Can Buses Spur Economic Development?

A recent article in Streetsblog pointed out that Brooklyn's Fulton Street mall, open only to buses and pedestrians, is the most successful retail strip in the city outside of Manhattan.

There's no doubt about it. Buses do spur economic development, by bringing more people into street-level retail spaces, by giving landlords and tenants a much more affordable alternative to building and maintaining huge parking garages, and by saving money for local governments (which spend less on transportation infrastructure) and commuters (who spend less money on gas and cars).

An anonymous comment in the last post asserted (rather scornfully) that only trains can spur transit-oriented development. That's just not true. In Portland, we've seen much more new development happen along the Congress Street corridor between Maine Medical Center and Washington Avenue - a street where buses run every five to ten minutes during workdays - than we've seen in the neighborhood around the train station in Libbytown. Bus service deserves some credit for this new development along Congress Street for reducing employers' parking requirements and their commuters' expenses.

In fact, City of Portland zoning codes explicitly reduce parking requirements if the development is within walking distance of bus routes. And the builders of the recent expansion at Maine Medical Center cited the availability of bus service and its high rate of bus commuters among employees as a reason to build more space downtown than the hospital otherwise would have.

Unfortunately, the economics of intercity rail in Maine require large parking lots for drive-in passengers to access stations that are miles apart from each other. But the economics of local and intercity express buses like the Metro and ZOOM buses require dense, vibrant employment centers and residential neighborhoods where passengers can walk to bus stops that are within a few blocks of each other in downtown neighborhoods. That's the kind of transit-oriented development we need more of.

There's no doubt that a handful of people don't like riding buses, and Anonymous seems like s/he is probably one of them. But for many of us, any option is better than no option. For the vast majority of people - including the thousands of households in our cities who don't own cars - the idea of waiting a decade or more for Amtrak to expand to Auburn with only three trips a day is not that exciting when an intercity bus route could start up within months, serve more destinations, and offer dozens of trips a day, for a much lower price.

Before I get more angry notes from railfans, let me make it known that I absolutely want to see Amtrak expand to Lewiston/Auburn. But it won't happen soon and it will take even longer unless those cities really begin to lay the groundwork of becoming a transit-oriented community. I'll reiterate the points I made yesterday: those cities need to stop throwing away their money away on temples to free-parking socialism. And they need to invite smarter forms of downtown development, by bringing commuters in on buses until they can afford to bring even more people in by rail.

At the end of the day, "sustainable transportation" also needs to be financially sustainable, and transit advocates need to be practical. Connecting two of Maine's largest urban centers by passenger rail does make sense, but building it will be very, very expensive, and it will be at least ten years before our small, aging, and poor state is able to afford it.

In the meantime, though, buses can deliver a similar outcome - the efficient movement of thousands of people - for a fraction of the cost. Rail advocates might be threatened by the idea that buses could become too successful, and make people forget about buying an expensive new train. But that's no reason to sabotage an important new transit connection between Portland and Lewiston.

PS: You don't have to take my word for it - here are a few more examples of places where buses - not trains - have cultivated successful transit-oriented development:

• Almere (The Netherlands): "North Americans try hard to do 'transit-oriented development,' (TOD) but the Dutch are doing it on a massive scale. Even more heretically, they do it with buses! All of Almere is transit-oriented, and the transit is all in the form of busways," writes transit planning consultant Jarrett Walker.
• Pittsburgh: "Faced with a long, slender five-acre parcel of land between Centre Avenue and the East Busway, the project needed to encourage tenants to come to the neighborhood without turning it into a suburbanized desert of parking," from a review of a new bus-oriented retail development in the Pittsburgh City Paper.
• Bogota, Colombia: "Analysis across time reflects slight average annual increases in property values correlated with the implementation of the [Transmileno Bus Rapid Transit] system."

Train Enthusiasm Meets Fiscal Realities

As reported in a story in today's Lewiston Sun-Journal, the Androscoggin Valley Council of Governments is wrapping up a feasibility study for extending Amtrak service to the edge of Auburn - and potentially on through western Maine to Montreal. Here's a link to the public presentation the study team made the other night.

