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| November 20, 2008 |
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To pull the strands of opportunities together, it is eminently feasible to maximize the use of scarce resources by using a rigorous, least-cost planning regimen to guide transportation investments. This methodology was pioneered in the Northwest and brilliantly applied in the energy sector, a sector of comparable scale and complexity. In spite of determined industry resistance, it finally gained a regional foothold after the Washington Public Power Supply System's nuclear plants proved to be such a financial disaster. The Northwest went from the biggest municipal bond default in history, thanks to WPPSS, to become a world-renowned paragon of energy efficient planning and development. That's the transition that's needed in the transportation sector. The luminaries who created and applied least-cost energy planning include the late Dr. Donald Shakow, the masterful analyst behind Seattle Energy1990, which spared Seattle the ignominy of investing in WPPSS nuclear projects 4 and 5. Also Edward Sheets, then-executive director of the Northwest Power Planning Council (NPPC), which first implemented least-cost energy planning on a regional scale; and Richard Watson, former head of the Washington State Energy Office. The least-cost approach concluded that there should be investments in efficiency -- making better use of the huge amount of energy already being generated, through residential conservation, development of better appliances, more efficient commercial lighting, superior building design, improved manufacturing processes, etc. This innovation enabled NPPC to push policies and investments toward the most prudent, cost-effective targets. When new generating capacity was needed, it also was selected and developed on the basis of competitive life cycle cost-performance. Least-cost planning saved the region billions of dollars and acute uncertainty in the energy sector, by helping reduce the growth in regional demand for electricity from six percent to one percent annually, while the population soared and the economy boomed. Later, the same pioneers turned their attention to the strikingly analogous challenge of transportation, and demonstrated how least-cost planning can be readily adapted to that sector. Least-cost planning is an elegant, but basic exercise. It benefits from the use of models and advanced computers, but it is conceptually simple, and offers a consistent framework in which alternative resource strategies can be evaluated. The best explanation is provided by Ed Sheets and Dick Watson in their essay, Least Cost Transportation Planning: Lessons from the Northwest Power Planning Council (January 1994). It is an open process in which numerous options are assessed and compared, in a rigorous search for the combination of investments that will reach the desired level of service, and reliability, at the most advantageous cost. Least cost planning is not a panacea. In electricity planning, however, it has provided an analytical framework that has led to consideration of and action on a much broader range of alternatives than had previously been the case. In the process, it has saved the rate payers of the Northwest billions of dollars. The least-cost planning opportunity has been met with dismay by the rail partisans and the freeway-builders. The Washington State legislature, prompted by then-representative Dick Nelson, called for least-cost transportation planning. Instead of rolling up their sleeves and getting to work on the task, the exertions of the capital-intensive partisans were devoted to crafting excuses why it couldn't be done. They insisted energy planning is simplicity itself, but transportation planning is very, very complicated. They claimed that the electric energy industry worked, and tested, and proved its least-cost planning ideas for years and years, priorto its general application, so nothing can happen in the transportation field until much time passes and unanimity emerges. They complained that electric energy is straight economics, it's "fungible," while transportation has other values. The excuses are transparent fabrications. If energy least-cost planning had been forced to await the ponderous institutional approval demanded in the transportation field, the region still would be deprived of its blessings. Least-cost energy planning was not developed by the industry, and it did not delay for a decade's gestation, testing, validation, and the confirmation of recognized state and federal experts-as the transportation establishment contends. It was swiftly accomplished, by outside innovators, through initiative and boldness. And the claim that transportation is more complicated? Least-cost analysis of the regional power system encompasses hydro, gas, nuclear, cogeneration, renewables, conservation, transmission, distribution, thousands of industrial processes, myriad residential and commercial applications, vast seasonal variables, diurnal cycles, and salmon and other environmental costs. It is no less demanding a task than an analysis of metropolitan Seattle's transportation requirements and options. As for the claim that