Modeshift

   PROPOSED CALIFORNIA HIGH SPEED RAIL ROUTE

California Democrats have elevated building their state’s proposed high speed rail network to the top of their legislative priorities, according to the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The Daily Kos, one of the most read blogs in the country, noted the swirl of attention that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stirred with his proposal to cut $2.5 million in state funding to the California High Speed Rail Authority, the agency overseeing the system’s planning. And the Los Angeles Times yesterday published an editorial yesterday that called on Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to back off his proposal to reduce state funding this year to the California High Speed Rail Authortity, the agency overseeing the system’s planning.

“By 2020, the projected completion date for the bullet train, gas will likely be a lot more expensive,” said the Times. “State and federal governments by that time should be well underway in cutting back sharply on greenhouse gas emissions, probably translated into increased costs for flying or driving. (The bullet train would be emissions-free.) Train service, particularly the kind that could compete with airline travel on convenience, could be far more economically competitive than it is now.”

The push back comes because Californians recognize the value of a reasoned alternative, not only to meet their own transportation needs, but also in responding to the triple whammy of peak oil, global climate change, and explosive growth in the number of people and vehicles expected in the state over the next generation. Nor is California alone. Trainblog, a fine compendium of rail news and notes, included this piece from the Billings Gazette in Montana noting growing support for a high speed rail line, the Ranger Xpress, that would link Rocky Mountain cities. The Republican lawmakers of Wyoming temporarily put down their guns and resistance to abortion and taxes to fund preliminary studies. “The Wyoming Legislature passed a supplementary budget request for $300,000 to help fund a study of the possibility of a Rocky Mountain High Speed Rail Corridor,” the newspaper reporter, “which would stretch from Casper, Wyo., to Belen, N.M. The cities of Casper and Cheyenne each gave $50,000.”

Governor Schwarzeneggers’s move on the California high speed system also coincides with the powerful evidence of rail’s utility in a sound transportation strategy. The San Francisco rapid transit system, BART, is experiencing a surge in ridership in response to the gasoline-fed inferno last week that melted a ramp to the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the primary east-west entrance and exit to San Francisco. The San Francisco Chronicle reported this week that  ”BART carried a record 375,200 riders on Tuesday, up from an average weekday of 340,000 riders. BART’s ridership fell back a bit Wednesday morning, with 7,300 more riders than average, for a total of about 140,000 riders who boarded from the start of service to 11 a.m. During roughly the same period on Tuesday — the start of service until noon — 158,000 people boarded BART — an extra 13,000 riders, 9 percent more than usual.”

Almost three years after Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation that put $2.5 million in the kitty of the California High Speed Rail Authority, which is charged with overseeing the planning of a 700-mile network of fast trains in the nation’s largest state, Schwarzenegger has had a change of heart. The governor’s 2007 budget proposal calls for cutting state appropriations for the Authority, according to an article in the April 29, 2007 edition of the Los Angeles Times, and has asked the Legislature to postpone indefinitely a public vote on a $9.95 rail bond issue that was scheduled to appear on the November 2008 ballot. The reason for all of this, according to Adam Mendelsohn, one of the governor’s spokesmen, ”Right now the voters are crying for relief from congested freeways. That’s the immediate priority.” 

Say what? Congestion relief from building more highways? Can’t be done. America has built hundreds of thousands of miles of expressway and congestion is worse than ever. Why? The rate of increase in the number of vehicles is rising much faster than the rate that states and the federal government can build more miles of freeway. That’s because they cost upwards of $50 million a mile to build, $100 million to rebuild, and millions more to maintain.

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It’s a mismatch that can not be resolved so long as American communities continue to spread out and the primary transporation mode is highways and personal vehicles. In California traffic volumes tripled from 1965 to 2000. The state’s population doubled during the same period to  almost 34 million. California is adding more people now — about 452, ooo annually — than at any time since the 1980s. There isn’t enough money in California or anywhere in the rest of America to pave over the landscape to save 5 minues on a commute. Period.

