Do common sense & logic ever intersect in transportation planning? I ask because of the "Radical change proposed for Dulles Rail Project" and well, experience in South Florida

Just some policy considerations to think about in the new year as plans, great and small, are proposed as solutions to real-world problems here in Hallandale Beach, Broward County, South Florida and the United States... and where you readers out there in the blogosphere live, from Stockholm to Santa Monica, Notting Hill to Sydney.

First, since some of you newer readers don't already know, I worked in Washington, D.C, and lived there and in Arlington County from 1988-2003, where I probably rode the Washington Metro (WMATA) about 12 times a week. This, after a few years of constantly riding the CTA's El  into downtown Chicago when I lived in Evanston and Wilmette.

At one point, I lived just a few blocks from the end of the El line at Linden Avenue.

Great in the morning, not so much when coming home in evening rush hour!

http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/purpleline_schedules/Linden.pdf

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=112+Linden+ave+Wilmette+IL&hl=en&t=h&hnear=112+Linden+Ave,+Wilmette,+Illinois+60091&z=16&vpsrc=0

I lived right near Lake Michigan at the first house off of Sheridan Road, DIRECTLY across the street from this beautiful site, officially called The Baha'i House of Worship for North America, but which everyone just called The Baha'i Temple.

This is what I looked at from my bedroom window on the south side of the street, and especially at night, it was an amazing sight I never tired of: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/bahaihouseofworship/

http://www.bahai.us/bahai-temple/

View Larger Map

So, all that said, kudos are very much in order for unsuck dc metro blog, who on Tuesday wrote a spot-on Beltway version http://unsuckdcmetro.blogspot.com/2012/01/we-can-put-man-on-moon-but.html of a typical South Florida transit snail's-pace story that South Florida resident Matthew Gissen first made public in 2007 in the Miami Herald.
That was a story of epic Miami-Dade County govt. failure that I followed closely and looked at for myself every time I had some free time while in downtown Miami. 
I finally mentioned it on my blog almost three years ago:

http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/bullet-proof-newspapers-good-copbad.html

Similarly, Thursday, over at the GreaterGreaterWashington blog, consistently one of the best public policy blogs in the country, has a great post by Dan Malouff that bears careful reading, as well as the reader comments, since it has a very learned audience.

Dulles Metro must go to Dulles Airport

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/13404/dulles-metro-must-go-to-dulles-airport/

Malouff's post on the preposterous plan -suggested by a supposed responsible party who actually has a vote on the matter- re the Washington Metrorail's overdue line to Dulles Airport actually NOT going to the airport, is a direct response to this bit of news, which I first heard about here: http://wtop.com/?nid=120&sid=2711431

I was dumbstruck.

This sort of "planning" is something that we know about in South Florida, given the often, to be kind, counter-intuitive way things are done here.

Now in most parts of the country, creating a sensible rail option from scratch, a route from the downtown business or legal community to the nearby airport is usually a no-brainer, unless there are physical or geographical barriers that make costs prohibitive at the beginning.

Frankly, it's often part of the price to be paid for enlisting the help of the business community in getting legislation or a referendum for the system actually passed. 

(Then again, they and their employees actually use it)

But as I written here and mentioned in some of the conferences and forums on transit that I've attended down here over the past eight years, in 1970's greater Miami, a rail connection to the airport, for whatever reason, wasn't deemed important enough a priority to make it actually happen, despite how ridiculous that sounds to read all these years alter.

And it has a direct correlation to why certain things are STILL the way they are in greater Miami, and from my perspective, someone who knew where almost everything was in Miami because I'd been there, most of them are for the worse.

Like building sports arenas and stadiums in areas far from population centers that make it easy for fans throughout South Florida to get to and from them easily via rail or train.

That's why getting from Flagler Street, Brickell Avenue or Biscayne Blvd. to Miami International Airport (MIA), then and now, is NOT as simple as paying for a ticket, hopping onto a train and sitting down and reading the newspaper or listening to your iPad for a few minutes, or simply look out the window, like I could in Washington,  Chicago and Baltimore on my way to Reagan National, O'Hare and BWI.

That, plus the power of the South Florida taxi cab industry, which showered Dade County commissioners with campaign contributions, and was NOT interested in having customers cut out the middle-man -them!

Here in Broward County, at some point during the 15 years I was working in the Washington, D.C. area and living in Arlington County -near the Ballston Metro station- the Tri-Rail system constructed an "Airport" train station that's NOT actually at Hollywood/Ft. Lauderdale International Airport, but rather in nearby Dania, where you have to wait and catch a bus to actually get to the airport.

But then consider where I live -South Florida.

Here, taxpayers are forever hearing stories from their elected state legislators about their travel hardships, and, I guess, we are supposed to just shrug our collective shoulders and look the other way as these legislators myriad and continual ethical shortcomings and flights of fancy are done after taxpayers have routinely pay $800 for them to take round-trip, non-refundable flights between this area and no, not Los Angeles or Seattle, but to Tallahassee.

And as some of you out there in the blogosphere know independently and some from my having shared articles about it with you over the years via email, some of these state legislators actually have the audacity to publicly complain and bitch to not only local news media about their travails, but also to the FAA, whether about the paucity of airline flights or the size of those planes.

It's not the fault of South Florida taxpayers that the state capital is NOT centrally located, but rather in what is, essentially, southwestern Georgia.

This sort of bitching is so embarrassing, and only makes the Banana Republic rubric applied to Florida harder to shake.

In his post, Malouff reiterates certain basic fundamentals that I believe hold true for concerned taxpayers and chastened activists, no matter where they live, to have any degree of faith and confidence in govt. planning, and transportation planning in particular.

