The dark side of light rail

I used to be a fan of light rail projects (and other rail-based mass transit) in large cities like Dallas, Washington DC, and many others, but now I'm not so much anymore. This is partly because it's been hijacked by a largely ludicrous bunch that, in many ways treats their beliefs about transit like a religion.

They're easy to find with Google searches: they are anti-freeway, tossing out fabricated or manipulated statistics to make rail seem cost-effective, and don't take kindly to being called out on. Light rail advocates coldly derided the late "Texans for True Mobility" group, primarily funded by Republicans as a lie, not realizing that they were the ones that were anti-mobility. These people are what I call "light rail fanatics", or LRFs, as I will use in this article.

To avoid pigeon-holing the "LRFs" as a hive mind who talk about the things below, these are common beliefs that run between people, not necessarily that all of the "LRFs" have. If you consider yourself a "light rail fanatic" but find that you disagree with one of the things below, it's okay: that part will not apply to you, but they do go for someone else. There is also a difference between a fan of light rail and a "light rail fanatic". Don't get them mixed up.

Well, for one, LRFs tend to romanticize things. They not only believe there was a calculated scheme to force people to ride buses, but also believe wrong things about streetcars themselves. A variety of TV shows and movies employ the belief that streetcars were far better than they actually were (putting this as fact in the LRFs minds), it also happen to be the same types of universes will people break into spontaneous song and dance. What's less emphasized is that streetcars were slow, broke down at regular rates, and occasionally jumped the tracks. The streetcar lines were already bankrupt by the time GM and its associated companies rolled in. This is held a cardinal belief in the light rail circles.

The second belief that LRFs hold as gospel is a theory known as "induced demand". This is where once a highway is built on previously undeveloped land, sprawl will occur and fill the highway up. But it's false, as sprawl was already there and had a pent-up demand to use it. This theory (and it is a theory) will fall apart under several conditions, proving it (at least mostly) wrong:

1) If induced demand was true, states and cities with declining populations could solve their problem by adding new freeways, thus adding sprawl, and people.

2) If induced demand was true, highways left unexpanded will eventually cause sprawl to stop and build up an ultra-high density core. This means cities with aging highways that haven't had significant updates since the 1960s will have better, higher cores than ones that haven't. But the areas with the tallest buildings have the biggest sprawl.

3) There are so many examples where that isn't the case. Since I run Brazos Buildings & Businesses, I can tell you that the Highway 6 bypass did not "create sprawl". The highway was built sometime in the 1970s (maybe late 1970s). A mall, a few subdivisions, and even a multi-story office building were added along the new bypass in the early 1980s, but it never sucked any life out of the main stretch (Business 6) of town, where all the businesses were located. New stores in the late 1980s and early 1990s, like Target, H-E-B Pantry, Wal-Mart, and Albertsons ALL went for the main road. It wasn't until the 1990s where some big draws started building (Sam's Club, a large movie theater, Lowe's, Wal-Mart Supercenter). It wasn't even until the mid-2000s where hotels, supermarkets, and freeway-fronted restaurants were finally added, wherein the highway finally started to appear like other highways in the case that sprawl surrounded it, but that's because the growth naturally caught up to it as it was expanding anyway (and not even in the DIRECTION of the freeway). These examples are often ignored by the LRFs. Even if it was an anomaly, LRFs and their ilk often cling to that kind of stuff anyway (like freeway removal).

It's rather laughable considering that LRFs are (supposedly) well-educated people, because this is the same type of ridiculously flawed thinking (highways create sprawl) that white supremacists use to "prove" why African-American people are inferior, or the old Middle Ages assumption that rotting meat will spontaneously produce flies.

Dollar for dollar, highways serve more people (and is compatible with their driveways), and even as nice as the light rail is in area that are serviced, the highways are still more popular, because they provide more freedom.

Light rail is designed to satiate a bare minimum of comfort: there's no eating, no smoking, etc.
I can't eat a hamburger in the light rail, or smoke on the light rail (I don't smoke, in case you're wondering), but I can in my car, but if they had eating and/or smoking, the light rail would be dirty, smelly, and generally unpleasant. Cars represent freedom, if you wanted to eat, smoke, or blast music from the stereo, you can. That is one of the reasons why highways are inherently more popular than public transit.

