Tag Archives: Transit

Columbus Weekend Links

I really like these Federal holidays when I actually get them off…

On airport transit service:

GGW had a point/counterpoint on how best to serve Dulles International Airport.  Spencer Lepler argued for using commuter rail along the Washington and Old Dominion right of way, while Matt Johnson argued in favor of the current plan, noting the greatly improved benefits, including access to Tysons Corner and other development along the toll road.   Johnson also noted the technical hurdles to reusing the old railroad right of way.

The entire idea of offering faster service between the airport and downtown DC motivates these discussions, and this isn’t limited only to DC.  Yonah Freemark notes the perils of Chicago’s Block 37 and the express airport service that doesn’t really exist.

In the end, express service to and from Dulles shouldn’t be a top priority.  The existing infrastructure certainly doesn’t make it easy to do so.

So what about the W&OD?  Matt’s post on the challenges to re-use the right of way also raise some potential uses – perhaps using the corridor, in addition to the Silver Line, as a light rail/interurban corridor might be a good use.  This allows at-grade operations in congested areas, as well as simplifying the terminal connection in Alexandria, either as a loop into Crystal City or as a connection to the new Potomac Ave infill Metro station.

With or without the Silver Line, however, I’ll still be looking first and foremost at DCA for flights.

First, convince the Bankers…

The Salt Lake City Tribune has a great article noting the biggest hurdle to transit-oriented development – the banks.

Transit-oriented development isn’t stymied by outdated zoning, unwilling developers or a lack of space. It turns out, banks, wedded to old-fashioned lending standards that stress parking, may pose the biggest blockade by denying financing.

The reason: Lenders operate from a tried-and-true principle that maintains more parking means less risk and a higher return on their investment. But ditching cars is the whole point of urban developers looking to create 24-hour live, work and play environments that hug light-rail hubs.

Take the capital’s gateway district, which soon could be further revived by a North Temple TRAX train, a new viaduct and millions in streetscape upgrades. City leaders envision a walkable, vibrant mix of housing, retail, restaurants and offices that one day will bridge the FrontRunner hub and a new North Temple transit station along downtown’s western rim.

But commercial investors, including one with a $100 million blueprint, complain banks cannot grasp the concept and instead slam their doors.

The first paragraph might be a little over the top, as outdated zoning, unwilling developers, and a lack of space are still huge hurdles, though I might change their language a bit.

Last week, there was plenty of discussion (BDC, RPUS, GGW) of the Post‘s article on DC USA’s woefully underutilized parking garage.  Valerie Santos, Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, noted the parking was necessary to convince any number of parties to build the thing – tenants, landlords, financiers:

The District has lost nearly $2 million — or $100,000 a month — since the garage opened in March 2008, numbers that make Valerie Santos groan when she considers the city’s decision to build the structure.

“I don’t want to say it’s a quote, unquote, mistake. At the time the District did what it had to do to attract a retailer it sorely wanted,” said Santos, deputy mayor for planning and economic development. “Am I happy about the operating deficit? Of course not.”

Obviously, there are lots of moving parts in any urban development equation, but overall education of all parties involved is a crucial element.

When speaking of performance parking, Dr. Shoup likes to advocate for removing parking restrictions from zoning ordinances and letting the market decide.  The challenge, however, is that this particular market is not acting with perfect information.  Rectifying that information gap is a huge challenge.  DC USA might have some use as an example of what not to do in the future, but that’s an awfully expensive lesson to learn.

Miscellany:

Some of the ugliest buildings in the world?

So says this list.  (h/t Yglesias)

Amtrak ridership is down…

…but still up over the longer tiemframe (Housing Complex)

Exit, stage left

DC Metrocentric takes a look inside the new Arena Stage.

The data wants to be free

Rob Goodspeed looks at municipal data sharing programs, and wonders what differences they make.

Electrification

High Voltage - by oskay on Flickr

High Voltage - by oskay on Flickr

The fact that most rail transit systems operate via electric power is usually listed as a net benefit in terms of energy efficiency.  Not only is transit hailed as an inherently more efficient mode (more persons per vehicle, steel wheels on steel rails – as opposed to rubber tires on asphalt, etc), the fact that it’s using electricity is another environmental benefit over gas guzzling cars.  Yonah Freemark says not so fast, however.

