You can probably take any random person off the street, put them in as project manager, and complete this for less. The incompetency the government has in handling projects is absurd.
probably more to do contracting bureaucracy than incompetence. With all of these public works projects there are just too many hands in the bowl to make it efficient. The alternative would be to do it dictatorially, which would not be acceptable either.
Worth pointing out that everyone's favorite example of decent mass transit in the US, the NYC subways system, was largely constructed by private companies, or constructed by the city and immediately leased to private companies.
Completing this project isn't necessarily the right solution. In this case, based on the construction costs and operating costs versus prospective usefulness, this project needed someone on board sufficiently early with the awareness and authority to say "this is a bad idea, let's not do it".
Plenty of private industries have incidents. How would this be different? There's already well-established legal and insurance systems in place to handle them. Also, privately run infrastructure has more of incentive to have a safe track (literally) record. Unlike government monopoly, they could loose a lot of money, lose their contract, or both.
Plenty of modern cities with highly functional urban cores do just fine with public mass transit. DC should be able to do the same.
It is a matter of fixing the right things rather than giving up and handing it over to private industry. Sadly too many interests in the USA are trigger-happy about throttling any/all public transit.
Doesn’t competition for gasoline, cable tv and phone service keep prices down?
Why can't this work for transportation?
Imagine what an Elon Musk could do with Amtrak or the New York subway.
More importantly, streetcars also have much higher passenger capacity than buses. This particular bus route in DC is stretched for capacity and already has buses coming every minute or two during rush hour, so they can't just add more buses.
DC's streetcar and subway systems aren't supposed to address the same need. The metro system, in terms of station placement/spacing, schedules, line routes, etc., is designed to efficiently move people from the suburbs to the core and back again. It's poorly laid out for moving people within the city; the hub and spoke layout means almost everyone needs to transfer and trips are often circuitous. For my commute to my last job, for example, getting to work via metro required walking five blocks, going into downtown, changing lines, coming back out from downtown, and walking an additional four blocks. It took 45 minutes, vs a half hour just to walk to work or ten minutes to bike, and this is typical of getting from place to place within the city by metro. Most people don't bother.
The envisioned broader streetcar network would have been explicitly designed to address intra-urban trips, and would have had a very different layout from metro, with stations spaced more closely together, and fewer lines passing through downtown.
Lots of cities have different systems to address these needs, since it's difficult or impossible to design a system that does both well.
the hub and spoke layout means almost everyone needs to transfer and trips are often circuitous
I don't know how well it works in practice, but ever since I saw the map[1] for the Moscow Metro I've always liked it. Especially the ring that presumably? keeps people from needing to go thru the core. It probably works better than most systems. E.g. NYC's subway doesn't do well if you're trying to get from outer borough to outer borough. Many such trips involve going thru Manhattan.
It really depends on whether the goal is simply to move people or to also spur reinvestment along the corridor. I won't debate whether or not the second goal is valid, but the second goal is why a streetcar can be preferable:
* Bus - Super flexible, cheapest, similar capacity to street car. However, because of its inherent flexibility, buses can be rerouted or cancelled. Therefore there is less incentive to invest in the corridor because a customer group can easily vanish.
* Buses with dedicated lanes - A good compromise between bus and street car, but drivers sitting in traffic will see the nearly empty bus lanes and complain why the road isn't being used.
* Street Car - Cheaper than subway, but because the tracks are laid, it's much less likely to be rerouted or cancelled, creating more incentive to invest in the corridor.
* Subway - Most expensive and least likely to be rerouted or cancelled; creates most incentive to invest in the corridor.
The lessened flexibility is actually a big plus for a side effect of transit--private investment. It's much easier to develop adjacent to non-movable transit infrastructure like a streetcar or light rail than it is a bus route which can change in an instant. BRT is a decent compromise, but it's still quite expensive to do.
> DDOT, citing confidentiality rules in working with construction contractor Dean-
Facchina, declined a public-records request to provide an item-by-item breakdown.
Well, there you have it. The money was stolen by shady construction contractors. The construction industry in the United States - and seemingly only in the United States - is incredibly corrupt.
