Gordon Chaffin is a freelance journalist who focuses on infrastructure and traffic news and insights for Street Justice. You can support independent journalism by subscribing to Gordon’s newsletter. He’s offering a 20% discount to THIH readers. –Maria Helena Carey
A Valley Metro Light Rail station in Tempe, Arizona. The Phoenix-area transit system provides reliable, frequent service and is designed to work better for commuters than streetcar systems. (via Google)
Phoenix > DC > Detroit on Light Rail Transit
On Friday’s Street Justice report — excerpted below — I analyzed DC government’s abandoning of westward streetcar expansion by comparing it to my hometown Detroit’s last 50 years of failed transit expansion. Specifically, I compared DC’s current 2-mile H Street NE streetcar with Woodward Avenue’s QLine streetcar. The two systems share similar, critical design flaws that inhibit frequency and reliability.
Detroit’s land-use, planning, and cultural context present a greater challenge to the QLine’s success than does DC’s. In the Washington, DC region, more people ride transit, there’s less car-focused job sprawl (cough Loudoun County cough), and residents see riding transit as a thing middle-class people do. However, DC has more numerous affordable, attractive options for transportation: maybe the best bikeshare system in the USA, plentiful shared electric scooters and e-bikes, plus a good bus system that connects to Northeast DC neighborhoods from which residents are more likely to come to H Street for commerce. DC might give a Streetcar system an easier footing, but it competes against many more viable options when compared to downtown Detroit.
Both DC’s Streetcar and Detroit’s QLine pale in comparison to Phoenix’s Valley Metro Light Rail system. I rode Valley Metro every day from home to work during the year I lived there after a DC-stress-induced nervous breakdown. Transit experts will jump in here to say this is not a fair comparison. Valley Metro Light Rail is not a streetcar. That’s true! But, for the money DC wasted building the operating segment of the Streetcar and planning the Westward expansion, it could have had a very promising start toward the 22-mile+ street-level light rail system envisioned for DC 10-15 years ago.
I’m spending this week’s free story on Phoenix Light Rail because the DC-area may invest huge sums of money in regional transit. Corridors like the following may actually break ground on frequent transit systems in dedicated road space. It’s important for stakeholders to figure out what designs maximize the return on expensive, long-run investments into…
- Colesville Road and Rockville Pike in Montgomery County
- Route 1, Central Ave, Baltimore Ave, John Hanson Hwy, and Annapolis Rd in Prince George’s
- Lee Highway, Arlington Blvd, and Columbia Pike in Arlington
- King Street and Duke Street in Alexandria
- Richmond Highway, Dumfries Rd, Telegraph Rd, & Arlington Blvd in Fairfax
- Leesburg Pike and the Fairfax County Parkway in Loudoun
For the most part, plans to improve transit on these roads are for buses in lanes used by all other vehicles. Northern Virginia’s habit recently is widening these major arterial roads and throwing a bone to people worried about the boiling of the planet by investing regional tolling money into commuter and express buses like OmniRide. However, data show widening roads doesn’t make traffic congestion better — sometimes it makes it worse. Widening *and* tolling works, but only really if you keep the free lanes congested so people to want to use the toll lanes.
So, folks looking for better transit options in the suburb-to-exurbs don’t have much to aspire to from recent proposals. Bus systems don’t generate game-changing ridership unless they travel in dedicated lanes. You’re not getting many people out of their 90-minute car commute up I-95 with an upgraded bus shelter and USB charging in the buses.
WMATA is thinking about spending big buckets of money over the next few decades. That very likely would include a new Potomac River tunnel/bridge providing additional capacity to Metrorail in NoVA. So, WMATA could send a new spoke line down Columbia Pike where proposals for a Streetcar were recently abandoned. Or, various fast-growing parts of DC without good Metrorail access (Ward 4, east Ward 5, and east Ward 6, etc) could tie into new loop lines.
However, my experience in Phoenix suggests WMATA might get better bang for their buck if they built light rail on dedicated surface alignments rather than tunneling and laying a new Heavy Rail line(s). Whether its WMATA or a County+State authority, light rail offers great benefits if those leaders never get serious about making buses good options for mid-to-upper class riders.
Phoenix’s Valley Metro Light Rail system runs almost entirely as a center-running system: two tracks in a center median of 2.5-3 car travel lanes width which is separated by a concrete curb from the vehicle traffic in parallel lanes. As the picture up top shows, rail stops are level-boarding platforms at intersections where crosswalks provide access from the sidewalk to the platform. The Phoenix area has extremely wide roads that are overbuilt so that nobody ever gets stuck in bad traffic even at 8:30 AM. That width makes it easier to re-purpose some lanes to serve more people with transit tracks. DC-area comparison roads are Connecticut Avenue NW, New York Avenue NE, Pennsylvania Avenue SE east of the Anacostia, Rockville Pike, Route 1, and Leesburg Pike.
Stops on Vallet Metro Light Rail are placed 0.5-1 mile apart, which is closer than subway stations but not as close as a Streetcar. That works fine because the Phoenix area doesn’t have land-use dense enough to justify more frequent stops. Though, more transit-oriented, denser, mixed-use, climate-smart development is revitalizing Apache Road between Tempe and Mesa.
