The Transportation and Mass Transit Megathread

[KJHburg]

5 hours ago, Rockatansky said:

Tried that with the AMP and it got killed.

Also, as I have said time and time again, 840N is dead. It ain't happening.

We need high speed, high capacity transit with frequent service operating in dedicated ROW.

Are illegal at the state level.

Great idea. We should implement it a soon as possible.

well something really needs to change as so much thru traffic goes right through downtown it is crazy.  Yes you need to plan and get going on transit.   Toll lanes need to be looked out change the laws and only make them applicable in certain counties then.  TDOT come visit NC DOT and see all things we are doing.  

[downtownresident]

Mayor Cooper to host 11 Public sessions to get input on a new transit plan in Jan and Feb of 2020:

https://www.nashville.gov/Mayors-Office/Transportation-Infrastructure-and-Sustainability/Transportation.aspx

[smeagolsfree]

If it is going to be bus heavy, then it is a lose/lose for all involved. Streets are already clogged and busses will make it worse. Busses is what I have heard.

[downtownresident]

1 minute ago, smeagolsfree said:

If it is going to be bus heavy, then it is a lose/lose for all involved. Streets are already clogged and busses will make it worse. Busses is what I have heard.

Exactly. We’ll need dedicated lanes along the major roads or this isn’t going to do anything to help. 

[PaulChinetti]

Paralysis by analysis. 

How many studies can one city do on transit?

[Rockatansky]

53 minutes ago, PaulChinetti said:

How many studies can one city do on transit?

By my count, this will be #5 this decade.
WeGo, Chamber, Planning, MPO and Cooper.
Just pick one and do something (preferably fixed guideway transit operating at short intervals in dedicated ROW).

[PaulChinetti]

The city could use it's study money as a dedicated funding for transit, hahaha. (sad laugh)

[nashwatcher]

We need dedicated lanes and a straight shot from the airport to downtown. I really hope this administration doesn’t kick this down the road. We need to start. And I don’t mean more buses.

[downtownresident]

14 minutes ago, nashwatcher said:

We need dedicated lanes and a straight shot from the airport to downtown. I really hope this administration doesn’t kick this down the road. We need to start. And I don’t mean more buses.

If rail is too expensive, give me the last transit plan with dedicated ROW for BRT instead of rail with a line down West End, please. 

[12Mouth]

56 minutes ago, downtownresident said:

If rail is too expensive, give me the last transit plan with dedicated ROW for BRT instead of rail with a line down West End, please. 

I hope I'm wrong, but I'll be shocked if we get anything more than a modest increase in non-dedicated ROW bus service.

[BnaBreaker]

Yeah, I'd love to be optimistic here, but I just cannot see someone like Cooper providing us with anything more than a half-assed band-aid on a gunshot wound on a paper thin budget type of solution.  

[nashvylle]

let's remember that Governor Lee is wanting more transportation in Nashville. With the state on board, there is a glimmer of hope. 

[AronG]

Meanwhile, Atlanta has seen the light and is adopting a $27B transit expansion plan including heavy rail, light rail, expanded bus service, and sidewalk upgrades:

https://atlanta.curbed.com/2019/12/16/21023213/atlanta-atl-marta-gdot-transit-expansion

I stayed near the BeltLine a few months back, and for my money it's the most interesting project in American urban development in decades.

We're currently somewhere around the population Atlanta was 40 years ago. What can we learn from them? They spent decades building enormous interstates that just served to spread everybody out so they could sit in bigger traffic jams. Here's hoping we can avoid at least some of that pointless endeavor and skip ahead to the part where we put our money towards more efficient and pleasant ways to move people around.

[BnaBreaker]

10 minutes ago, AronG said:

Meanwhile, Atlanta has seen the light and is adopting a $27B transit expansion plan including heavy rail, light rail, expanded bus service, and sidewalk upgrades:

https://atlanta.curbed.com/2019/12/16/21023213/atlanta-atl-marta-gdot-transit-expansion

I stayed near the BeltLine a few months back, and for my money it's the most interesting project in American urban development in decades.