As a DC resident, this project is really ridiculous for a few reasons. First of all, it is no faster than a bus because it still does not have a dedicated right-of-way. It also follows the side of the street instead of the center, so it constantly smashes mirrors of parked cars. Sometimes, people parallel park poorly and completely block the tracks, delaying service until the car can be towed. Buses don't have that problem, obviously.
Finally, it is forecast to make $450,000 in revenue per year on $5.1 million in operating expenses. I realize most transit systems don't make a profit, but that is crazy. You could literally buy every single streetcar rider rides on UberPool for less money.
Paying for Uber rides does not include paying for new roads. DC traffic is bad enough they need higher density options. If that's busses with dedicated right of way, or street cars with dedicated lanes, or new subway stations they need to do something that people will actually use.
PS: I don't live in DC in large part due to traffic issues, but also giving up the right to vote bothers me deeply. So, this is from someone that lives close to, but not in DC.
Paying for rail doesn't do anything to alleviate the need to pay for roads though. The comparison really is paying for trolley vs paying for Uber (or whatever)
Rail is only useful in certain situations and it's only useful if done correctly. Neither of these things are happening in this case.
And don't worry about your vote. It's really irrelevant. It's really about making you feel like you have a voice then actually you having a voice.
There are a few reasons it's not ridiculous - will encourage development, it will encourage more people than buses will to switch modes, will make everyone healthier (lower med costs).
One area the streetcar plans to serve is the H Street Corridor. It's currently not really served by the subway system, so supposedly the powers-that-be decided it was a lower-cost solution. At $200m and 10 years though (and counting), I wish a subway system expansion would have been implemented.
I would gladly pay more tax dollars for a more extensive (and less sucky) subway network here in DC. Instead, I'm spending that money on Uber, when I find out that the next train comes in 20 minutes.
I should add that a monthly pass for the DC metro costs more than twice than NYC's (the 2nd most expensive in the country), and more than triple San Francisco's.
The DC Metro is an abomination. I regularly spend about 40 minutes waiting for my girlfriend at the end of one of the lines as she gets on a trip that should take 20. Everything from "Single tracking on line between EVERYWHERE due to construction" to train inexplicably stopping on tracks for 10 minutes, to trains simply deciding not to run in that direction with absolutely no warning, no explanation why, and no ETL on the next train.
It boggles the mind to think how any work gets done in DC when the public transit system is so terrible.
The saddest part is that Metro used to be incredible. I first moved to DC in 1993, and back then the trains were on time, the cars were clean, and the fares were low. It was excellent. People routinely pointed to it as the best thing about living in the District.
It's taken two decades of neglect and mismanagement to turn it into the horror show it is today.
IMHO, the turning point several years ago was when Metro went from automated mode to manual mode after having to go from 6 car trains to 8 car trains. Apparently, the automated mode, where the train driver just looks out for anomalies, doesn't have enough precision to handle 8 car trains that consume the entire platform at stations.
Under automated mode, you had consistent threshold breaking and acceleration, door opening times, etc. It was a very smooth ride.
The switch to manual mode was much more due to the fatal Red Line accident than it was due to 8 cars.
Either way, it's a symptom of the fact that the WMTA Union has suppressed the number of full-time positions for mechanics to ensure that existing mechanics get plenty of overtime pay. The result is a system where a single mechanic working a 12 hours shift is preferable to two mechanics working 6 hours each and getting something fixed. From the perspective of ANYONE other than the unionized workers, this is not ideal.
Any riders can see the results of this on a daily basis. The escalators remain broken for months on end, and disabled riders end up having to go to entirely different stations because the elevators will remain out for months as well.
I'll paste a link to a publication that I really don't like, but this particular article is actually very accurate. Sadly, the non-fringe media in DC are afraid to cover this story, despite the fact that anyone who has ever applied to work at the DC Metro can tell you this first-hand, and the data backs it up:
As someone who lives in the bay area, I think the DC Metro is absolutely amazing. The idea that your public transportation is always under heavy construction is kinda nice -- at least they're actively working on it. And you know, it actually exists at all.
