L.A. Subway/Light Rail Planning
- Thread starter WhoozOn1st
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LA has made quite a commitment to light rail transit. My kid took the Amtrak there and then maneuvered around on the subway to visit her friends and returned telling me that ."the nice thing about Los Angeles is that you don't have to own a car." A slight exaggeration, I'm sure.
I'd like to see the feds pay for some of this as part of the stimulus. The fact is, the Los Angelinos were willing to make a huge financial committment to transit with their own money. That's a good
indication that its a good prospect for federal money.
IF you are traveling between areas served by rail transit or if you work downtown and have a car at the other end, L.A.'s public transit is actually not that bad.
The problem is that there are HUGE swaths of the L.A. basin that are inaccessible by rail transit (and bus transit in L.A. is a joke).
What if you live in La Canada Flintridge and work in Santa Monica or live in Woodland Hills and work in Torrance? Actually, the decentralized nature of the city (such a large proportion of people work and live away from Downtown [the CBD]) makes the current hub-and-spoke system unpalatable to the vast majority of Angelenos.
To convert L.A. to the kind of place that would make a car-free lifestyle feasible, you'd need a system that would make the New York MTA, the Paris Metro, or the London Underground look like a toy train system.
I'm all for L.A. trying to do it, but you can't pretend it's going to be accomplished by two or three more light rail lines and a subway to the sea.
Even some places that are accessible by transit take a long time. A few of us at AU gathering went out to Cantor's deli. The transit info lady gave lousy instructions necessitating a long walk one way. Even so, I remember thinking at the time that this would have been a lot quicker by car, and it was a good thing we were going as much for the journey as for the destination. It would have been much worse if we had not been starting and ending at Union Station (I think for those trips suggested by Jackal, one should get a motel room at the destination and return the next day.)
In the San Fernando Valley, where my mother lives, the buses run on a grid, so to get anywhere you have to tranfer. Many buses run hourly. In summer heat, that becomes a safety issue for elderly people like my mother after we took away her car. A grid is pretty much the only way to run transit in a large area that, like Jackal pointed out, does not have a center.
Also, why is Parsons-Brinckerhoff in all of these big projects? Sure they've built a lot of the current LA transit system, all over time and over budget, and with an expensive sinkhole to their credit. I think they are incompetent; my brother thinks they intentionally bid in a way to get highly profitable change orders (fraud?). Either way doesn't sound good to me. For you easterners, Parsons-Brinckerhoff was in on the Big Dig, too. It also pains me that they'll be part of high speed rail in California. Aren't there any other engineering firms that do big projects ethically and competently in this day and age?
-Alice (native Angeleno moved to a small town, and car heretic who lives in a household with two vans per person)
Joel N. Weber II
Engineer
It's possible for the government to run the bidding process in such a way that a company that's planning on massive change orders will be willing to bid ``lower'' than a company that's going to do things in the most cost effective way with minimal change orders and the cost fully described up front, and that the government can be too incompetent to select the vendor that will actually be more cost effective overall. Whether that's happening in LA, I don't know.
Joel N. Weber II
Engineer
I'm not sure there's any city that really quite works on a hub and spoke system. If the New York City Subway system has a hub, I haven't figured out where it is. The Boston subway system certainly has a hub (Park St, Downtown Crossing, Government Center, and State Street), and the fact that you have to go through those stations to change from one line to another (unless you're going between the northern parts of the Green Line and Orange Line, in which case you can change at North Station or Haymarket) means that for certain trips, the travel time is pathetic (for example, from the far end of the D branch of the Green Line to Alewife on the Red Line).
If we want a serious investment in mass transit, anything that is a highway in any sense of the word ought to have mass transit service at least every 15 minutes. In systems where multiple transfers are needed, more frequent headways are probably a good idea.
Uh, that was my point. L.A. needs a non-hub-and-spoke system because it is such a decentralized city. Right now, it has one. Virtually every mode of transit (Metrolink, Amtrak, and Redple Line, which is the vast majority of commuters) offers exactly one place to connect: Union Station. (The exceptions are the Blue/Redple interchange at 7th St/Metro Center and the Blue/Green interchange at Rosa Parks (about 8 miles south of Downtown) and the IEOC line, which runs from Riverside to Oceanside (and connects to the 91 and OC lines at Fullerton).