Millions of citizens, dozens of communities, and a few courageous and prominent political leaders understand there’s a need to think differently about this. Governor Schwarzenegger is one of them. Last year he campaigned for the $37 billion “Rebuild California” bond, which was easily approved by California voters. The bond’s intent is to be the state’s first concerted response to the global market, environmental, demographic, and economic trends that threaten to upend the Pacific Coast, and every other region of America. Most of the $22 billion devoted to transportation will be used to improve existing roads and highways. The plan is not a new highway building fund. That’s a change. About $1 billion is directed to improving public transit. Other features of the bond were designed to secure the state’s natural resources, deal with the impending fresh water supply crisis that California faces, and strengthen public education. In other words, the Rebuild California plan’s goal is to improve communities and the quality of life, and that’s a change too.

On those facts alone, the governor’s new distate for high speed rail makes no sense. But now consider what’s happening in the Bay Area, where last week a gasoline tanker truck crashed, burned, and destroyed the ramp where the Oakland Bay Bridge, the primary east-west entrance and exit from San Francisco, empties traffic onto Interstate 580. City and state elected leaders had two options to suggest to commuters and avert a cultural and economic meltdown. Drive to and leave work in off-peak hours, or use the region’s excellent regional rapid transit system. Guess what. Ridership on BART increased dramatically because the system is safe, clean, efficient, and easy to use.

It will take months to repair the ramp and in that time BART will develop thousands of new regular riders. The same thing happened after 9/11 when ridership on Amtrak’s northeast corridor increased and has stayed high ever since. 

Schwarzeneggers biggest problem with the high speed proposal isn’t the Republican party’s ideological barrier against rail, it’s money. The rail system that would tie the Bay Area and Sacramento to Los Angeles and San Diego, via the San Joaquin Valley, would carry passengers on trains traveling up to 220 mph and compete with the French, Japanese, and Chinese for the best high speed rail network on the globe. But the projected cost of the 700-mile system has climbed from $25 billion in 1999 to $37 billion, according to the state’s high speed rail authority. 

Oh my! Well consider that the cost of building highways has climbed faster. We’ve got a lot of experience with that in Michigan. In 1996, for example, the Michigan Department of Transportation estimated that a bridge and new highway across the Boardman River valley here in Traverse City, would cost $15 million. By the time the highway proposal died in 2004 the official cost estimate had soared to over $55 million and was heading to nearly $100 million.

Regardless, $37 billion is a lot of money, and we ought to carefully consider how to spend it. At current costs, for that kind of money you get about 700 miles of new concrete freeway that will last about 30 years and then have to be completely rebuilt. Or you get super fast, comfortable, convenient trains and 700 miles of high speed rail that won’t need to be replaced for at least 100 years if you take care of them. You also get new station stops, new walkable patterns of housing and business development around those stops, cleaner air, energy-efficiency, speed, jobs, and time.

The other principal critique of rail proposals in the United States is this one: Nobody will use it. ”Critics see the high-speed train as a potential boondoggle that would be a drain on the state treasury,” said the Los Angeles Times, “and a loser that would never pay for itself. Consider, they say, the poor performance of most long-distance U.S. passenger rail service.”

There are two parts to an appropriate response. The first is that the United States has done everything it can to drain resources and diminish Amtrak’s performance. Still, Amtrak carries 69,000 passengers a day and ridership has been increasing one to two percent a year. Moreover, the very same American business travelers who wouldn’t dare set foot in a long-distance train here are flocking to them in Europe and Asia. Why? They’re reliable, fast, cost-effective, and much more relaxing than traveling by air. “Trains in Europe run like a clock,” Ralph Smith, an executive from Minneapolis, told the New York Times for an article in the April 24, 2007 edition. “They’re nice and clean and fast. And the rail staffs are very helpful to Americans who kind of don’t know where they’re going.”  

The fact is that the industrial nations we are competing with around the globe are building high speed rail networks. It’s prompted a boom for Siemens, Bombardier, Alstom, and other manufacturers who are busy filling multi-billion dollar contracts to build lines and equipment in China, Japan, France, and other nations. High speed rail represents the transportation Mode Shift that makes sense for modernizing economies that are anticipating the transformative demographic, environmental, and economic forces of the 21st century.  

As long as the United States keeps thinking highway, we fall further and further behind. Come to Michigan. We have all the highways a modern society thinks it needs, a smattering of passenger trains, and no regional rapid transit. Our biggest metropolitan region is fading away. Our economy is obsolete. Our bright college-educated kids, who we’ve spent billions educating, are leaving to build the economies of cities that have long-dsitance rail and regional rapid transit systems. Michigan is becoming the new American backwater, and still some lawmakers are considering hiking the gas tax to build more roads. 