This has been a long-awaited study for rail advocates. But the news it delivered wasn't especially good for rail fans. I'll let the Sun-Journal's lede sum it up:

Establishing regular rail service between Auburn and Portland in 2020 could cost up to $234 million to start and could require an $8 million annual subsidy, according to a new study presented Wednesday night.

That figure is expressed in 2020 dollars - which, adjusted for inflation, amount to roughly $180 million in startup costs and a $6.1 million annual operating budget in today's dollars (assuming an average annual inflation rate of 3%). Putting the costs in 2011 dollars makes for easier comparisons to other Amtrak projects, like the expansion to Brunswick (which cost about $35 million). But by expressing the costs in future terms, the study's authors are already acknowledging that the money (in 2011 dollars) doesn't exist to make this happen.

There's more discouraging news: the extension to Auburn would be contingent on improving the existing Portland-to-Boston line for faster trains and one more daily round trip (for seven in all). Those are worthwhile projects, but they'll also be expensive - between $120 and $150 million.* This project alone will take several years to fund and build - I'll be pleasantly surprised if it happens by 2020.

Plus, the proposed train wouldn't even stop in downtown Lewiston/Auburn, within walking distance of thousands of jobs. Instead, it would stop on the industrial outskirts of town, in between a little-used airport and a complex of industrial warehouses. Passengers bound for L/A would need to take a bus shuttle to get anywhere.

Then there's the hard fiscal realities we're dealing with: the state is broke, and even if an increasingly tight-fisted Washington scares up more money for passenger rail, I would doubt that a project to connect two small cities in Maine with a 60 MPH train is going to rise to the top of national priorities.

So what's a transit advocate to do? Two things.

1. Don't rely on Washington or Augusta - local funding will be crucial to bringing Amtrak to L/A, and these cities could afford it, if they only started spending less money on parking garages and highway interchanges. Lewiston, in particular, has gone on a parking building binge in the past decade, spending tens of millions of dollars in local tax dollars to subsidize car travel. Auburn's about to build an expensive white elephant parking garage of their own. And both cities are pursuing big-ticket roadway expansions.
   
   The costs of all these automotive subsidies rival the costs of the proposed Amtrak expansion. Not only is this diverting money from transit improvements; it's also undermining the demand for transit down the road, by filling up downtown real estate with acres of car-storage units instead of with transit-oriented housing and workplaces.
   
   
2. But you can't have new housing and workplaces unless you're able to bring more people into downtown L/A, so start cultivating transit-oriented development now with a low-cost intercity bus service between Portland, L/A, and Augusta. That will bring new workers, businesses, and households into L/A's affordable downtown districts, raise property values, encourage new investment, and create a stronger customer base for when the cities are finally ready to invest in rail.

And as a matter of fact, the L/A Amtrak study concluded with a recommendation that an express bus should run between downtown Lewiston and downtown Portland as an interim measure. Sounds like a great idea to me.

*"Expensive" is relative, of course. The Maine Turnpork Authority had been planning to spend the same amount of money just to widen 9 miles of highway inside Portland's city limits. If Maine does in fact have that kind of money to throw around, the Downeaster is obviously a better place to invest it.

Find this bike.

Above: Slovenski's stolen bike looks similar to this one, but is blue.

Via the AP (who may try to sue me for this fair-use good samaritanism, but let 'em try):

LEWISTON (AP) -- Ruth Slovenski of Lewiston acquired her blue Huffy bicycle as a gift in 1943 when she was a teenager and had been riding it ever since.

But the 66-year-old bike was stolen last weekend after its 83-year-old owner left it unlocked during her regular visit to a local nursing home.

Police said Slovenski arrived at Maison Marcotte at 2:45 p.m. Saturday, leaving the bike near a mailbox. When she went to leave less than two hours later, the bike was gone.

A security video at the nursing home showed a male wearing a hat and dark clothing riding off on a bike that fit the description of the one that was stolen.

Cpl. Matthew Cushman quoted Slovenski as saying the bike, with wide fenders and a large metal basket, had great sentimental value.

Even though it's a Huffy, it's still a gorgeous vintage bike. I suspect that the thief might have had an inkling of this and expected to pawn it off to an unsuspecting collector. Don't let it happen: everyone in southern Maine should keep an eye out for it.