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Health & Fitness

TrafficSnark: Libby Garvey Versus the Streetcar

Arlington County Commissioner Libby Garvey recently wrote in the Washington Post that all streetcar projects were "not a good investment for anyone." Bold, but completely wrong.

In a recent opinion column in The Washington Post, former Arlington County School Board member and recently-elected Commissioner Libby Garvey denounced all streetcar projects as “not a good investment for anyone.” She made this startling assertion after denouncing the proposed Columbia Pike Streetcar, which was backed by her fellow commissioners in a unanimous vote in July 2012 (with Commissioner Garvey abstaining), in favor of a Bus Rapid Transit line. Garvey cited Alexandria’s own BRT proposal as proof that other jurisdictions were backing away from streetcars, implying that Alexandria made the same assessment she had. Unfortunately, she’s wrong.

During my tenure as Chairman of the Alexandria Transportation Commission, I supported the construction of three BRT lines around the edges of the City. But, that’s hardly the end of the story. All corridors are being engineered to eventually accommodate streetcars, once funding allows for their addition. Unlike Arlington, Alexandria did not opt for the commercial add-on tax. Our financial resources are more constrained, plus we have other projects to pay for. These include a Metro station in Potomac Yard, which will cost us between $195 million and $462 million (depending on the alignment chosen).

So, in this highly constrained funding environment, it’s smart to keep our options open. If you take a look at the concrete path for BRT in the median of Corridor A, you will note that it’s sturdy enough to support adding rails at a later date. We could have just put down asphalt, but we didn’t because we want to tie into Arlington’s streetcar one day. As Garvey herself implies, riders prefer a single-seat ride. They will not want to take a streetcar down through Arlington to the border of Alexandria, then switch to a bus. Changing modes reduces the speed of the commute unless the transfer is to a mode that is much faster, such as a Metro train. That’s why Metrobus routes converge on stations, something Garvey overlooks in her column.

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It’s on the issue of speed that Garvey makes another error. She claims the Columbia Pike Streetcar will be slow because it will get stuck in traffic. That’s actually true since the streetcar won’t have a dedicated lane. But then she makes a baffling claim that a BRT line on Columbia Pike will be faster, even though it will be traveling in that exact same shared lane. How is that supposed to happen? The same laws of physics rule in both instances: neither vehicle can pass through the vehicles blocking their path. The buses can’t just dart across several lanes like a Mini Cooper to get around a slow-moving vehicle in the curbside lane. They must stay in that lane, because that’s where the stops are. A study from the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Transport Studies confirms that BRT is hardly faster than a conventional bus route, so why would Arlington (or any jurisdiction) want to spend large sums of money on a system that offers little improvement?

In Alexandria’s case, we are building BRT in dedicated right-of-way as a transitory stage, not as an ultimate goal. That will allow our vehicles to go faster than Arlington’s Columbia Pike transit. However, on some corridors such as the one along Duke Street, those vehicles will be in shared lanes along the narrowest stretches. So, they will get stuck in traffic for brief stretches. This was a concession to practicality: we didn’t want to bulldoze people’s homes for this project, just as Arlington didn’t want to knock down businesses and homes along Columbia Pike. Sometimes you have to adapt to circumstances on the ground and leave the bulldozer parked. If Commissioner Garvey wants dedicated right-of-way on Columbia Pike, as she appears to imply in her column by touting Alexandria’s plans, adjacent property owners will have good reason to be concerned.

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Garvey further errs when she claims that the refusal of federal funding for various streetcar projects is somehow a judgement against their efficiency, hence her “not good for anyone” remark. This ignores the obvious situation affecting transportation departments and her own constituents: budget cuts and sequestration. Any project seeking federal funding these days faces an uphill climb, especially expensive corridor projects. However, the same federal Small Starts list she cites shows that there are more light rail projects on the list than BRT projects. This may reflect the change in Presidential administrations: BRT got its big boost under the administration of George W. Bush. The Obama administration hasn’t embraced many of the policies of his predecessor, so BRT’s day in the sun may be approaching its twilight.

Perhaps the worst error, though, comes when Garvey attacks the Portland Streetcar as being a financial failure, due to a recent decline in ridership. A look at this streetcar’s annual ridership reveals that it is actually a little bit up from the prior fiscal year. Interestingly, bus ridership in Portland also hasn’t been doing terribly well, either. As the economy continues to struggle, we shouldn’t be surprised that riders might not be taking transit to reach jobs that aren’t there

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