A final thought. Voters have the opportunity to make the case for high speed rail in 2008, when the Democrats, who are far more sympathetic to public transportation than the Republicans, will take the White House. And when they do all of the public transit agencies and city officials and citizen advocates across the country who see the future on rail and not concrete need to be much more active in making the case for constructing fast intercity regional rail systems, and equipping those systems with sleek state-of-the art trains. A national movement can certainly be built from all of the regional high speed rail systems proposed around the United States. 

Along with California, high speed rail networks are proposed in:

• Nine states of the Midwest under the Midwest Regional Rail System.
• New England, where a line would run from Boston to Montreal.
• Florida, where a system is proposed to carry passengers from Miami to Tampa with a stop in Orlando.
• The Southeast, from Washington to Charlotte.
• The Pacific Northwest, where a line is proposed from Eugene to Portland to Seattle and onward to Vancouver.
• New York, to carry passengers from New York City to Buffalo.

That’s a lot of territory and spans 85 percent of the presidential delegates. Candidates could pick up a lot of support on that new high speed platform. 

Since 1996, nine states in the American Midwest have been gradually inching forward on a proposal to establish a 3,000-mile high speed train network linking 100 of the region’s big and small cities. Chicago would serve as the hub of the The Midwest Regional Rail System. Spokes would include Detroit, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Columbus, Des Moines, and many other large cities served by trains capable of traveling 110 mph, which would make the travel time and ticket prices downtown to downtown more competitive than on an airplane.  In 2004, a feasibility study found that purchasing the 63 train sets needed to operate the system would cost $1.1 billion, and upgrading the existing tracks to accomodate high speed rail would cost a little more than $2 million a mile or $6.6 billion. The expense of building the system would be 80 percent federal and 20 percent

In essence, for the same cost as building less than 120 miles of new Interstate freeway, the Midwest could design, construct, and operate a 21st Century passenger rail network that would make the region’s transportation system competitive with that of western Europe. Moreover, the feasibility study predicted that the system would generate so much passenger traffic, over 10 million riders a year, that annual revenue by 2014 ($528 million) would exceed the operating and maintenance expense ($453 million). 

The Midwest Regional Rail System represents what is arguably the most economically, environmentally, technically, and culturally sound public investment under discussion in the nine–state region. But for more than a decade it’s been almost entirely just that, a discussion. No surprise. The barrier that prevents the idea from doing much more than creep forward is money. Neither the Federal Railroad Administration, nor any of the Midwest states have $700 million a year laying around for passenger rail in the Midwest. When it comes to big transportation investments, the region and the Federal government are still wedded to energy-wasting, environment-damaging, culturally dislocating highway construction. 

Proponents of the regional high speed rail network, particularly the departments of transportaton in Ohio and Wisconsin, are not giving up. This month, the Wisconsin DOT published a reader-friendly economic analysis that takes into account the systems’ Mode Shift benefits. The study by the Frederick, Maryland-based Transportation Economics Management Systems found the system would reduce energy use and global climate change emissions, conserve land, and improve the ability of cities to design new communities and job centers around train stops. The system would generate 15,000 jobs a year during the decade of construction, and produce more than 57,000 related permanent jobs in the region, said the study’s authors. The high-speed network also would add $22.2 biilion in new economic activity. Almost $5 billion of that figure comes from transit-oriented development around stations.  In other words, the Midwest Regional Rail System could produce a convenient, efficient, job-producing passenger rail network that replaces the slower and less robust Amtrak system, and prepares the country’s heartland to speed out of the 20th century. 

Judging from how Americans are flocking to trains, and developers are surrounding station stops with new transit-oriented housing and business construction, the Midwest is likely to be just as  eager to invite high speed rail into its midst. Texas is considering a high-speed rail system that would link San Antonio to Ft. Worth and Dallas, and Killeen and Temple to Houston.  Southern California is experiencing record ridership on its rail lines between Los Angeles and San Diego. The Boston to Washington corridor continues to attract ever larger numbers of riders.