electric energy is straight economics, while transportation has other values, that's false too. Electric energy mustdeal with issues of social equity, spatial distribution, and environmental impacts, and is required to meet a far higher standard for reliability of service than transportation can even conceive. Least-cost planning can readily accommodate non-economic factors-but it does something that the capital-intensive transportation industry fears: it cogently, competently measures and compares the relative costs of alternatives, including impacts on the environment and on vulnerable members of society. In short, it strives to spend public resources, which are precious and limited, to optimal effect. Two years ago city personnel crafted and adopted a commendable transportation plan for Seattle, including many of the kinds of ideas summarized above. It did not use least-cost planning as a guide to rigorously optimize investments, but it was loaded with good prospects that would genuinely address the blight of congestion. But, sadly, the plan was accompanied by a letter from the mayor, announcing that little could be done to carry it out, because, The honest truth is that we do not have the resources to take good enough care of our existing system, much less to make the mobility investments required to protect our environment and economy. Yet the mayor and other city officials then proceeded to spend an enormous amount of time and energy frantically knocking on federal agency and congressional doors on behalf of light rail funding. They ardently lobbied the state legislature, pleading for more money for that purpose. They allocated additional city funds, arranged to transfer some Sound Transit costs to Seattle City Light ratepayers, and crafted generous "tax forgiveness" measures in order to stack the enormous pile of Link dollars higher still. They're incurring debt obligations decades into the future just to complete Sound Transit's "starter rail" phase. With reckless abandon, they're pouring money into a light rail scheme that is inferior in cost-effectiveness to anything listed in their own, impoverished city transportation plan. Seattle is even poor about filling its backlog of potholes. Added Capacity: Highway Construction While there are a wealth of opportunities to use the existing, mega-billion dollar transportation infrastructure more efficiently, it has some intrinsic limitations. For one thing, the embedded capacity is not evenly distributed. Some corners of the Puget Sound region are growing rapidly, but have sparse roadway networks that are utterly overwhelmed. Providing at least minimally adequate roads is the necessary byproduct of the decisions of municipal and county councils to open those areas to development. Also, Bill Eager, an outstanding transportation planner and principal of TDA Associates, has identified a handful of critical, overworked stretches in the freeway system which, if addressed with carefully targeted investments, could significantly improve the flow of traffic. No miracle cures, but there's solid ground between excess and next-to-nothing. That said, it would be most regrettable to revert to the frenetic, pork barrel laden, freeway-building excesses of past decades, like the16-freeways-plus-rail Seattle Transportation Plan of 1965. Within the city of Seattle the road network is highly elaborated. Downtown and the University District suffer from a surfeit of traffic already, yet active discussions about adding still more lanes across Lake Washington into the city have resurfaced. That regrettable idea will alienate more land, tear up more neighborhoods, and deliver more cars to an already-too-clogged Interstate 5. The ample opportunities to use the extensive, existing highway system more efficiently should be promoted, and calls to expand it should be resisted in Seattle. Added Capacity: New Transit Technology The admirers of 19th century rail technology cannot conceive of anything better than old-fashioned urban trains, while cars are more and more high-performing. They have improved because there's a demand for safer, more nimble, less polluting, more energy efficient, better-priced cars, which is leading in turn to radical new innovations, like the hybrid car and hydrogen fuel cell. When commercial airlines are faced with a technology that will diminish their bottom line and market share, they carefully lay out a set of performance standards, like lower passenger cost per mile, better fuel efficiency, less noise, whatever-and demand the airplane producers meet their needs. If Boeing wants to stay competitive, it assigns its best engineers to the task, and usually prevails. But contemporary rail technology, as Stanley Hallett puts it, "...is about where the telegraph system was one hundred years ago....The key problem that limited its use was the fact that you had to go to a telegraph station to send a telegram, and at the other end a messenger hadto carry the message to its destination." With the surge of new inventions, there is every reason to anticipate theintroduction of innovative transit technologies that will be accessible, compact, lightweight, customer-friendly, cost-effective, and genuinely competitive with the automobile