Eurostar’s example is a case in point: transportation systems relying on electricity can be dirty or clean, all depending on where the power is coming from. This point is unfortunately lost on most alternative transportation activists, who cite efficiency to support the claimed ecological advantages of using transit instead of automobiles. Yet efficiency means little when the electricity used is being produced by carbon-generating plants.

Now this is undoubtedly true – where the electricity comes from matters.  However, that’s the beauty of electricity and transit systems that use it.  Electricity can be produced in any number of ways, some more sustainable than others.  The key difference, however, is one of scope.  Electricity generation and greenhouse gas emissions are a whole different piece of the pie, dealing with every aspect of energy policy.

Light rail running on electricity may seem clean, because the local point emissions — in the city — are nonexistent, especially as compared to diesel-spewing buses. But if the necessary power is being generated at coal-based plants, the global effect is negative, making some transit systems less environmentally sensitive in terms of per passenger emissions than many automobiles.

Yonah’s referencing the fact that on a pure BTU per passenger basis, rail isn’t that much more efficient than a Prius.  What this measure misses, however, is the secondary effects of transit.  Congestion reduction alone saves tons of fuel from idling traffic, not to mention the savings of switching trips or eliminating them all together.  Additionally, the changes in land use that rail transit enables allows more efficient transportation – walking trips, shorter trips due to neighborhood retail (and improved accessibility), and so on.

Where electrically powered rail transit vehicles have an advantage is in their applicability.  The infrastructure (in most urban rail transit systems) is in place.  The technology is proven.  The same can’t be said of electric cars.  They’ll face the same kind of issues with the cleanliness of the electricity they use, whether they’re plug-in hybrids or pure electric vehicles – and they won’t solve congestion issues or address the new residential demand from cars plugging in while parked in the garage.

Still, these are nitpicking Yonah’s general argument and final conclusion:

The point, then, is that to suggest that transit is ecologically sensitive is more accurate when the source of that transportation’s electricity is carbon-free or at least carbon-reduced. Proponents of transportation alternatives must also be strong advocates of the remaking of our electricity production system.

Transit alone isn’t the silver bullet.  It can only be one part of the puzzle.   Though I think it’s a larger piece of the puzzle than this post would imply, we must remember how that piece fits into the whole energy system.

More clues…

Dr. Gridlock has a couple of posts on the NTSB’s recent discovery of the failure of the ATO system to detect that Red line train:

As previously reported, initial testing showed that when the test train was stopped at the same location as the train that was struck in the accident, the train control system lost detection of the test train. Additionally, in subsequent testing over the weekend the train detection system intermittently failed; data is currently being collected to further analyze each component in the train detection system. Investigators are reviewing recorded track circuit data for each test configuration.

Maintenance records show that an impedence bond for the track circuit where the accident occurred was replaced on June 17th, five days before the accident. After a post- accident review of recorded track circuit data, WMATA reported to the NTSB that the track circuit periodically lost its ability to detect trains after June 17th; the NTSB is reviewing documentation on the performance of that track circuit both before and after the June 17th replacement.

Bold is mine.

John Catoe’s statement, with an excerpt:

Our testing has resulted in our being able to replicate the problem, but not isolate the specific cause. We know the problem is in a track circuit. We could just replace the parts, but we need to understand what caused it. You don’t just change the parts. We must find the cause.

We have conducted computerized analytical tests, which the NTSB has referenced as “track circuit data.” The data establishes a profile of what’s taking place electronically in the rail system. These tests are normally conducted monthly. What we found during a special review of the data after the accident was that the track circuit periodically lost its ability to detect trains. This is not an issue that would have been easily detectable to controllers in our operations control center. What the analytical profile showed was that the track circuit would fail to detect a train only for a few seconds and then it appeared to be working again. This happened after we had replaced an “impedence” or “weezie bond” for the track circuit for where the accident occurred. The device communicates information such as speed and distance between the tracks, trains and operations control center. The device was replaced as part of Metro’s normal track rehabilitation program. We are now running analytical reports on the rail system daily instead of monthly and system wide. We have found no other similar issues with track circuits in the system.

Again, bold is mine.

So, the question now is to determine just how periodic this detection failure was – how often, and for what time frame.  “A few seconds” could mean 1 or 2 seconds, or it could mean more.  It would seem that the longer such a glitch occurs, the more likely it is that a collision could take place.  Without knowing what kind of data Metro operators have before them on an updated basis, it’s impossible to tell if such a glitch should have been detected by the operators.