The third belief of LRFs is a lack of understanding for quality of life or different lifestyles. As LRFs are primarily urban dwelling liberals, "different lifestyles" refers to gay and lesbian people, not people who prefer to live in the suburbs, like driving cars, and enjoy having a yard. Coupled with this is a lack of understanding (or refusal to understand) that unless you're playing SimCity, people don't have a constant home-to-work schedule. People stop at restaurants and stores, and go to theaters, schools, businesses, and places all over town. There is no way that a mass transit system could ever effectively cover that as effectively (if at all) as private vehicles do.

The fourth belief of LRFs is that mass transit must be maxed out. Nearly all mass transit systems (especially rail) are public enterprises, which means that don't turn a profit, or at least, not much. Traffic jams on highways are obviously bad and seen by LRFs as a means to "justify" mass transit projects, and if a mass transit system routinely fills up with people packed shoulder to shoulder, it's a "success". If you're crammed next to people who think personal hygiene is entirely optional and you have a problem with that, LRFs will think you're just complaining. The thing is, low ridership tends to be better, have a higher quality of life. And it's not just a quality of life thing, it's also a math comprehension error (see below).

An example of this is the Dallas DART system. DART (the Dallas Area Rapid Transit) built up a fairly extensive light rail network since the 1990s, but it has one of the lowest riderships per mile. That's not a bad thing, and here's why: a bus on a college campus takes 40 people (I'm just making up numbers here for the purpose of example) on a mile journey across to the other side of the campus. A bus going from two major cities takes 40 people 200 miles. That's a fraction of the campus bus. Therefore, the longer bus would be a failure (in theory).

Instead, people LRFs and their sympathizers get wrong conceptions about why ridership is low, and blame the highways. If the highways and light rail system are equally well-built, and the light rail has empty seats, then the highways are superior (and that's why they're built). Light rail fans would rather see highway construction money go toward light rail, the equivalent of having a politician so lousy that he would attempt to undermine his opponent instead of actually trying to be the better candidate.

LRFs would say that it's the other way around, in which corrupt politicians redirect money away from light rail to fund highways. If a politician didn't do light rail for pragmatic reasons (see "Texans for True Mobility", above) and that freeways would serve more people, he is evil. The very reason that rail-based mass transit is found only in very large cities while freeways are as common as McDonald's restaurants is because you need a huge base of people to even have a worthy percentage in the amount of people who ride light rail. A Houston-based forum I go to had a few people deriding the politician that killed a monorail plan in the city while even Sydney's monorail had reached the end of its life after being only in operation since the late 1980s, and was both built and dismantled at an enormous cost.

Again, to be fair to LRFs, they aren't all like each other. Some are legitimately ideologues who think everyone should be forced to ride mass transit whether they like or not, and some are people who would like not be forced to drive every day in rush hour without buses.

I also want people to know that while I came down hard on the "light rail fanatics" and the things they hold as truth, there's nothing here that is inherently opposed to light rail. What I am opposed to is people who demand light rail at any cost and anyone who doesn't nod their head with their theories and wishes is backwards or the Antichrist.

If you'd like, please leave a comment below and we can discuss it further.

It's Photography!

The act of taking photos is a pretty broad category, utilized by a broad spectrum of people, from self-important hipsters to kids who've had too much to drink, and everyone in between. People, cats, porn, people, buildings, lakes, mountains, textures, pretty much everything can be captured with a photograph. But I believe it is probably the single biggest technology of the second millennium, even greater than the flush toilet or the steam engine (though they are admittedly also very high on the list). In many ways, it's a crude form of time travel, allowing you to see certain things the way they used to be (and times you'll never experience), in some ways, it allowed a capture of certain scenes that were previously off-limits. Prior to photography, were there any detailed portraits of the poor, at all?

Because of the speedy, high-capacity digital cameras today, someone could get hundreds of photos to a trip (if not thousands). While it's a bore to sit through them all, isn't it objectively good that they could show you a good portion of what it was like? Back in 1998, I only had one disposable camera to take on my Washington D.C. trip. If I knew better (and knowing what I'd like to see now), I should've taken scads of pictures. My own current photo history includes photos I'm glad I took, and photos I'm kicking myself for never taking. Because I don't have everything documented, I'm often forced to borrow pictures for my better known blog, Brazos Buildings & Businesses. While I missed seeing that last AppleTree in operation, I got to see Dulie Bell (at least the exterior) one last time, as well as G. Rollie, and numerous others (my apologies if you don't know what those refer to).