in the congested circumstances of an urban area. Jerry Schneider, professor of civil engineering at the University of Washington, tracks such prospects, and reports progress under the title Innovative Transit Technologies, with a Web site athttp://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans. For illustrative purposes, here's how one prospective personal rapid transit (PRT) technology could work: Imagine a system akin to the bus network of an urban community, but the passenger does not need to wait for PRT, because the vehicle is waiting at the stop for the passenger. The vehicle travels on a guideway overhead, entirely liberated from congestion. Each vehicle is on an extensive transit network, and moves directly to the selected destination without intervening stops, so the trip is much faster than it would be even by car. The vehicle is small, and the passengers ride securely, either alone or with companions traveling together. Each vehicle is self-directed by redundant computers, so it does not need a driver, achieving great operating savings. By proceeding at an even, constant speed, without stops, the vehicle consumes but one-tenth to one-twentieth as much energy, per passenger, as buses or trains. By traveling on urethane wheels, driven by a battery-powered electric engine, or hydrogen fuel cells, the vehicle makes virtually no noise. Since the vehicles are small, and made of light-weight composite materials, the overhead beam from which they're suspended is scarcely more than a foot square in bulk. This enables the infrastructure to be built at a tiny fraction of the cost of a rail line, facilitating the extensive network, which in turn offers vastly superior service and makes the system far more productive. The pillars supporting the beams are little more prominent than light standards, and the beams enclose all overhead wires, so telephone and lighting poles can be eliminated, as is the need to lay underground cable. When snow and ice impede the movement of cars and buses, the vehicles travel unimpeded, because their wheels and motors are located inside the guideway, protected from the elements. By aggregating the features summarized above, the system could be so cost-effective that modest passenger fares would cover the capital and operating costs. And it could offer convenient service and customer appeal sufficient to attract a substantial and expanding ridership and market share. Additions to the network would be akin to expanding a tinker-toy structure, and the low per-mile capital cost makes expansion feasible as demand for service grows. The capacity of each line would be very substantial, and as the network proliferates the capacity would be so magnified that it would vastly exceed that of contemporary "high-capacity transit." Such an option is available, today, but not off-the-shelf. Every bit of the requisite technology is proven and operating, but critical tasks of engineering and marketing remain. To attract the necessary private venture capital to refine PRT and other innovative transit technologies, customers-most notably transit system operators-have to signal that they are a market. They should offer transit contracts conditioned on cost and performance criteria that will, if met, enable transit systems to radically lower per-passenger costs and dramatically expand market share. Such a market signal, qualified by performance standards, will enable promising technologies to gain access to needed venture capital, quickly emerge, evolve, and proliferate. That is what metropolitan areas around the world desperately need, so transit agencies should quit favoring yesterday's technologies and reach for tomorrow's. They will not supplant cars, which can do many things PRT and its counterparts cannot, such as being parked in one's own garage and conveying a family any place the vast road network reaches. But for many in-city applications such technologies would be more convenient than cars, and could transport city dwellers to the sprawling suburban job market in a fashion difficult for buses and impossible for trains. Further, working in tandem with long-haul passenger rail service in corridors like San Francisco/Los Angeles or Portland/Seattle/ Vancouver, PRT's ability to collect and distribute passengers efficiently would significantly strengthen the competitive opportunities for inter-city rail. Concluding Comment To return to the analogy with electrical energy, when the utilities were freed, albeit unwillingly, from their singular reliance on central station generating plants-the functional equivalent of rail projects-and applied least-cost planning, it opened vast opportunities to use existing resources more efficiently. The change also leveled the playing field for invention and innovation, and moderated the weight of interests represented by the construction industry and its allies in the public sector. When old habits were broken, and cost-effectiveness became a hallmark, new technologies were given life, from energy-efficient lights and refrigerators, to new generations of gas turbines, wind machines, photovoltaics, and hydrogen fuel cells. Prices moderated and performance soared.
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