This system doesn't serve the huge majority of Los Angeles commuters (those who don't live just a few minutes from where they work) who commute from one suburb to another over much greater distances than most other urban areas. My grandfather's daily commute was 45 minutes (without traffic; much longer with it). I know people who live in Torrance and commute to Pasadena. Remember, the L.A. basin covers an area as tall as Boston to Providence and almost as wide as Boston to Springfield. Virtually the entire area is filled with endless decentralized suburban development, and people can (and do) live in one decentralized area and work in another decentralized area. This makes planning effective mass transit extremely difficult. Right now, the best that is offered is a way for people who live in suburbs to drive to a park and ride Metrolink station and catch a ride into Downtown--but even then, the percentage of commuters who do commute to Downtown is a much smaller component than people in other cities who commute into that city's CBD. A car-free lifestyle is virtually impossible, not only because the "last mile" (between the park and ride and the person's house) is practically uncovered by mass transit but also because the layout of the system appeals to a relatively small percentage of the region's commuters.
I'm going to revise my earlier statement. It would take a system beyond anything else in the world to make living in L.A. car-free a reality. The London Underground would have to cover an area from Heathrow to Chatham, Kent, and the Metró would have to blanket an area from CDG to Chartres.
The best we're going to get is a system which expands upon the current target audience to make park-and-ride more attractive to Downtown commuters (provide more lines so that train stations aren't as far from people's houses and/or raise the lines' speeds so commuting by train is substantially faster than driving, coupled with a dense network in the downtown area so people can get to work with a minimum of walking) and/or choose a relatively small geographic area (say, Hollywood to Pasadena, about the distance from Cambridge to Quincy) and blanket it with enough mass transit to make walking--and not driving--to the train truly feasible.
Toughest part of living in SoCal is getting girls without having a car. If you don't drive, they don't wanna know you.
"What kinda car do you have?"
"I don't drive. Haven't for years. I ride trains."
"Here's my number."
Usually something like (555) GO TO HELL.
Oh well.
Fortunately the wonder of the internet has resolved that difficulty.
"What kinda car do you have?"
"I don't drive. Haven't for years. I ride trains."
"Here's my number."
Usually something like (555) GO TO HELL.
Oh well.
Fortunately the wonder of the internet has resolved that difficulty.
I'd say that you live too far from where you work. Even if one had a car, why would you want to spend so much of your life in it?
Frankly, I'm surprised how many people confuse pollution, debt, and foreign energy dependence for the American dream.
Pittsburgh, perhaps?
That most people are actually going to downtown there, probably helps enormously.
Probably, but then again, with SoCal housing prices, many people can't afford to move, especially if they're renting.
Besides, you can't design a system and expect people to use it on the basis of what they should do. You have to design the system to make it useful for what people actually do. In other words, work the system around the people, not the people around the system.
Besides, if someone lives in North Hollywood and works in Burbank or lives in Canoga Park and works in Chatsworth, making it possible to live car-free would still require an absolute monster of a system unless you developed each of these areas separately.
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Joel N. Weber II
Engineer
We could consider a hypothetical system where the subway-type trains effectively were 50 or 100 systems, each with its own hub (and probably some interconnections so that if you were going to an adjacent subway system you might not have to go through that hub). Then we could try to build a system where you could get a one seat ride from any of those 50 or 100 hubs to any other such hub.
If you want one seat rides to be available to 100 different stations and each train only makes 10 stops after you board on average, you'll need 10 trains available from each station. Maybe this can actually work with double tracked railroads: each station could have five routes going in one direction and five routes going in the other direction, and with three minute spacing between trains, that would get you 15 minute headways on each route. But I haven't looked carefully at whether the relative locations of the stations will be such that this will actually work out this well.
The other problem is that I think most of the housing in LA is just not dense enough for a subway system.
So maybe you build a hubless commuter rail network with 100 stations, run various subway/light rail tracks out of some of those stations where transit oriented development starts happening, and resort to park and ride everywhere else.