We don’t have the full story yet, but the confluence of circumstances is starting to build.

Adding to Metro’s Core Capacity

Greater Greater Washington’s always had some great fantasy transit discussions – whether talking about the New Blue line, more fantastic visions, or even the multimodal vision for Baltimore and DC.  Over the last few days, the fantasy discussions have started again.  Though these are not always the most realistic discussions, they’re a great starting point for larger discussions about the role of transit in the transportation system in the city, and more importantly they discuss what kind of city we want to have.

This past week’s discussions have focused on the idea of a new Yellow line – originally posted here, along with my response.   The entire premise of separating the Yellow line from the Green line (at least as I understood it) was to increase the maximum capacity of both lines – the same premise behind the idea of separating the Orange and Blue lines.  That way, both colored lines would have full capacity for their entire length.  Doing such a project would also have ancillary benefits, such as adding redundancy to the system with multiple tracks on fairly similar routes, as well as opening up new areas to Metro service (such as adding Metro service to H Street NE with the New Blue line).  Each of these ideas is worthwhile, though slow to implement.  Given the facts that Metro is already straining to handle the crowds along the Orange line though the RBC, focusing on this kind of long term planning is important.  Building new subway lines will take a long time, and with Metro expected to reach capacity sometime between 2025 and 2030, starting the planning process now is vitally important (i.e. Metro was recommended as the preferred alternative for the Dulles Corridor in a 1997 report – the full line is now set to open in 2016 – nearly 20 years after the fact).

With that in mind, proposals that involve a great deal of capital construction must have a long term plan behind them to justify the investment.  The idea of separating the Blue and Orange lines is a good start.  Having a longer term plan to separate the Green and Yellow lines is also a good idea – even better would be to combine those efforts sowe have a nice 50 year map to follow for Metro’s development over time.

The lack of this kind of focus and long term vision troubles me with GGW’s latest series of posts about adding new trackwork in downtown DC.  The premise is a simple question: is there a simpler and cheaper way to add core capacity to Metro without building the entire New Blue line?

How about separating the Yellow Line instead? The Yellow Line plan Dave Murphy suggested last week, and some of your comments, suggest a possibility. If we separate the Yellow and Green lines in DC, then Metro could put many more trains over the 14th Street bridge. According to Metro planners, this option would involve building a shorter subway tunnel from the 14th Street bridge to the Convention Center along 9th Street.

While the tunnel at Rosslyn is already at its capacity, the 14th Street bridge isn’t, because all its trains must merge with Green Line trains from Branch Avenue. Metro can squeeze a few more Yellow Trains in if they reduce Blue trains, but not that many. If the trains didn’t have to compete with the Green Line, the 14th Street bridge could carry many more trains from Virginia.

The second iteration of the idea also generated a great deal of discussion:

If we could run more trains over the 14th Street bridge, where would they go in Virginia? I can see two possibilities: convert the Arlington Cemetery segment to a shuttle train, or add connections to route the Silver Line over that segment as well as the Blue Line.

Both of these ideas are intruiging from an academic perspective, but completely lose sight of why you’re adding core capacity in the first place.

Remembering that the whole point of the New Blue line is to separate it from the Orange line tracks it shares through DC, the reason it gets brought up first is due to the popularity of the Orange line in Northern Virginia.  This GGW idea is an attempt to solve that same problem by essentially starting on a new Yellow line.  You’re essentially building half a subway, except that you’re building the New Yellow line first when the Blue line is the obvious choice.

If you’re going to put shovels into the ground, you might as well make sure that the plans have long term significance.  Metro’s genius is that it was concieved as an entire 100 mile system.  Even so, it functioned well before the full system was complete.

WMATA should take the same step here.  If you want to add new capacity to downtown DC by building half of a new subway, just start building the new Blue line – and do it in phases.  The first phase (say, from Rosslyn to the Connecticut Ave station) would accomplish the same thing – freeing up core capacity on the Orange (and Silver) line, as well as delivering Blue line riders to the core of downtown.   However, unlike the 9th street proposal, the Blue line would be readily expandable at a later date, much like how the Mid City portion of the Green line was completed in phases (with U Street opening in 1991, while Columbia Heights didn’t open until 1999).   Ideally, you’d like to do it in one fell swoop, but the entire premise of this idea is that the funds to do such a project aren’t there.  So let’s at least plan it with expansion in mind.