Washington DC has some deep issues with a legacy of discrimination and urban decay that created a highly disadvantage population in the cities poor neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, they've tried to use government employment to fix these issues by turning certain agencies, especially the metro, into jobs programs for poorly educated and socialized locals.
This is the primary problem with the DC metro. It's staffed by a croneyist union who holds none of the employees accountable, and who simply pass any and all wage increases onto riders without even trying to attempt to find cost reductions via efficiency. It's an awful, awful system.
> At $200m and 10 years though (and counting), I wish a subway system expansion would have been implemented.
Nice thought, but not realistic.
Firstly, $200 million for full metrorail construction is way low. The NoMA station cost over $100 million, and was an above-ground infill station that required no new track. That was just the cost to build a new station. The Potomac Yard station in Virginia is budgeted in the $210-$270 million range, and is also infill and above ground, but will require a slight track rerouting. An H Street station, if it were even possible (and I'm skeptical because the whole area is riddled with other rail infrastructure) would involve new underground track through newly bored tunnels, and a new underground station. I bet $200 million is off by at least a factor of two.
Secondly, even if the city did want to spend the money on it, they wouldn't be able to. DC can't unilaterally spend money on Metro; all new construction has to be divided amongst eight different jurisdictions according to a legislatively pre-determined formula, and the WMATA board (which has representatives from all the jurisdictions on it) has to vote to approve it. This basically never happens for new construction in the city, because DC is a minority on the board and none of the suburban jurisdictions want to pay for core infrastructure, only extensions. DC has taken to replicating more and more of WMATA's services under its DOT umbrella just to avoid having to deal with the bureaucratic nightmare and mismanagement of the transit authority. The (wildly successful) Circulator bus system is an example of this, as it in some cases directly overlaps with WMATA bus service. The streetcar would have been another such attempt.
Third: if by some miracle DC could get agreement on justifying new underground metrorail construction and pull the funding together for it, H St. would be nowhere near the top of the list of priorities. Metro has major rush-hour capacity issues that are in dire need of addressing, and a random spur out to H St. wouldn't help with any of them. New construction should go towards an additional Potomac crossing north of Rosslyn, and a separated Blue line running north of the current blue/orange/silver shared track. This has been proposed to run along M, and could conceivably eventually serve Georgetown, Logan circle, and Union station.
(None of this is to say the streetcar project isn't a clusterfuck. It is. WMATA just isn't the answer.)
I wasn't implying that $200 million would anywhere near cover the costs of a subway expansion, nor that an H street expansion is at the top of my WMATA wish list (that would be the fabled "Purple Line"). But at this order of magnitude of costs/time, we might as well go all in with a subway expansion. It would be a huge boost to the neighborhood; I hear this all the time about H Street and other places in Northeast: "...but there's not a metro stop there".
Actually, the Purple Line isn't WMATA either, for the same reason DC avoids it: too much bureaucracy to get it done. The Purple Line will be administered by the Maryland Transit Administration.
I live a couple of blocks from this boondoggle, but some of the issues aren't strictly the streetcars fault. For instance, this very morning while walking my dogs, a DC tow truck sped past us all code 3. We rounded the corner onto H ST, and saw the tow truck using the wheel lift, fully extended, to push a car out of the way of the streetcar. And it wasn't like this car was just over the line, the driver had left its ass end hanging about a foot and a half out into the traffic lane. Whomever was driving that wrecker was masterful, blocking the entire street for only about 60 seconds while he rammed the car into place.
Any improvement in public transit is also going to require improvements in the quality of driving out there. People are selfish idiots when in their cars.
A lot of cities have built street cars in the middle of the road, or they place concrete edge between parking and the street car's lane to stop exactly that from happening. Why didn't DC?
This seems incredibly dangerous and poorly thought out:
I understand that civil engineers are sometimes handcuffed with what they can do. But the city really needs to decide how seriously it is about this project, and either design the city around the streetcars or just eliminate them completely.
It just looks like they tried to half-arse it and it blow up in their face.
Honestly Salt Lake City is a map of where the US needs to go, not DC. Cycling lanes everywhere and streetcars with dedicated space and priority. It isn't perfect (cycling lanes need more protection, like Copenhagen, actual concrete to stop cars driving or parking in them) but it is darn good by the US's standard.