Two sentences in particular resonate for anyone like me who has gone to lots of public meetings in South Florida, esp. about transportation policy & process, and emerged hours later shaking their head.

Cutting so many corners that you don't achieve your goal is not cost savings, it's failure. 

The absolute minimum requirement for a Metro line to Dulles Airport must be that it actually reaches Dulles Airport. Period.

He's 100% right.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

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http://www.governing.com/

http://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/topic/travel/transportation/public-transportation/T51001001.topic

http://www.transitmiami.com/

Transit Miami is one of the most widely-read blogs in South Florida, especially among people interested in public policy, or, who are, themselves, policy makers. Lots and lots of very educated people who know their way around a City/County Hall and who ALWAYS vote. 

Like me.

Whistleblower's steadfastness + well-timed FOIA requests + Washington Post's Lisa Rein = evidence of public safety at risk re WMATA's proposed Silver Line.

Below is yet another striking example where FOIA requests and interviews at the right time,

plus some hard, critical questions asked by someone unwilling to look the other way, Steve T. Mackey, has led to evidence of shortcuts on public safety and plain old incompetence in a national transportation plan of consequence, WMATA's proposed Silver Line. 

The eye-opening Lisa Rein article on train safety referenced below in the WashingtonPost editorial that ran on Thanksgiving, complete with diagrams and photos, is at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/21/AR2009112102323.html

Some excellent photos that pinpoint the exact area under discussion -which is two Metro stations past where I used to live, and near a very popular Applebee's in McLean that my friends and I used to frequent- are at: http://www.roadstothefuture.com/WFC_Metro_Station.html 

 And since it wasn't in the papers down here, I can tell you that they had a crash there on Sunday with millions of dollars worth of damage. 

See also: http://wtop.com/?nid=600&sid=1825327 and http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/local/Metro-trains-crash-in-West-Falls-Church-Rail-Yard-8602928.html 

 And don't overlook the obvious -this is precisely what a first-class editorial looks like. Compare and contrast with the shallow LCD silliness that passes for big-thinking editorials in South Florida's newspapers, esp. the ones dealing with immigration policy. 

Latin America politics, public corruption or anything having to do with real estate. 

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/25/AR2009112503234.html Washington Post Editorial 

Supporting evidence 

'You don't build bridges without testing.' 

Thursday, November 26, 2009

THE MANAGEMENT and contractors involved in building one of the largest public infrastructure projects in the nation -- the $5.2 billion extension of Metro to Dulles International Airport and beyond -- suddenly stand accused of slipshod procedures and casual neglect of critical safety issues.

It's a damning indictment. The senior federal official with direct responsibility for transit has charged the project manager, Washington's airports authority, with submitting an "unresponsive and inadequate" plan to test crucial support structures for a planned bridge that would carry Metro trains over Interstate 66. Other officials with intimate knowledge of the project to build Metro's Silver Line are alarmed that safety tests that should have been obvious and obligatory were neglected or resisted by the contractors, a partnership between civil engineering giants Bechtel and URS. A whistleblower who formerly oversaw construction of the bridge has quit the project. And crucial documents appear to be missing.

These and other serious matters, raised in a report Sunday by The Post's Lisa Rein, have cast a shadow over the 23-mile Silver Line project. They will continue to darken perceptions of it unless they are addressed thoroughly, quickly and with an unstinting focus on safety. To its credit, the airports authority now appears to be doing just that, although it has not laid out its plans in detail.

The root of these concerns is the strength and integrity of a number of existing support structures -- concrete-encased steel pilings driven deep into the ground and each designed to withstand 70 tons -- that are to be used as foundations for the bridge. These foundations, built in 1977 in anticipation of Metro's eventual extension, were all but forgotten until workers came across them two years ago. Project engineers then decided to save money and time by using 11 of them as footings atop which pillars would be built to support the bridge.

It seems plain that the money saved by not having to build these foundations from scratch should be used to test the load-bearing capacity of all the underground pilings -- especially given their age and the apparent disappearance of original construction records. That sort of testing is exactly what Steve T. Mackey, the project's former chief bridge manager, insisted on. Incredibly, Mr. Mackey was overruled by a supervisor, and his attempts to alert the Federal Transit Administration about his concerns were ignored (outrageously) for more than six months; he resigned last year. "I'm old enough to know you don't build bridges without testing," he said.

There are some troubling questions here. One is whether the airports authority, which owns the project and the problem -- and is therefore responsible for a solution -- has the expertise, experience and muscle to manage this project. The authority did little to inspire confidence when, pressed to submit a testing plan by the feds, it merely wrote a cover letter for one submitted by the contractor, known as Dulles Transit Partners. Now the authority says all 11 structures will be tested.

Another question is why Dulles Transit Partners resisted testing every one of the foundations, as appears to have been the case. Was it because of cost, or the risk of disruption to service on the Orange Line or I-66, or because some forms of testing can actually harm the structures?

We make no presumption about the condition of the 11 existing foundations; as far as we know, and based on the limited tests that have been performed, there is no evidence to suggest they are unsafe. We understand that testing all the foundations could temporarily disrupt Orange Line service or require briefly closing part of I-66. It's also possible that tests could trigger cost overruns. What's critical is that the airports authority, as the project manager and owner, comes up with an informed, independent and transparent plan based on the most exacting safety and engineering standards. Nothing short of that will restore the public's confidence in Metro's most ambitious expansion plan to date.

Reader comments at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/21/AR2009112102323_Comments.html

There are a lot of well-educated professionals in Northern Virginia who believe a tunnel would be better and cheaper (and faster) for the Tyson's Corner/Route 7 area than an elevated line, including many of my friends who have offices near there. 

Their slogan is 'It's not over until it's under." See http://www.tysonstunnel.org/index2.htm