We're currently somewhere around the population Atlanta was 40 years ago. What can we learn from them? They spent decades building enormous interstates that just served to spread everybody out so they could sit in bigger traffic jams. Here's hoping we can avoid at least some of that pointless endeavor and skip ahead to the part where we put our money towards more efficient and pleasant ways to move people around.

Amen to that... designing not just a city but an entire region around automobile travel exclusively truly is a dead end street.

[Nashvillain]

3 hours ago, BnaBreaker said:

Amen to that... designing not just a city but an entire region around automobile travel exclusively truly is a dead end street.

If only the powers that be will let it die

[rookzie]

7 hours ago, AronG said:

Meanwhile, Atlanta has seen the light and is adopting a $27B transit expansion plan including heavy rail, light rail, expanded bus service, and sidewalk upgrades:

https://atlanta.curbed.com/2019/12/16/21023213/atlanta-atl-marta-gdot-transit-expansion

I stayed near the BeltLine a few months back, and for my money it's the most interesting project in American urban development in decades.

We're currently somewhere around the population Atlanta was 40 years ago. What can we learn from them? They spent decades building enormous interstates that just served to spread everybody out so they could sit in bigger traffic jams. Here's hoping we can avoid at least some of that pointless endeavor and skip ahead to the part where we put our money towards more efficient and pleasant ways to move people around.

One reason that this transit expansion plan, in the making for a number of years, has become so foremost of an accomplishment in its own right is that public trust became heavily eroded during relatively recent past mayoral terms in Atlanta, in particular the Campbell administration from the mid-1990s through the early 2000s.  This alienated and polarized sentiment, not only with existing governance of the City of Atlanta and shared with Fulton and Dekalb counties, but it ramified regionally to all outlying counties within Greater Atlanta, and crippling the chances of expansion beyond the now relatively meager coverage.  Five years ago, Clayton County finally passed a sales tax to join MARTA.  Highly populated Gwinnett and Cobb counties so far had refused to join or fund MARTA

MARTA is the largest public transport agency in the U.S. to never receive operational funding from the hosting state.  With a few pivotal "Rough Rides" financially between the 2008 Great Recession and around 2015, MARTA had been on its own, with little if any hope of expansion of the existing heavy rail network, the most recent being the Red Line extension of the North Line to Dunwoody in 1996 and farther out to North Springs in 2000.  This new plan gets nearly everybody onboard ─ a true "consortium, for a change ─ including Gwinnett County, the state, and the Fed.  Cobb County corridor planning remains ongoing, and to date I don't believe Cobb County has actually joined.

The plan is a projected 30-year (2021-2050) initiative.  The existing Atlanta Streetcar opened in 2014, currently only in the form of a Downtown Loop and which has been dubbed the Streetcar named Nowhere, was taken control of during 2018.   As a streetcar, it is to become integrated into the proposed larger MARTA Light Rail plan for the Beltline LRT and Clifton Corridor LRT.  As such the current streetcar technology will have to be transformed into LRT design standards which incorporates higher speed and safety requirement, as well as scalable length of trains.  MARTA HRT (heavy rail transport) definitely and finally is to be extended.

Edited December 19, 2019 by rookzie

[rookzie]

In mid-October I mentioned that the NYCMTA finally implemented a highly contested proposal to exclude all cars from a stretch of its Manhattan 14th Street crosstown route ─ the "M14".

Perhaps most readers are aware that Manhattan’s massive roadway grid consists of primary numbered “Avenues” extending lengthwise (north – south [actually NNE to SSW]), with numbered cross streets, east to west (1st St. at the south end of Manhattan through 225th St. at the north end).  The numbered avenues are designated 1st through 12th, from the Eastside to the Westside, with only portions of 12th Ave. remaining, and some of running concurrent with the West Side Hwy and the Henry Hudson Pkwy.  Some of the high-numbered streets and 4th Ave. are skipped (don’t exist), and 225th St. actually is across the Harlem River from Manhattan Island itself, but officially is included with Manhattan, which includes Marble Hill north of that river.