Last month I was in Salt Lake City for the New York Times and found ample evidence of the market’s embrace of rail transportation and transit-focused development. More than $1 billion in new housing and retail development is planned or under construction around the Salt Lake Valle’s rail stops.  Salt Lake City and its closest suburbs in 1999 finished the $520 million, 19-mile, 23-station TRAX system, which carries more than 55,000 riders a day, well ahead of ridership projections. Voters have also repeatedly passed sales tax increases, including one approved last November, to spend $2.5 billion more in the next decade to complete 26 additional miles of light rail, 88 miles of heavy commuter rail line and nearly 40 extra station stops. The only American metropolitan area that is building more regional rapid transit capacity is Denver, which is constructing a 151-mile system.

Last year, Amtrak ridership reached a record 69,000 riders a day on 300 trains. The greatest growth rates occurred among the 23 short-distance routes where states contribute money to Amtrak and dictate routes. Of the 11 routes that saw the fastest increase in ridership, three were in the Midwest, including the Blue Water train that links Chicago to Michigan (10.9 percent increase), the Chicago to St. Louis train (8.3 percent) and the Hiawatha that ties Illinois to Wisconsin (10.5 percent).

Summed up: High speed passenger rail is a smart investment for this century. Every candidate running for statewide office, and every presidential candidate that campaigns in the delegate-rich Midwest ought to be asked their position on constructing a regional high speed rail network. The Midwest Regional Rail System, more than any highway, needs to be built.   

It’s the nutty season here in the first weeks of spring. The purebred chicken scratch hill billy hound dog puppy that I picked up off the highway in southern Virginia almost 18 years ago decided she’d had enough and wandered off two days ago and vanished. It’s been snowing here in Michigan’s great white north for more than a week. Over the weekend I shoveled nine inches of snow off the deck and driveway and it’s colder than it was in January when my daughter and I, both of us wearing shorts and long tees, ran in the forests near the Betsie River. 

And now gas prices are $2.86 a gallon and rising. In northern Michigan, like almost every other rural area, we feel that price right away. Wages are stagnant here. The cost of living is rising. Thousands of people drive long distances to work, sacrificing their time in exchange for living in a home they can afford. Our public transit agency is doing a better job, and soon we’ll have an express bus from my home in Benzonia to Traverse City. But most people drive to their jobs, often 50 to 80 miles round trip. When you’re making $80 a day after taxes – a pretty typical wage here — and fuel costs $10 a day, the price of gas is an issue.

When gas gets this high it gets a lot easier to make the case that we need to think more clearly about community design and the much different energy era we’ve entered. Kurt Vonnegut, the writer and humorist who died yesterday at age 84, once summed the problem us this way.  “We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.”

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Those of you in other states who’d like a short primer in the cruel consequences of failing to face up to the future need only look at Michigan. Its budget is $1 billion in the red and getting worse. Only Mississippi had a higher unemployment rate in February. Mortage foreclosures top the nation. The Republican legislature last year eliminated a $2 billion business tax and are now intent on draining more money from public education and the state’s universities. The Democratic governor, despite one of the largest election margins ever for a Democrat in a statewide race, seems helpless in pushing for a new direction. The auto-dependent economy, land gobbling patterns of development, and way of life here in the Motor State are  obsolete. Yet one of the clearest messages out of Lansing is offered by the road lobby, which argues that the best way out of the mess is more of the same: Raising gas taxes to build new roads. This in a state that has a public transportation system so poor that it takes 10 hours to get from Ann Arbor to Traverse City — a 250-mile, four-hour car ride. Michigan ranks 49th out of 50 in its ability to retain educated young people, and is among the slowest growing states.  

Fortunately, all states aren’t as inept. The good Mormons of Utah, for instance, embraced sound land use planning and efficient community design long before they landed on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in the mid-19th century. The 21st century metropolis at the foot of the Wasatch Front that they are now developing is being stitched together by energy-efficient, cost-effective, gas-saving light rail and heavy commuter rail lines. Last November voters approved a measure to raise their sales taxes to accelerate construction of four new lines, a total of 26 miles, to add to the existing 19-mile light rail system. Next spring, the Utah Transit Authority opens a nine-station, 44-mile heavy commuter line running north from Salt Lake City. And 44 more miles running south could open as soon as 2014.