I've lived in two European cities with extensive tram lines. Both of them have trams on the streets, but the other one also has dedicated lanes in places where streets are wide enough. The dedicated ones are very fast and enjoyable to ride, but even the on-the-street lines are way better than buses.
Blocking the rails happens very rarely, so I assume it's about everyone getting used to it, plus hefty towing fees.
56 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadYou can probably take any random person off the street, put them in as project manager, and complete this for less. The incompetency the government has in handling projects is absurd.
Each begets the other forever.
You forgot corruption, the third member of the triad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_S...
The subway wasn't brought under full public control until 1940, after which there was very little expansion.
http://www.npr.org/2015/10/22/450583840/in-d-c-and-china-two...
A little "uber" or "air bnb" type disruption is what mass ground transportation needs.
It is a matter of fixing the right things rather than giving up and handing it over to private industry. Sadly too many interests in the USA are trigger-happy about throttling any/all public transit.
PS: I live in a city with an extensive streetcar network which is still expanding (Zurich)
The envisioned broader streetcar network would have been explicitly designed to address intra-urban trips, and would have had a very different layout from metro, with stations spaced more closely together, and fewer lines passing through downtown.
Lots of cities have different systems to address these needs, since it's difficult or impossible to design a system that does both well.
I don't know how well it works in practice, but ever since I saw the map[1] for the Moscow Metro I've always liked it. Especially the ring that presumably? keeps people from needing to go thru the core. It probably works better than most systems. E.g. NYC's subway doesn't do well if you're trying to get from outer borough to outer borough. Many such trips involve going thru Manhattan.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Moscow_m...
* Bus - Super flexible, cheapest, similar capacity to street car. However, because of its inherent flexibility, buses can be rerouted or cancelled. Therefore there is less incentive to invest in the corridor because a customer group can easily vanish.
* Buses with dedicated lanes - A good compromise between bus and street car, but drivers sitting in traffic will see the nearly empty bus lanes and complain why the road isn't being used.
* Street Car - Cheaper than subway, but because the tracks are laid, it's much less likely to be rerouted or cancelled, creating more incentive to invest in the corridor.
* Subway - Most expensive and least likely to be rerouted or cancelled; creates most incentive to invest in the corridor.
Well, there you have it. The money was stolen by shady construction contractors. The construction industry in the United States - and seemingly only in the United States - is incredibly corrupt.
Is this an example of Poe's law? Isn't "the construction industry" "incredibly corrupt" pretty much everywhere?
Finally, it is forecast to make $450,000 in revenue per year on $5.1 million in operating expenses. I realize most transit systems don't make a profit, but that is crazy. You could literally buy every single streetcar rider rides on UberPool for less money.
PS: I don't live in DC in large part due to traffic issues, but also giving up the right to vote bothers me deeply. So, this is from someone that lives close to, but not in DC.
Rail is only useful in certain situations and it's only useful if done correctly. Neither of these things are happening in this case.
And don't worry about your vote. It's really irrelevant. It's really about making you feel like you have a voice then actually you having a voice.
https://twitter.com/unsuckdcmetro
https://twitter.com/dcmetrosucks
One area the streetcar plans to serve is the H Street Corridor. It's currently not really served by the subway system, so supposedly the powers-that-be decided it was a lower-cost solution. At $200m and 10 years though (and counting), I wish a subway system expansion would have been implemented.
I would gladly pay more tax dollars for a more extensive (and less sucky) subway network here in DC. Instead, I'm spending that money on Uber, when I find out that the next train comes in 20 minutes.
I should add that a monthly pass for the DC metro costs more than twice than NYC's (the 2nd most expensive in the country), and more than triple San Francisco's.
It boggles the mind to think how any work gets done in DC when the public transit system is so terrible.
Oh, wait...
It's taken two decades of neglect and mismanagement to turn it into the horror show it is today.
Under automated mode, you had consistent threshold breaking and acceleration, door opening times, etc. It was a very smooth ride.