The M14 SBS (Select Bus Service), which commenced this past Oct 1, was born out of a controversial but necessary plan to compensate for the shutdown of the NYCMTA “L”-Train train route (as in route’s A, B, C, D, E, F, etc., not to be confused with the term “elevated” or “El”, or “L” for the physical type of rapid transit).  The Canarsie Line Tunnel, a.k.a.  the 14th St. Tunnel, is one of 9 storm-flood-damaged tunnels of the network’s 14 underwater tunnels, some of which were partially destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.   All these tunnels have come of age, and this particular tunnel is nearly a century old with cabling equipment buried within the walls of the tunnel.  The plan was revised to add a new cable support system (racking) on the exterior of the bench walls (extended lateral space above a continuous concrete shelf with in the tunnel, instead of within the wall, to facilitate foreseen maintenance.

So far this plan is “temporary”.  The planned L-Train shutdown meant anticipated demand for surface travel via a dedicated “Busway” along the core of 14th Street (9th to 3rd avenues eastbound and 3rd to 8th avenues westbound).  Additionally, the plan adds offset bus lanes from 8th Ave. to 9th Ave. westbound and a combination of curbside and offset bus lanes 1st  Ave. to 3rd Ave. in both directions.  The street redesign includes temporary bus bulbs and expanded sidewalks to the corridor.   Under the plan, access to the Busway is mostly limited to M14 local and SBS buses.  In addition, Access-A-Ride para-transit vehicles, local deliveries, emergency vehicles, and private cars accessing parking garages also are permitted along that stretch of 14th St.

For all-non-bus vehicles needing local access, motorists are able to make a turn on to 14th St. and then make the next available legal right turn off 14th Street.  In this manner all vehicles have access to 14th St., but only buses and emergency vehicles are allowed to use 14th Street for through trips.  These vehicles may turn onto 14th Street from the avenue closest to their destination and then exit 14th St. at the next legal turn.  14th St. bus-priority treatments are in effect from 5AM to 10PM daily and liberally installed cameras are used to enforce compliance.  The city also has incorporated other measures to expand travel capacity with the L-Train service interruptions, some of which have been made permanent initially.  NYC DOT completed safety improvements to the Brooklyn entrance of the bike path on the nearest river crossing, the Williamsburg Bridge, a surface path between Manhattan with Brooklyn.  In a manner similar to Nashville’s I-440 rehab partial shutdown, the NYMTA rapid-transit L-Train has had to undergo planned and staged disruptions during the rehab of the tunnel beneath the East River.  The L-train, a vital link of the NYMTA, connects Rockaway Pkwy in the Canarsie district of the Borough of Brooklyn, to 8th Ave. on the Manhattan Lower Westside.  The L-Route locally is known as the “14th Street – Canarsie Local”.  

Last Sunday the NYCMTA began updating its fleet to serve the M14 route with new Battery-Electric articulated buses built on same body design as Nashville’s New Flyer Xcelsior hybrid series introduced during around 2013.   The “Xcelsior Charge eBRT” is the first and only 60-foot (articulated) battery-electric bus to complete FTA (Federal Transit Administration) bus testing.  Technology has become refined since back when the dinky Proterra “greens” were introduced to Nashville.  Those now have been integrated into the urban core along standard routes, since the canceling of the Downtown Free Ride circulators and now are seen in Wego purple.  NYMTA is the first agency in the U.S. to deploy a battery all-electric (as opposed to hybrid) articulated bus fleet on a single route.

In the case of NYC’s M14 SBS, ridership predictably has been on the increase, when so many riders have depended on the L-Train subway for many years running below the surface of lower Manhattan, in addition to the fact that it connects with other subway routes at points.  In only 2-1/2 months ridership, not only has surged from enforcement of the new busway for both Select and local service, but the agency actually has had to slow the speed of buses to prevent their travel from exceeding the significantly shortened headways during the bus priority periods.  Again though, the full-dedicated busway is only temporary, until the subway tunnel gets rehabbed.

I can see at least in part that such a busway set-up could be analyzed and tested in trials for short segments with Nashville, and trials would not necessarily be applied within the core.  It would work best with signal priority (lessons from the relatively new streetcar lines of Cincinnati and Detroit).  The main caveat with a busway in Nashville in its present state and layout is that Nashville has poor surface-road (local) connectivity and very little if any redundancy for parallel travel, even worse across its natural barriers and railways.  Even the existing street grid in Nashville is rife with historically misaligned segments of a given street, particularly within the central older core.