 The land around the existing 23 transit stations, and the coming nine new ones, are becoming magnets for new housing, business and retail developments that are reachable by train, car, bike, and on foot. The new residents of the planned development at the Farmington station, for instance, won’t be nearly as worried about the price of gas regardless of how high it rises. They can use the train to get to work in Salt Lake City 13 miles away, and operate a single vehicle instead of a fleet, the way we need to do in northern Michigan. 

Many families here, including mine, spend more on vehicles, fuel, insurance, and maintenance than they do on any other monthly expense, exceeding the cost of housing. 

It’s not going to get easier. The sharp rise in gas prices over the last two weeks comes amid news that oil production in the  Cantarell field in Mexico, the world’s second largest by output, is falling dramatically. According to Supply Chain Digest, one of the Internet sites I pay attention to on this issue, the Cantarell field has seen its daily production rates drop by 20 percent over the last year, what Supply Chain says is “an incredibly rapid decline. It is now producing about 1.6 million barrels per day, down from two million a year ago.”

“Pemex, Mexico’s national oil company, is applying some new technology to the field, and hopes to stem the slide in barrels per day as a result. Even so, production from Cantarell will decline to 600,000 barrels per day by 2013,” said Supply Chain.

The Wall Street Journal also reported last week that: “Two decades ago, about a dozen fields produced more than a million barrels a day. Now there are only four, one of which is Cantarell. The future of two others, discovered more than 50 years ago, remains in question.”

Michigan is desperately far behind in the work to prepare for the era of $4 a gallon and $5 a gallon gas, which is imminent. Look at California, where Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and Sacramento all boast good rapid transit systems that were built over the last generation. The state’s cities are growing more dense and more compact, even Los Angeles, which by various measures is the most densely developed city in the country. The state, by the way, achieved new patterns of development and a healthy economy.

A last thought. Residents and state officials in car-happy California recognize that there is waning civic energy for more damaging highways. Neither California nor any other state can afford to build its way out of congestion. There aren’t a whole lot of people left who think more highways, more parking lots, more cars, more sprawl is a good thing to do. There is much more popular support for repairing existing roads and building more compact, environmentally-sensitive, walkable places to live. And people want to build rail transportation that is fast, convenient, affordable, and much cheaper than driving. 

Last November California voters overwhelmingly approved more than $30 billion in new state spending to achieve that vision. The Rebuild California plan calls for $12.25 billion to repair and modernize highways, not build new ones, and $4 billion for light rail, commuter rail, and bus improvements. Talk about investing in the future.

In Michigan, we’re cutting school spending, freezing state grants, laying off state troopers, and thinking about more highway construction. We’re also sliding fast into backwater status.  

It’s essential to stay abreast of what opponents to a reasoned development strategy have to say about Smart Growth. And there’s no more unreasonable voice on these issues than the social theorists at the libertarian Reason Magazine. This week Sam Staley and Ted Balaker published their newest assessment of the value of public transit, why Americans won’t ride new trains and buses, and how to relieve congestion. They come to this conclusion: “The planning gurus who are supposed to solve our transportation problems are in the grip of transitphilia and autophobia; their beliefs about how cities and transportation work are grounded more in nostalgia than in a realistic view of the world we live in now. The public policies they design and try to enforce make it harder for us to get to work, pick up our kids from school, or go shopping. They are deliberately fostering congestion.”

Staley and Balaker’s solution: Erase transit funding and focus on building more roads.

The weakness of this thesis falls into four categories:

• The vehicle population is increasing faster than population growth. It’s impossible for America to build its way out of congestion.
• At well over $30 million a mile for a new urban highway, and sometimes three times that cost to rebuild old ones, neither state nor local governments have nearly the money to do both.
• American patterns of development, fostered by fast-rising energy, vehicle, and housing costs, is starting to change in many metropolitan regions, which are gradually growing more dense. That is making it much more difficult to build or widen new roads, and much easier to link neighborhoods with new transit lines.
• Americans are falling back in love with rapid transit. The American Public Transit Association just reported record increases in transit ridership. In dozens of communities — Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix, Dallas, Minneapolis, Seattle, Charlotte to name a few – taxpayers are digging into their own pockets to pay for new lines because the federal government won’t.

Reason Magazine has long viewed building pavement as a more appropriate activity for Big Government than constructing mass transit. The distinction fits their view that Big Government means less personal liberty, but if you’ve got to choose, cars provide more freedom than trains.