With that said, the idea of a new Yellow line isn’t a bad one at all, even if the timing isn’t quite right.  However, using 9th street doesn’t make a lot of sense when you already have lines along 7th and 12 streets downtown, and along 14th street in Columbia Heights.  The alignment proposed in the original post makes a lot more sense when viewed with a long-term lens.  A 9th street alignment would indeed be redundant, but almost too redundant – it wouldn’t open up any more area to Metro service, such as the transit poor Washington Hospital Center.  A North Capitol/Georgia Ave route would provide redundancy for both the eastern Red line, the whole of the Green line, and open up a major commercial street to Metro.  This line could also be phased in over time, initially operating as just a partial segment.

As Burnham said, “make no little plans.”  If you’re looking for incremental physical improvements, I’d opt to ensure that they’re part of a larger plan.  The final result will be far better for it.

Fantasies

Dave at Imagine DC (and also GGW) put up a nice concept of a separated Yellow line through the core of DC.  Separating the Blue line has been the most popular suggestion, and was originally among WMATA’s official plans, but the idea of separating the Yellow line is relatively new.   Still, amongst extensive discussion in the comments from previous fantasy maps, the idea has come up before – my name is somewhere in those comment threads.

Given the focus that Monday’s accident has put on redundancies in the transit system, it’s fitting to consider the idea.  However, it’s important not to lose sight of the reasons for such plans and expansions in the first place.  With that in mind, I’d propose a few key principles to consider for any metro expansion plan:

  • Separation of the current interlined portions of track.   The proposals to separate the Blue and Yellow lines certainly do this, and for good reason.  The ‘tail’ sections of each line are limited by the capacity of the shared track at the core.  Furthermore, the complexities of switching so many trains on and off the same line only adds to potential delays.  Separating these lines would offer wide ranging benefits to other lines in terms of increased service frequencies.
  • Plan the entire system now.  By ‘now’ I don’t mean today, but if plans are drawn up to implement this kind of expansion, it is vitally important that the lines are planned together.  The fact that all 100+ miles of Metro were planned as a coherent system is what makes it such a useful system today, rather than a hodgepodge of individual lines.  If you look at the poor connections between Baltimore’s light rail and subway, you’ll see precisely what you wish to avoid.  That means planning to separate the Blue & Orange lines, the Yellow & Green lines, and the VA portions of Yellow & Blue at roughly the same time.  Doing so, like the original system, will allow for transfers to be built in and will make for a much better overall system.  Begin with the end in mind.
  • Learn from Metro’s past. Metro’s hybrid nature as both an urban subway and a suburban commuter rail system makes for some interesting compromises in terms of system design.  Given that the newer portions would entail track mostly in urban areas, it’s important to apply the lessons of Downtown DC, the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, and others.  This is about urban transit, not park and ride stations.
  • Coordinate plans with other modes. Metro expansion should focus on the core because that’s where it’s most useful and can justify the cost.  Ideas like extending the Orange line to Centreville, or the Green line to BWI miss the opportunity to have a newly beefed up regional rail system operating in place of MARC and VRE trains.  Ideally, such Metro expansion plans would be coupled with a transformation of the commuter rail services into a more S-Bahn like system.  In the other (more local) direction, coordination with streetcar planning is also vital.

Speaking in terms of broad corridors, Dave’s plan for the Yellow line is spot on.  I think he’s got too many stations for a heavy rail line, but the general corridor is correct – the line would use the same bridge over the Potomac, then go underground and follow the Maryland Ave right of way, linking to L’Enfant Plaza with a new platform for the station complex.  The line would cross the Mall, then travel north under North Capitol, including a station at H street – which would also be part of the station with the new Blue line – also connecting to the current Union Station stop (hence the importance of planning these lines at the same time).  The line should go up to the Washington Hospital Center, serving that major employment center, then sliding to the west somehow to turn northward again under Georgia Ave.  After reaching Silver Spring, the line can either end there, or continue north along US 29, as proposed by Sand Box John.