With very few parallel lengthy point-to-point thoroughfares (or “boulevards”, as designated by TDOT), and with most arterials being non-parallel and primarily radial in geographic layout, probably very little justification could be made for converting an entire street into a busway during any given time of day.  Also most Nashville cross streets are secondary and likely could not accommodate both local and “Select Bus Service”.   In fact, Manhattan’s 14th St. is as wide as most of Nashville’s widest arterials and is parallel to many other nearby streets.  But the main question might be, what public transport need could be fulfilled with a dedicated busway encompassing an entire street, even for a relatively short distance as with NYC’s M14 route?  Probably none without a lot of collateral disadvantage, and at the very best, only dedicated bus lanes could be afforded on of Nashville’s “width-eligible” rights-of-way, and in some cases only a single lane for uni-directional travel only.

The NYCMTA 14th St. entirely dedicated busway was set up for performing remedial work on an existing but much faster alternative ─ point-to-point.  It does not cover the entire transit route, but only a short segment of it.  The M14 busway is a tailored solution for a specific highly complex need for correcting a critical safety and operational fault with other infrastructure.  As such it can’t be a one-size-fits-all solution in any other locale, even if it works well for that corner of NYC.  So far I just can’t perceive any benefit with the existing and highly constraining transportation infrastructure to set up such a busway in Nashville.  A dedicated lane-only BRT set-up with state approval likely is the only palpable plan for the city, as far as using buses for rapid service is concerned.  A start might be Main St. and Gallatin Pk. in East Nashville, south of Briley Pkwy, since US-31E has been redesignated to be concurrent with Ellington Pkwy along that stretch of Gallatin Pk.  In the end though, any dedicated busway will need to be a part of Mayor Cooper’s Transportation Planning, with preliminary public sessions commencing Jan 9.

 

Edited December 25, 2019 by rookzie

[MLBrumby]

Rookzie, please contact Mayor Cooper and offer your consulting services!!  

[rookzie]

11 hours ago, MLBrumby said:

Rookzie, please contact Mayor Cooper and offer your consulting services!!  

I'd like to give a try, ML, but I just don't have the connections, especially since I didn't crony the coat-tails of the election campaign.  The time couldn't be more aligned, since I just graduated from Lipscomb last weekend.

[CenterHill]

1 hour ago, rookzie said:

I'd like to give a try, ML, but I just don't have the connections, especially since I didn't crony the coat-tails of the election campaign.  The time couldn't be more aligned, since I just graduated from Lipscomb last weekend.

Congrats, Rookzie!!   

[markhollin]

10 hours ago, rookzie said:

... since I just graduated from Lipscomb last weekend.

Big congrats to you, Rookzie!    : )

[smeagolsfree]

Awesome Rookzie! Still missing you at the meets. Show up soon, PLEASE!

[rookzie]

Thanks to all.
Needless to say, I had all cohort fellow students beat in age, and some had grandchildren.  I even had the Provost and the President beat, and they taught 2 of the 10 courses, so if I learned nothing else, then it's that I ain't no spring chikkin!

I'll have to miss the next 1st-Saturday meet yet again, since I'll be traveling back from rural South Central PA that day, weather permitting.

 

[dReAmWiELdEr]

Nashville ranked 25th most expensive city in U.S. (out of Top 50) for annual commuter costs at an average of $7,774 per commuter. Average commute time estimated at 29 minutes, 45 seconds.  

More at NBJ here:

https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2019/12/03/how-nashvilles-commuting-cost-compares-to-other.html?iana=hpmvp_nsh_news_headline

Full report here:
 
https://www.listwithclever.com/real-estate-blog/best-and-worst-metros-for-commuters/?utm_campaign=covered-commuting-v1

It's crazy to consider that both Nashville and Atlanta have longer average commute times than Los Angeles, which is what you stereotypically hear as being the worst.

Sent from my GM1915 using Tapatalk

[chris holman]

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10216493289944455&id=1223658553