Just saying something to an underappreciated technology, I guess.

America in 62 Demographics

So, I'm taking an Urban Geography class, and after reading something, I stumbled upon the PRIZM Clusters, which separates America in dozens of separate categories. It's really cool to see this because you can classify how neighborhoods are made up and what kind of changes neighborhoods go through. As America changes, the classifications change too, with 18 (Young Influentials) being described as "the last of the Yuppies", and Cluster 45 (Single City Blues) the type of lifestyle with cities in the East predominantly being the type of soul-sucking transient lifestyle that give cities a bad name. The grimy and gritty, the type with a seedy liquor store right below a flophouse. Or those little apartments as seen in Rocky. And cities can have more than one, there's both #46 (Hispanic Mix) and #1 (Blue Blood Estates) right in Houston, though Houston is an anomaly in general of cities: it is expansive land-wise, younger than East Coast cities, and with lax zoning rules, so as a result you end up with multiple CBDs, neighborhoods close to the city core that are not only single family homes but also filthy rich. It doesn't take into account America's past (where the now-aged "Gray Collars" are), nor does cover Europe, but man does it cover a lot of ground.

Dismantling memories, one building at a time

In the last past decade, I've been more tuned into my route to Houston from 290, and have come to recognize things along the way (a friend of mine recently fell prey to the fancy-looking entrance to Prairie View as a sign of getting closer), but things have sure changed in the last 10 years. I remember going down the stretch of 290 outside of Fairfield returning home from a school field trip, desperately regretting not going to the restroom before leaving (I managed to make it in time). At the time, the road was a divided four lane highway with a few exurban subdivisions but not much beyond that. Then it became a divided highway, and now there's a giant interchange there that's not even complete. The subdivision has grown, there's a huge new H-E-B, a huge new-ish outlet mall, and restaurants continuing to build. And that's not even the part that depresses me. Things that I had come to recognize: super-high fast food signs at Beltway 8 and 290, holding a Taco Bell, McDonald's, and Wendy's, the same stuff I can get at home, but so much cooler because of where they were. And there was some stuff that wasn't that I came to recognize anyway, like a rice milling facility, a sign manufacturer (a deteriorating McDonald's sign can be seen outside, I've known it for the last past six years), and much, much more. Too bad most of that is coming down for a highway expansion, and it will never be the same again. There used to be a large car dealership in Hempstead, Lawrence Marshall Hempstead, which featured billboards (in the car lot) displaying six brands of cars they sold (Chevrolet, Hyundai, etc.)

Over the years since it closed 5 years ago, I've seen the fabric on the signs fade and fall off. It's depressing, because at one point in the not-too-distant past, every trip had a sort of mystique to it. Despite the somewhat grimy appearance of the continuing inner trip, it really felt like you were going somewhere cool. Heck, looking at the list I created in response to this change that I've posted recently, just hearing something like this while looking at those high-mast fast food signs brings something back.

It's a rather strange situation, since the times when I felt best about these things weren't the best of times. 2008 was not a great year by any means, but because of the trips I took to Houston (and Galveston) masks that. Remember when I admitted that I tended to look back fondly on my high school years, even when the actual evidence suggests that I'm lying myself and scrubbing out some key portions? Stuff like that, for sure.

Dressed to the fours...or the threes...or twos...or the ones...

My brother and I are very different people. He graduated from college several years ago, I have not yet done so. His idea of fun is being outdoors and doing things like rock climbing, while mine is playing video and computer games, and so forth.

One of his criticisms of me is that I dress poorly (he tends to hold this view to his older cousins, who have the excuse of being a computer programmer and telecommuting, respectively). He fails to understand that my wearing a t-shirt and baggy cargo shorts (or jeans, depending on the weather), and a general apathy toward shaving ("scruffy" at best) is totally normal for many in my position. For the females of the "college student" species, the trend has been in the last few years to have long t-shirts and leggings/tights (whether or not they actually look decent in this combo--some do, some do not) depending on weather (boots appear when the weather gets cold, but thankfully the uggs have mostly disappeared), proving that there is a distaff counterpart to the "scruffy college student" look.

While I still dress decently for church, is it worth it to dress better for school? I think I made more tips at my job when I dressed nicer (but wow, was it hard to get around with dress shoes and jeans, especially when I was shuttling carts at high 90° temperatures) but I don't think it has that much of an impact otherwise. What do you think?