April 27, 200916 yr The homeless haven't managed to scare away development along the streetcar route in Portland either.
April 28, 200916 yr Homeless people have bummed money/rides off of me in the following places within the past two years: Mall parking lots Suburban car washes Milford Oakley Reynoldsburg The BP station on US 23 south of Columbus just outside 270 My parents' farm in Pickaway County; on our own land The suburbs are full of homeless people -- you just don't see them much because you are whizzing by at 50mph.
April 28, 200916 yr I think the only thing this article shows is how critical having fare inspectors are. I live in Baltimore and the light rail here has the same problem. Fares are rarely checked and it essentially becomes a rolling homeless shelter. If the streetcar is built, and I hope it is, constant fare inspections are a must.
April 28, 200916 yr I think the only thing this article shows is how critical having fare inspectors are. I live in Baltimore and the light rail here has the same problem. Fares are rarely checked and it essentially becomes a rolling homeless shelter. If the streetcar is built, and I hope it is, constant fare inspections are a must. Constant fare inspections seem extremely expensive.
April 28, 200916 yr So does the prospect of the streetcar being less sufficient because we wouldn't entice individuals to actually pay their fair share of riding the streetcar.
April 28, 200916 yr >Constant fare inspections seem extremely expensive. It can cost more to collect fares than to not collect them. At-grade systems save a lot of operating costs by not having subway or elevated stations that require escalators that run in virtual perpetuity. But they save more money by not having stations that are staffed. The cost of constructing a mezzanine can save over $100,000 in payroll a year since it can cut staffing requirements in half. If anyone's seen the money train on the New York subway, it illustrates the costs of charging money. It's an armored train with about five guys with machine guns who keep the peace while one guy empties all the fare card machines. Although many people use credit cards to buy weekly passes, there are still thousands of dollars of physical money collected at each station. That train probably rolls around with well in excess of $100,000 on it every night.
April 28, 200916 yr Random fare inspections, with the penalty of a $150 fine for people caught not paying, along with big signs warning people about it. After three fines, you get banned permanently.
April 28, 200916 yr The problem is that if people get nailed with stiff fines, it will turn them off in the same way getting a parking ticket downtown does. The better strategy is to have people who haven't paid go and pay and if they don't have any money to get off at the next stop. University students get parking tickets all the time and they grumble but they're at the mercy of the university. A downtown worker usually has a regular spot so they don't have that trouble. It's the visitor who will leave and tell everyone else how bad the city is if they get a $150 fine for not paying to ride public transit.
April 28, 200916 yr Actually there's no longer such thing as the money train in NYC (movie depictions notwithstanding). Cash revenues are picked up via armored car service at the street level, the same way your local ATM machines get serviced. With more people using credit and debit cards to purchase Metrocards, the MTA deals with far less cash than it used to. Proof-of-payment seems to be the favored method of fare collection on streetcar and many light rail systems. It runs mostly on the honor system, and patrons retain a validated ticket during their journey. Periodic spot checks in random locations (with a stiff fine) are used to keep people honest. Portland, of course, has a zone downtown where fares aren't collected at all... That was probably a pragmatic move, as it's simply not feasible to spot-check a large number of people getting off a light rail vehicle downtown during rush hour. For grade-separated heavy rail systems on large-capacity systems, proof-of-payment becomes impractical and you need to use fare control barriers (i.e., turnstiles) and have at least one person on duty to answer questions and discourage turnstile jumpers... And people feel safer with an employee working in the station anyway, especially during off-hours. If you have a light rail system that runs in a subway through downtown, you could always do a hybrid approach: Fare control barriers and on-site customer service agents at busy downtown stations, with proof-of-payment and random spot checks outside the downtown core. I think Boston's Green Line might be transitioning to something like this approach. Regarding the homeless problem, any transit system will need to be adequately patrolled by police, with problem people removed from the system. (I wish the MTA would be a bit more aggressive about that here in NYC.) Funny how Cincy Streetcar critics act as if they're the first people who have thought of these issues... Fact is, other cities have successfully figured out ways to collect fares and discourage homeless people from riding on trains. Cincinnati isn't trying to re-invent the wheel here.
April 28, 200916 yr In Boston you paid with a token at the underground stations and one or two elevated ones just like a subway line. If you boarded at a surface stop, you paid with a token as you entered the train, just like a bus. They only open the front door next to the driver on the surface stops. Obviously this slows boarding when a big group of kids or whoever are getting on. >That was probably a pragmatic move, as it's simply not feasible to spot-check a large number of people getting off a light rail vehicle downtown during rush hour. There's basically no way to get to the fare machine in the Portland streetcars in the fareless zone because the passengers are so tightly packed. The big difference between Portland and Cincinnati is that their streetcar line doesn't serve a stadium or other big event venue so they haven't had to deal with those big surges of people. In Boston they stage about six streetcars in each direction outside Fenway Park toward the end of the game and everyone's got tokens already so it's not an issue. I seem to remember you could simply put four quarters in instead of tokens as well. I think a "ride free after the game" policy is about the only option for us.