Next question is how fast the commuter rail system needs to be for people to consistently find it faster than driving. That one seat service I'm envisioning probably requires a stop every 5 miles, and a stop every five miles is probably not how you build a commuter train that averages 90 MPH from the time you board the train to the time you detrain, which is probably what you need for a lot of commutes to offset some of the other overhead in taking a train to be competitive with a 60 MPH single occupancy vehicle. So maybe you do need quad track or something.
You may be able to get a significant number of businesses to move themselves to be within a 5 minute walk of rail hubs once there are actually rail services actually worth using if you're willing to wait 5-10 years to see real progress in getting businesses moved to more transit friendly locations.
If you want one seat rides to be available to 100 different stations and each train only makes 10 stops after you board on average, you'll need 10 trains available from each station. Maybe this can actually work with double tracked railroads: each station could have five routes going in one direction and five routes going in the other direction, and with three minute spacing between trains, that would get you 15 minute headways on each route. But I haven't looked carefully at whether the relative locations of the stations will be such that this will actually work out this well.
The other problem is that I think most of the housing in LA is just not dense enough for a subway system.
So maybe you build a hubless commuter rail network with 100 stations, run various subway/light rail tracks out of some of those stations where transit oriented development starts happening, and resort to park and ride everywhere else.
Next question is how fast the commuter rail system needs to be for people to consistently find it faster than driving. That one seat service I'm envisioning probably requires a stop every 5 miles, and a stop every five miles is probably not how you build a commuter train that averages 90 MPH from the time you board the train to the time you detrain, which is probably what you need for a lot of commutes to offset some of the other overhead in taking a train to be competitive with a 60 MPH single occupancy vehicle. So maybe you do need quad track or something.
You may be able to get a significant number of businesses to move themselves to be within a 5 minute walk of rail hubs once there are actually rail services actually worth using if you're willing to wait 5-10 years to see real progress in getting businesses moved to more transit friendly locations.
George Harris
Engineer
There is a lot you don't know here. I have worked for PB for 20 years and am currently involved in the California HSR. PBis BY FAR the best in the business. And they do operated at the highest level of integrity in what they do.
George
What is "PB"?
Joel N. Weber II
Engineer
Parsons-Brinckerhoff, I suspect.
George Harris
Engineer
Well, Whooz touched on a real problem: You can't pick up girls on the subway. So Los Angelenos are going to keep their cars. I'm not troubled at all by the park and ride concept. Zealots like me would like everyone to be able to stroll to the subway stop, but that's not realistic in the LA basin. So go ahead and do park and ride. Its still a big improvement.
I do believe that public corruption is a real problem, endemic to these kinds of projects, and should be dealt with in an aggressive and systematic way. Best contracting practices for controlling costs, and really mean, nasty, federal prosecutors from the Public Integrity section of DOJ who train the local feds to do the same. My state went 15 years without a federal public integrity prosecution, and believe me, it shows in the kind of government we get.
Joel N. Weber II
Engineer
If you're going to do that at all, you need to be a little bit careful about it. You don't want to create a situation where anyone who has any concern at all about their long term future will choose not to take the job for fear that someone else's minor screwup that they could not reasonably have been expected to know about might ruin their life, leaving as the only candidates those who are incapable of considering what might happen a year or five from now when choosing their actions.
George Harris
Engineer
Birdy, let me tell you a little story:
In 1986-1988 I was working for a consultant involved in the DART planning in Dallas. We were determined that we would NOT end up with low-ball price estimates. Instead, a very good job was done making sure the "engineer's estimates" included all likely and many unlikely contingencies.
Were we thanked for it? NO. Instead the authority said, well since these cost estimates are usually low, it is going to be really expensive, so we will postpone the whole thing. As a result, the only thing we got for doing a very good job was to lose or jobs, both corporately and personally.
A few years later, when construction of DART actually began, with other consutants, and they ahd all our work handed to them, our estimates proved to be very solid, and in some instances higher than actual bid prices by up to 20% or more.
Again, any thanks, it is great that we are spending less than antiicpated! NO.
There are plenty of watchdogs looking over the shoulder of any design and construction management consultant already. Occasionally some actually know what they are looking at. Again at an even earlier time and another employer, we were doing some highway design work in a state I won't name. The person looking over my shoulder, and a few other shoulders in our office, knew so little about what we were doing and we spent so much time explaining a lot of the basics of what went into a design to him, we felt like we should be charging the guy tuition in addition to the design fees.