That frame, however, is obsolete. It’s been replaced by the powerful civic consciousness about quality of life and security, and that a life spent in personal vehicles to do everything diminishes freedom in the most substantive way. The civic movement to build more rapid transit reflects an important Mode Shift in how people want to design their communities to enhance their choices, and provide them a right to the good life.

From Knoxville to Las Vegas, Los Angeles to Portland, Maine, there are few communities left in the United States that view more  roads, more outer suburban growth, more parking lots, and more cars as an improvement. And all over the United States, wherever rapid transit has been built, people flock to the new lines, seek to build their homes and businesses close to station stops, and view the new way to get around as a decided step forward in economic development, achieving prosperity, and responding to the new market signals of the 21st century. Building rapid transit is a choice people make to improve their lives.
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Not long ago, in Denver, a Douglas County Commissioner told me that one of the impediments voters faced in approving a nearly $5 billion sales tax increase in 2004 to build the West’s most extensive regional rapid transit system was old attitudes about trains. “The critics, including our governor, kept saying nobody would ride a train,” she said. ”This is the West. You have to pry the keys out of people’s hands before they’d get out of their cars.”

Well, every year since then transit ridership has climbed in the United States, including in every western city that has built a modern rail transit system. That includes Dallas (see pix) Denver, Portland, Phoenix, Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, San Jose, and San Diego. And ridership is climbing in the East and Midwest, too. This week the American Public Transportation Association released its latest annual report on transit ridership that confirmed the trend. ”Americans took 10.1 billion trips on local public transportation in 2006 – the first time in 49 years,” said the association. “Over the last decade, public transportation’s growth rate outpaced the growth rate of the population and the growth rate of vehicle miles traveled on our nation’s highways.”

“This significant ridership milestone is part of a multi-year trend as more and more Americans ride public transit to get to destinations important to them, while realizing the benefits of saving money and avoiding congestion,” said William W. Millar, president of APTA.

Light rail had the highest percentage increase among all modes, the association reported, with a 5.6 percent increase in ridership last year. Some light rail systems showed double digit increases in ridership: San Jose (36.6 percent); Minneapolis (18.4 percent); New Jersey (20.1 percent); Saint Louis (16.2 percent); Philadelphia (10.8 percent); and Salt Lake City (14.2 percent).

As a guy born and raised in White Plains, a railroad suburb north of New York City, I never understood the cultural reluctance to rail outside the major cities of the East Coast. My buddies and I used the Metro North line to get into the city. I rode Amtrak to Philadelphia and the Paoli local commuter train from 30th Street Station to get to college in Haverford, a Main Line suburb. After graduation I lived in Boston, Charleston, and Washington and regularly rode Amtrak to New York, where my employers were based. Riding the commuter lines and Amtrak reduced my costs for maintaining a car, and when I left Washington in 1993 the precipitous rise in the value of my Bethesda home was largely the result of its proximity to the Medical Center stop on the Washington Metro’s Red Line, about a mile walk away.

Now there’s mounting evidence that many more Americans who were never raised to ride commuter rail lines are growing more comfortable with this transportation mode shift. A major national infrastructure investment in rail construction needs to be part of the energy, environmental, and national security platforms of every candidate for the presidency. There’s nothing about many more miles of rail in the United States that doesn’t make plain sense. 

More on that train race out west that I wrote about earlier this month. Metro, the transit agency in Phoenix, is asking the state for $1.7 billion to accelerate construction on the 57-mile light rail system that is being built, and to add more than 20 new miles to the system by 2027. This according to the Arizona Republic.

That’s the very same strategy that Salt Lake City voters approved in November when they raised the sales tax to speed up construction and add new lines to a 45-mile light rail system, and an 88-mile commuter rail network. The $3.1 billion system is so popular that suburbs that fought its development are clamoring to organize constituents and build even more train lines (see pix.)

In both places, just as here in Michigan, there was plenty of skepticism about the value of light rail, whether people would make the mode shift from their cars to a train, and whether the investment would pay economic dividends. And in both western cities the answers are that trains are more popular than anticipated, and are encouraging $billions in new housing, retail, office, and recreational investments. As an icon of a region’s will to succeed as an energy efficient, environmentally-conscious, modern, and prosperous place, rail rapid transit has few equals.