Light rail cars get separate and/or priority signals at intersections, like some of DC-area buses. But, Phoenix’s priority system works better. There’s no traffic keeping a train from first position at a stoplight. There are some off-street tracks, like where the alignment cuts through ASU’s Tempe campus and crosses Tempe Town Lake — an artificial lake in the Salt River bed that is the only blue part of the map below actually filled with water more than a few days per year. Also in the map below, you see the Valley Metro’s first line after a decade of operations. It added a 5-mile extension in 2016, going Eastward from Tempe to historic downtown Mesa.
CValley Metro’s current Light Rail system, running in Phoenix and Tempe, Arizona. The Phoenix-area transit system provides reliable, frequent service and is designed to work better for commuters than streetcar systems. (via Google)
The long-range plan for Valley Metro is to add several spokes off of this mainline, but the only big expansion active now is a long-delayed, nearly-politically-killed branch line going down into South Phoenix — a poverty-stricken area — plus a new downtown loop. Also under construction is a Tempe Streetcar that will serve a function appropriate for mixed-traffic streetcars: slow travel in a loop that transports pedestrians around a small, walkable area and connects to faster transit. In Tempe’s case, the Streetcar will loop ASU’s campus.
Phoenix Valley Metro Light rail is fantastic if you live or work near it, which I did (door to door commuting to ASU’s Downtown campus!). Phoenix has a terrible anti-transit culture and homelessness is more present on it than I’ve ever experienced in DC transit. However, the core fundamentals for success are there: dedicated funding from a regional sales tax; a trunk line that goes through important, dense places (dense for PHX, that is); and a starter ridership from anchor employers. It’s the best way to get from ASU’s Tempe to the Downtown campus and to get to the popular off-campus housing.
Phoenix Light Rail is different in fundamental design than DC Streetcar and Detroit’s QLine, the last two operating in curbside lanes shared with all other traffic. The two streetcar systems travel short distances, to frequent stops, at slow speeds, and struggle to reliably meet their relatively infrequent schedule because of modern-day curbside conflict (online deliveries, UberLyftVia pick-up/drop-off). In Phoenix, other than a few days per year with intersection-closing accidents, I could hop on light rail every 12 minutes, no problem.
It is entirely possible that Streetcars are fine solutions for more limited transportation challenges, like getting Union Station arrivals to west Kingman Park or Suburban Detroiters from cheap parking garages to entertainment venues. But, Detroit’s QLine — as currently designed — cannot feasibly serve the city’s neighborhoods with quality transit and extend into the suburbs with perpendicular routes. The DC Streetcar might be a good solution to go east into Ward 7. And bus rapid transit might work well for DC-area suburbs *if* the systems are designed for vehicles traveling in dedicated space, frequently, in routes covering wide geographic areas.
I was able to live in Phoenix without a car because of the Light Rail and Zipcar. I could’ve more easily bike commuted than I do today in DC. Eventually, if Maricopa County, the State of Arizona (state government also in Phoenix), and the city of Phoenix have urbanist leaders, they could have one of the best regional transit systems in the West.
So, maybe Montgomery, Loudoun, and Prince George’s County should be building more of the Purple Line-type systems and less of the heavy rail subway? My experience in Phoenix makes me believe in several more DC-area transit lines of Purple Line light rail design. Enough with this Streetcar, and BRT done right is nice — but is light rail best for the Pikes and Boulevards, the state roads with the most dangerous traffic?
Dupont Circle ANC Loses Transportation Committee
Before the January meeting of ANC 2B (Dupont Circle), 2B05 Commissioner Randy Downs stepped down as Chair for its Transportation and Public Infrastructure Committee (TPI). None of the other ANC 2B Commissioners offered to lead TPI, and terms of the residents appointed to it expire January 31, 2020. The Committee did not meet this Wednesday as scheduled, and will therefore fold.
Kingman Park/River Terrace/Parkside ANC Chair Resigns After Struggles with Delinquent Colleagues
Last Tuesday, ANC 7D Chair Sherice A. Muhammad resigned as that Commission’s Chair and as an ANC Commissioner. Ms. Muhammad struggled with several other Commissioners in 2019 regarding ANC treasury matters and other basic operations of ANC 7D. Ms. Muhammad’s resignation leaves ANC 7D with five active commissioners. Cmmsr. Aretha Jackson remains on medical leave — where she’s been the majority of the current 2019-20 term. One source who regularly follows 7D proceedings described frustration from fellow residents. That anger reached the level of suggesting recall elections and calls for the whole Commission to resign.
What to Do Now That DC is Abandoning the Streetcar
My best value addition to the news that DC will not expand its Streetcar west: frame the next steps for DC given my more recent experience, expertise in public policy, and personal experience. I was born and raised in Macomb County, MI. It includes the northern adjacent suburbs to Detroit — home of the Reagan Democrats and Obama-Obama-Trump Voters.
Macomb is an “automation alley” — a home of now almost completely lost economic opportunity from the U.S. auto industry. The rise of that auto industry is a major reason why Detroit is a complete disaster when it comes to transit projects like a streetcar. In the last 50 years, Detroit built the People Mover and the QLine. The later is a very good analogous case study to DC’s H Street NE Streetcar.