in "Downtown San Rafael" but the ABAG map continues to show the rail ending at Civic
Center).
"Current congested conditions on the US 101 corridor
during peak hours would persist indefinitely". If they don't build
another freeway lane that is.
The railway is feasible if:-"A high concentration of
jobs/major employers are within walking distance (approximately 0.5 miles) of a
station; There is a high concentration of jobs/major employers for which shuttle
services would be convenient (within approximately 2.5 miles); and there is
severe traffic congestion affecting travel times by car."
This attempted justification of a rail system becomes null and void by the
alternative of a Bus System plus another freeway lane. (as in Portland). There is adequate space to widen the
freeway from Civic Center to Santa Rosa. (Other rail systems like ACE-San Jose were built where there was little space to widen
the freeway. Metrolink-LA shares existing rail
track.)
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| SMART
supposed Benefits |
The Truth |
| Reduce congestion on 101. |
nowhere on 101 will
there be any effect with a max of
1,392 peak time commuters per day MAYBE leaving their cars at
home. Currently there are 39,000 Marin worker commuters from out of county per day
combined with the Novato commuters on 101 (and the 1000's of pass thru
commuters per day). |
| Utilization of an existing resource. |
but still costing $548 mil
(prob. more) and $10 mil/yr . |
| Link to multimodal alternatives (e.g.,
bus, bike, pedestrian). |
and as
Sonoma & Marin is not like a metropolitan area, most will drive/bus to/from the stations |
Faster
commute. Greater time utilization.
Santa Rosa to San Rafael morning commute: 70-80 minutes.
The same trip by train will take no more than 55 minutes. |
Not if you examine the
national data on wait time + interconnect travel time. 55 mins + 20 mins
aver. drive to station + wait time + 15 mins aver. from station to work.
Extra freeway lanes and busing to relieve this congestion would not exist
because money to do so would have been taken away by over-expenditure on
rail. Rail, which costs more than 2 freeway lanes providing 5
times MORE passenger-miles.
source http://www.geocities.com/cartransit/RailvFreewy.htm |
A
Feasibility Analysis of San Antonio VIA's Light Rail Plan
It is estimated that light rail would remove no more than one
out of every 250 cars. It would
be an unprecedented waste of scarce transportation dollars for this rapidly
growing transportation corridor.
The Illusion of
Transit Choice (pdf) A decade in which every
metropolitan area that built or expanded rail, lost transit market share,
should have ended the debate |
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of
history is the most important of all the lessons of history. - Aldous Huxley |
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In
Sacramento the percentage of those who use
light rail is only in single digits yet it represents about 50 percent of the
region’s overall transportation budget. Light rail generated $6.3 million in
fares in FY 1999, compared to operating costs of $17 million. Its cost $20 to
$30 million a mile. For that money
per mile you could buy 60 to 90 buses, clean fuel, low air pollution buses, that
don’t have any infrastructure, don’t have tracks to run on, have fairly low
capital and operating costs, and you can make them go wherever you want them to
go. In Sacramento, “light rail is a huge expenditure” which diverts
40 to 50 percent of all available transportation funds into “a very limited
system.” Estimated costs for one six-mile stretch of light rail into south
Sacramento are $200 million, money that’s not now available for fixing roadway
problems and for more effective buses.
Los Angeles is now under
federal court order to quit raising rail fares . It must put hundreds of buses
back into operation, improve service, and reduce bus fares.
UTAH: UTA Rail Transit Does Not Reduce Congestion
UTA predicts that, with the tax increase, it can triple transit ridership by
2020. But it currently carries less than two-thirds of a percent of all
passenger miles in the Ogden-Salt Lake region. Since auto driving is
increasing even more than the tripling in transit ridership, UTA would still
carry less than 1.3% of all passenger miles in the region. This is far
too small a share for UTA to have any significant effect on congestion.
Rail deprives Transit-Dependent People
Providing rail transit on one route means denying bus improvements on many other
routes. Indeed, rail is so expensive that passage of the sales tax increase and
construction of more rail lines will probably lead to less transit service
(buses), overall.
ACE
makes an annual
loss of $4.3 mil. Covered by subsidies from
San Joaquin, Alameda and Santa
Clara counties. Metrolink-LA and the Coaster make a
loss, too, and were established when no freeway alternative existed and
development around stations already existed. This is a totally different
situation from Marin. ABAG's requirement of Marin to
CREATE development to justify rail ignores the far cheaper and easier
alternative of another freeway lane.
 | The 1983 campaign in support of a one cent
sales tax to fund
Dallas DART, many promises were made to
Dallas taxpayers. DART advertisements told Dallas
taxpayers that light rail offered the best hope for reducing traffic
congestion, improving air quality, and revitalizing downtown Dallas. Light
rail has failed on all three counts.
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| Light rail has
not reduced traffic congestion. Traffic congestion has risen 35% since
the light rail election, an amount 10% greater than the national average
increase and greater than any other Texas city (none of which have light
rail).
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| Light rail has not
improved air quality in Dallas, because to do so would require reducing
traffic congestion, which DART has not done. |
SMART also erroneously says "births minus deaths will account for 50% of the bay Areas growth in the next 20
years". It is a well known fact that, even with increasing life expectancy,
reduced births make
population increase a straight line in all developed countries
today.Immigration
and babies born to immigrant mothers account for all of the state's growth
You need a fast connection to see
this ABAG Marin Map http://www.abag.ca.gov/planning/smartgrowth/maps/marin%20SG.pdf
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