Look at Utah: low unemployment, rising job numbers and incomes, well-educated workforce, mecca for young people, vibrant, and building the West’s second largest regional rail system next to Denver’s.

Look at Michigan: nation’s highest unemployment, rapidly diminishing job numbers and personal income, workforce not yet convinced that college degrees are worth the trouble, treats its brightest young people as a primary export, troubled spiritually, and still arguing about whether rail transit has a place.

In an interview on Michigan Radio earlier this month, Michigan’s Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm said that public transit, and especially trains, were a “necessary” investment for the state to make to be competitive in the global economy. A starter line that links Ann Arbor with Detroit, and the suburbs in between, is now teed up for regional and state approval. There is $100 million in federal funding to complete the engineering and design stages and start construction. The  familiar crticisms about cost, popularity, wise investment and the like surround the proposal. The typical critics — Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, House Republican Leader Craig DeRoche among others – have aligned to derail the idea.       

But for the first time in years, there also is a political opening that makes sense. Gov. Granholm says she wants more transit. And state Representative Marie Donigan, a Democrat of Royal Oak, was appointed chair of the new House Public Transit Subcommittee. Marie is southeast Michigan’s most prominent elected transit advocate. Get in touch with her at mdonigan@wowway.com and tell her you want to help.

“The stuff that matters, especially when it comes to the environment, is not the big flashy stuff,” explained Keith Bartholomew, a lawyer who teaches planning at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. ”It’s the small actions. Environmental damage is an accumulation of 1,000 cuts. So repairing it means applying 1,000 Band-Aids. Each one is important. It’s the many small Band-Aids that matter. Real relevance is the cumulative effect.”

I interviewed Keith last week for an article on how metropolitan regions have become the new incubators of effective environmental policy and programs. We hadn’t seen each other in 10 years, ever since he accepted our invitation to come to northwest Michigan to help the tiny, two-year-old Michigan Land Use Institute think through a particularly troublesome problem. The Grand Traverse County Road Commission, the business community, and several townships were desperate to build a new highway and bridge across the Boardman River south of Traverse City. We were convinced that was a terrible idea. The road and bridge was a waste of money, would make traffic worse, encourage more sprawl, and wreck a spectacular river valley so wild bald eagles nested there.

Keith knew a couple of things that made sense. As a young lawyer at 1000 Friends of Oregon in Portland, the granddaddy of non-profit American land policy organizations, Keith developed the legal and advocacy strategy that killed a $1 billion freeway proposed for Portland’s west side. In doing so, Keith helped to open a political, cultural, and economic space large enough for Portland to consider alternatives, including the regional light rail system that eventually was built. His story is an exceptional example of how clear thinking and a lot of moxie can produce a truly great outcome. Portland’s reputation as one of the outstanding cities in America has a lot to do with how its regional rapid transit system encourages more energy-efficient, environmentally-sensitive, neighborhood enhancing patterns of development.

The lesson we learned from Keith in 1997 was simple. In order to beat the Boardman bridge we needed to develop a credible alternative. A decade later, the bridge is dead and the alternative is gradually taking shape in the form of a $1.36 million regional land use and transportation project paid for with federal funds. Keith hadn’t heard the whole story so I spent a few minutes relating all that’s gone on in my home region since his visit, which occurred during an October 1997 week so warm and sunny that we convinced Keith to join us for a quick and chilly dip in Crystal Lake here in Benzie County. Now Keith can claim two places in America where his good ideas made things better.    

Keith isn’t as involved in municipal affairs in Salt Lake City as he was in Portland, though he recently joined the governing board of the Utah Transit Authority, the agency that is building the second largest regional rapid transit system in the West. By the time it’s completed in 2015, Salt Lake City and its suburbs will add 24 miles to the 19 miles of light rail line that are already operating, and roughly 100 miles of commuter rail. Only Denver, which is building a 172-mile system, will have more. And just as in Portland, the economy supported by the UTA trains is booming.

Keith is 46 now, the married father of a handsome young boy, and a scholar in law and planning anxious to prove himself worthy of achieving a tenured faculty position. He’s tall, slim, funny, and still loves trains. ”In order to create a quality place it has to have iconic features that attract people,” he told me. “It’s hard to beat a train. Trains promote centrality, vitality, and sustainability. That’s what they represent. They make cities work better. If they’re built in the right place trains will do what they’re good at — providing efficient access to localized geography.”
    