The Blue line has been discussed many times – I think the best alignment would be across town under M street, angling southward under New Jersey Avenue, and then continuing east under H street – ideally with transfers to the Red line at both Union Station and under Connecticut Ave, as well as a Green line transfer at the Convention Center and a transfer to the new Yellow line near the Union Station complex.

Separating the Blue and Yellow lines in Virginia is probably the easiest route to conceptualize – simply shooting the line outward under Columbia Pike is the most obvious choice, making the current line to Alexandria one ‘color’ with multiple spurs – one to Huntington and one to Franconia-Springfield.

Track Circuit Didn’t Work

News today that the track circuit underneath the stalled Metro train in Monday’s crash failed:

The track circuit below the Washington Metro train that was rear-ended by another train this week didn’t work, U.S. transportation safety investigators found in a test.The circuit was supposed to relay information about the location of trains. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the June 22 accident in which nine people died. It was the worst in the 33-year-old Metro system’s history.

The circuit, part of Metro’s automated operations system, didn’t detect the presence of a test train investigators placed on it, the board said today in an e-mailed statement.

My speculation: In effect, the system didn’t know the stalled train was there.  Hence, it accelerated the back train and sent it at normal speed into a section of track the computer thought was clear.

The disturbing part would seem to be not the ATC system, but the fact that the sensor didn’t work.  ATC is a relatively new thing for railroads, but track sensors are not.  They work by sending a small current through each rail – tracks are divided into separate sections called blocks, and when a train’s wheels enter a block, the metal axle completes the circuit, sending a message to the control center on the train’s location.  This kind of technology has been in use for a long time.

The question is whether the failure is a part of the ATC system or the trac circuits.  Either way, it’s becoming more clear that the ignalling/control failure is primarily responsible here.

Metro Crash Aftermath

In the wake of Monday’s Red Line crash, DC’s various news outlets have uncovered all sorts of interesting factoids about Metro’s safety record and the implementation of various NTSB recommendations.  Speculation about the causes have run rampant, ranging from mildly informed theories to pure guesswork.  Some immediately blamed the now deceased operator, citing likely use of a cell phone.  DCist now reports via WTOP that’s not the case.

There’s also been a lot of discussion about the 1000 series rail cars and their crashworthiness.  At Greater Greater Washington, Matt Johnson has an excellent summary of Metro’s safety systems, particularly noting the design of the Automatic Train Control system as well as the track record of the 1000 series rail cars.   WCP gives you tips on how to avoid them, while the WMATA board agrees to move the cars to the middle of trainsets.

Public interest seems to focus on the 1000 series rail cars as the culprit, even though there’s no evidence that the cars themselves were the cause of the crash.  To me, the more interesting news to come out was the City Paper’s report that the NTSB found “anomalies” in the trackside equipment that’s part of the automatic train control system:

‘Anomalies’—that’s what federal investigators found in trackside electronic control equipment during testing yesterday, ’suggesting that computers might have sent one Red Line train crashing into another’ on Monday evening, WaPo writes. More from Lyndsey Layton, Maria Glod, and Lena H. Sun: ‘A senior Metro official knowledgeable about train operations said an internal report confirmed that the computer system appeared to have faltered.’ And that system, according to the NTSB’s Debbie Hersman, is ‘vital.’ Then there’s this: ‘The steel rails show evidence that McMillan activated the emergency brakes 300 to 400 feet before the pileup’—but she would have been traveling 59 mph. See also WTOP, NC8, WRC-TV, WUSA-TV, WTTG-TV, NYT, and Examiner, which notes that brake maintenance seems no longer to be an issue.

Again, it’s important to separate the two issues in this crash – the events that caused the crash itself, and the impact of the crash and the aftermath.  The former is about why this happened in the first place, the latter is about the crashworthiness of the cars.  Crashworthiness is important, without a doubt – but it’s also about keeping things as safe as possible after something has already gone wrong.

For that reason, the events that caused the crash itself are far more interesting to me.  We have evidence that the train was operating on Auto mode, that it was traveling quite fast (though eyewitness accounts tend to vary as to how fast – nevertheless, the damage shows a great deal of force was involved).  Given the slight curvature of the track, the speeds involved, and human reaction time to depress the Mushroom, it seems we can infer that the collision was unavoidable at that point – which would point to a very serious error with the Automatic Train Control system.

That’s where my interest is as the investigation unfolds.