Either way, it's a symptom of the fact that the WMTA Union has suppressed the number of full-time positions for mechanics to ensure that existing mechanics get plenty of overtime pay. The result is a system where a single mechanic working a 12 hours shift is preferable to two mechanics working 6 hours each and getting something fixed. From the perspective of ANYONE other than the unionized workers, this is not ideal.
Any riders can see the results of this on a daily basis. The escalators remain broken for months on end, and disabled riders end up having to go to entirely different stations because the elevators will remain out for months as well.
I'll paste a link to a publication that I really don't like, but this particular article is actually very accurate. Sadly, the non-fringe media in DC are afraid to cover this story, despite the fact that anyone who has ever applied to work at the DC Metro can tell you this first-hand, and the data backs it up:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/03/29/exposed-dc-metro-...
I used to be a daily metro rider.
Washington DC has some deep issues with a legacy of discrimination and urban decay that created a highly disadvantage population in the cities poor neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, they've tried to use government employment to fix these issues by turning certain agencies, especially the metro, into jobs programs for poorly educated and socialized locals.
This is the primary problem with the DC metro. It's staffed by a croneyist union who holds none of the employees accountable, and who simply pass any and all wage increases onto riders without even trying to attempt to find cost reductions via efficiency. It's an awful, awful system.
Nice thought, but not realistic.
Firstly, $200 million for full metrorail construction is way low. The NoMA station cost over $100 million, and was an above-ground infill station that required no new track. That was just the cost to build a new station. The Potomac Yard station in Virginia is budgeted in the $210-$270 million range, and is also infill and above ground, but will require a slight track rerouting. An H Street station, if it were even possible (and I'm skeptical because the whole area is riddled with other rail infrastructure) would involve new underground track through newly bored tunnels, and a new underground station. I bet $200 million is off by at least a factor of two.
Secondly, even if the city did want to spend the money on it, they wouldn't be able to. DC can't unilaterally spend money on Metro; all new construction has to be divided amongst eight different jurisdictions according to a legislatively pre-determined formula, and the WMATA board (which has representatives from all the jurisdictions on it) has to vote to approve it. This basically never happens for new construction in the city, because DC is a minority on the board and none of the suburban jurisdictions want to pay for core infrastructure, only extensions. DC has taken to replicating more and more of WMATA's services under its DOT umbrella just to avoid having to deal with the bureaucratic nightmare and mismanagement of the transit authority. The (wildly successful) Circulator bus system is an example of this, as it in some cases directly overlaps with WMATA bus service. The streetcar would have been another such attempt.
Third: if by some miracle DC could get agreement on justifying new underground metrorail construction and pull the funding together for it, H St. would be nowhere near the top of the list of priorities. Metro has major rush-hour capacity issues that are in dire need of addressing, and a random spur out to H St. wouldn't help with any of them. New construction should go towards an additional Potomac crossing north of Rosslyn, and a separated Blue line running north of the current blue/orange/silver shared track. This has been proposed to run along M, and could conceivably eventually serve Georgetown, Logan circle, and Union station.
(None of this is to say the streetcar project isn't a clusterfuck. It is. WMATA just isn't the answer.)
Any improvement in public transit is also going to require improvements in the quality of driving out there. People are selfish idiots when in their cars.
A lot of cities have built street cars in the middle of the road, or they place concrete edge between parking and the street car's lane to stop exactly that from happening. Why didn't DC?
This seems incredibly dangerous and poorly thought out:
http://i.imgur.com/WbWrf9l.jpg
I understand that civil engineers are sometimes handcuffed with what they can do. But the city really needs to decide how seriously it is about this project, and either design the city around the streetcars or just eliminate them completely.
It just looks like they tried to half-arse it and it blow up in their face.
Honestly Salt Lake City is a map of where the US needs to go, not DC. Cycling lanes everywhere and streetcars with dedicated space and priority. It isn't perfect (cycling lanes need more protection, like Copenhagen, actual concrete to stop cars driving or parking in them) but it is darn good by the US's standard.
Blocking the rails happens very rarely, so I assume it's about everyone getting used to it, plus hefty towing fees.
http://www.citylab.com/politics/2015/10/from-250-million-to-...