SALT LAKE CITY –  In the 1990s, before one of the most successful and popular regional rapid transit systems in the United States was built at the foot of the Wasatch Front, the very same criticism of light rail and commuter rail now occurring in Detroit, and to some extent in Grand Rapids, was also heard here. It’s too expensive. Nobody will ride it. The region is too spread out. It makes no sense. Build highways not rail. 

All this week I’ve ridden Salt Lake City’s 19-mile Trax light rail system, which opened in 1999, and now carries nearly 60,000 passengers a day. The system is fast, safe, convenient, and cheap. It cost $4 a day to ride anywhere, anytime. I didn’t need to rent a car. The light rail conductors care so much about their line that they pasted Valentine’s Day messages to riders on the windows.

Last year, ridership increased 23 percent, more than any regional rapid transit system in the country. People like rail so much that last November voters in Salt Lake County and neighboring Utah County approved a tiny sales tax increase (2.5 cents on a $10 purchase) to speed up construction on an extension, three brand new lines, and to double the length of a new commuter rail line that is set to open later this year. Suburban communities that were the most virulently anti-rail in the 1990s are clamoring to be the first to open new stations. 

As an icon of efficiency, usefulness, environmental-sensitivity, and metropolitan prosperity, regional rapid transit is hard to beat. That’s especially true when contrasting Michigan’s largest and sagging metropolitan region with the modern, fast-growing, clean and green cities of the West. A great train race has broken out across the Rocky Mountain region and the Pacific Coast, with cities challenging each other to build the best transit systems and to find new ways to raise money to do so, including taxing citizens and leveraging federal dollars.

Denver is building a 172-mile light rail, commuter rail, and rapid bus transit system. Portland last month opened a $57 million tram to add to its world-class system of light rail and street cars. Seattle is close to  completing a light rail system and is already planning expansions and a street car. Phoenix is building its first line, and San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles have systems in place and are in various stages of planning expansions. 

While regional rapid transit systems do not, by themselves, ensure that regions can compete in the global economy, they are essential equipment for attracting the bright minds and active people who make regions prosper. In interviews here with young entrepreneurs, every one of them said that the Salt Lake region’s commitment to rail transit was a big factor in why they either built their companies here or relocated. 

Just before the Super Bowl, Dave Barry, the Miami Herald columnist, lampooned Miami’s light rail system for its expense and low ridership. ”It does not go to many other places that many Miami residents would like to go, which is why most of them do not use it,” Barry wrote. “To them, the Metrorail train is a mysterious object that occasionally whizzes past over their heads, unrelated to their lives, kind of like a comet.”

Miami’s transit problem results principally from poor planning and support. I hear the officials critical of rapid transit in Detroit cite Miami as an example of a system that is not working as anticipated. I remind them that people are pedestrians before and after they ride light rail. So to make systems work well zoning that encourages mixed use developments that connect people is just as important as economic investments that yield walkable destinations. It’s all in the linkages and connections. 

The West’s cities understood that, and none more so than Salt Lake City. The light rail system, coupled with the 2002 Olympics held here, have given this region of nearly 2 million people a new view of itself as a global competitior. Incomes are rising. New companies are piling in here, particularly those in the recreational sports industry. Salt Lake City has a federal wilderness region at its doorstep, the only major metropolitan region in the country like that. And the city’s government has been led for nearly eight years by Rocky Anderson, a Democrat who has organized much of Salt Lake’s economic development strategy around the need to be more environmentally intelligent especially in reducing the production of global warming gases. Toyota hybrid Prius’s serve as municipal vehicles.

What is occurring here, the largest metropolitan region in the most conservative state in the country, is evidence of three things. First, rapid transit, environmental progress, and economic prosperity are tied together in ways that were foreseen long ago by visionaries, but are just coming to be fully realized in the dynamic cities of the American West. Second, these issues have transcended partisanship. And third, Michigan’s largest metropolitan region, and by extension the state, is far behind and losing ground in global competitiveness every day. Detroit has an opportunity to launch a commuter rail line to Ann Arbor that by itself won’t resolve the region’s massive economic migraine, but will go a long way to showing itself and the world that southeast Michigan is a place that matters.