Most of the characters with watchdog agencies we deal with really do not know the difference between good and bad quality work in this field. They only know cheap, and good engineering is not cheap.
In 1986-1988 I was working for a consultant involved in the DART planning in Dallas. We were determined that we would NOT end up with low-ball price estimates. Instead, a very good job was done making sure the "engineer's estimates" included all likely and many unlikely contingencies.
Were we thanked for it? NO. Instead the authority said, well since these cost estimates are usually low, it is going to be really expensive, so we will postpone the whole thing. As a result, the only thing we got for doing a very good job was to lose or jobs, both corporately and personally.
A few years later, when construction of DART actually began, with other consutants, and they ahd all our work handed to them, our estimates proved to be very solid, and in some instances higher than actual bid prices by up to 20% or more.
Again, any thanks, it is great that we are spending less than antiicpated! NO.
There are plenty of watchdogs looking over the shoulder of any design and construction management consultant already. Occasionally some actually know what they are looking at. Again at an even earlier time and another employer, we were doing some highway design work in a state I won't name. The person looking over my shoulder, and a few other shoulders in our office, knew so little about what we were doing and we spent so much time explaining a lot of the basics of what went into a design to him, we felt like we should be charging the guy tuition in addition to the design fees.
Most of the characters with watchdog agencies we deal with really do not know the difference between good and bad quality work in this field. They only know cheap, and good engineering is not cheap.
George Harris
Engineer
Way, way too true.
Another favorite specification "clause of death" in my opinion is those two words added at the end of a list of acceptable products, "or equal" What they really mean is, the cheapest thing you can find that will last until you can get out of town.
A perfectly reasonable point, but you are speaking about competence and best practices in constructing highly complex projects, of a type (rail) which are uncommon in the U.S., which is a huge issue, no doubt, and I am speaking about graft. Grafters are not terribly sophisticated,and to address Alanb's point, the people who get prosecuted are almost always way over the line in any semblance of ethicality.
Usually its some fairly blatant deal. In my jurisdiction, they had a completely unqualified guy (the bag man, actually, ) be the construction manager. That's one red flag. Then the bribees were paid through inflated change orders, although the payoff could have happened any old way. The phoney-baloney "consultant" contract is a favorite. It was a federal prosecution, so naturally there were heavy duty money laundering charges to lay on these guys. My point is, that the DOJ Public Integrity section has been defanged just like the guys at the FDA who are supposed to detect Salmonella in peanut butter. Graft is a fact of life on the projects the size we are talking about. Don't just hope for the best. Plan for it the way you plan for other contingencies. With the bazillions of dollars being spent on public works and an ethical milieu which has been on the downswing for a while, we will regret it if we don't take the initiative.
George Harris
Engineer
You seem to have missed the paragraph I left in above.
It would be a nice thing, but for the most part the "watchdogs" I have had the dubious pleasure of encountering would not know the difference between good and bad work if it was explained to them with diagrams and pictures. Too many times you also find you have a "fox guarding the chickenhouse" situation.
As to the fairly blatant payoffs: Taht is one type of problem, but acceptance of poor quality work or even work not done is worse in the long run. That problme is not cured by squeezing the engineer's oversight.
There is a long standing joke about major projects to the effect that they have four stages:
1. Enthusiasm
2. Dissalusionment
3. Punishment of the Innocent
4. Awards to the Uninvolved.
Years ago I worked a couple of contract inspection jobs on natural gas pipeline construction. After that I had a lot more respect for the safety of pipelines. It was very simple: 100% of everything done will be 100% inspected by someone who knows how to do the work being inspected., and that person will sign off on everything he looks at. But of course this was work doen by and for companies that were not government agencies.
George, You originally responded to my negative comments re Parsons-Brinckerhoff. From comments since, it seems that you believe the process used by public agencies is the problem, not the engineering. So first, where do you think the heart of the problem is: RFP, bid evaluation, inspection, other? And second, is there anything that can be done about it (taking into account political realities), or is this just a cost of getting things big projects done in modern America and we should work on solving other problems?
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