April 28, 200916 yr Boston no longer uses tokens; they switched over to a stored-value card several years ago, similar to NYC's Metrocard. On the surface portions of the Green Line, you swipe your card when you board the train only when traveling inbound. On outbound trips, fares aren't collected once the trains leave the subway portion of the line.
April 28, 200916 yr Author In Boston you paid with a token at the underground stations and one or two elevated ones just like a subway line. If you boarded at a surface stop, you paid with a token as you entered the train, just like a bus. They only open the front door next to the driver on the surface stops. Obviously this slows boarding when a big group of kids or whoever are getting on. >That was probably a pragmatic move, as it's simply not feasible to spot-check a large number of people getting off a light rail vehicle downtown during rush hour. There's basically no way to get to the fare machine in the Portland streetcars in the fareless zone because the passengers are so tightly packed. The big difference between Portland and Cincinnati is that their streetcar line doesn't serve a stadium or other big event venue so they haven't had to deal with those big surges of people. In Boston they stage about six streetcars in each direction outside Fenway Park toward the end of the game and everyone's got tokens already so it's not an issue. I seem to remember you could simply put four quarters in instead of tokens as well. I think a "ride free after the game" policy is about the only option for us. I think ride free with a same day reds or bengals ticket would be a great first year promotion.
April 28, 200916 yr When I was in San Diego I went to a Padres game. I was lucky enough to walk but I noticed that since Petco park was downtown with limited parking their light rail system ran express trains from Quallcomm Stadium to Petco Park. I know the streetcar system isn't going to be nearly as long but perhaps a gameday express would work.
April 28, 200916 yr ^that makes sense. The Minnesota Twins' new stadium with have rail access built right into it. “ The ballpark site sits at the convergence point of the Light Rail Transit (the existing Hiawatha Line and future lines such as the Central Corridor), the future Northstar commuter rail line, the Cedar Lake Bike Trail and Interstates 394 and I-94." http://www.hga.com/the_latest/press_releases/mn_ballpark_041207.html
April 28, 200916 yr Philly treats it's streetcars like buses - with either tokens or a swipe of the card at the front and the operator won't move if someone tries to get a free ride - saw a passenger spit on the streetcar after being kicked off, a real winner.
April 28, 200916 yr ^That sounds like the best method. Have people enter in the front door and exit from the other(s). If they have a card/ticket machine at the stops, it would cut down on wait time when people enter, while still giving the driver the ability to easily deny access to those who don't pay. You may still have the occasional person who sneaks in the back, but hey, nothing's perfect.
April 28, 200916 yr The issue is that the particular design of the Skoda vehicles is such that it prevents the traditional Boston/Philly setup. It basically trades an air-tight way of collecting fares for a much faster and easier method to board the vehicles. This is one central difference between streetcars and modern streetcars -- the philosophy of fare collection is quite different. The Skoda vehicles have a pair of double-wide low floor doors in the middle section of each streetcar. The third door on each side, next to the driver, is lightly used because it's narrower and you have to climb a few steps. Essentially it comes down to this: the Skoda design is much more inviting and accessible to the elderly & handicapped and attracts more riders than a traditional streetcar. But this same design paradoxically makes it more difficult to collect fares. Boston's green line I recall had significant ADA compatibility problems. In fact I can't remember how wheelchairs even got on them. The Skoda design was a breakthrough in ADA compatibility, both for those in wheelchairs & scooters and those who simply can't walk fast. It has the halo effect of being much more inviting to the general public. I always thought the green line's high floor LRV's were great until I saw the Skoda low floor vehicles in action. It's a brilliant design in so many ways, but fare collection is its one shortcoming. Having fare machines at stops would help but the machines themselves are quite expensive and probably only needed at Government Square.
April 28, 200916 yr Author I have been thinking about fare collection and I think we should follow the approach of what the CAC does. They give you a color coded (for different days) sticker to wear that shows you have paid your fare. Then when you leave, you probably keep it on, giving them free advertising. Have the ticket machine print small but brightly colored stickers to indicate to everyone on the train who paid and who didn't.
April 28, 200916 yr ^^I never realized that. I assumed that the front door was the same as the rear door, I just never used it in Portland because I prefer to sit in the back anyway. I have been thinking about fare collection and I think we should follow the approach of what the CAC does. They give you a color coded (for different days) sticker to wear that shows you have paid your fare. Then when you leave, you probably keep it on, giving them free advertising. Have the ticket machine print small but brightly colored stickers to indicate to everyone on the train who paid and who didn't. I'm not sure how I'd feel about stickers. If I were headed to Reds game, sure, but I don't think I'd want to put a sticker on a nice suit.
April 28, 200916 yr Boston's green line I recall had significant ADA compatibility problems. In fact I can't remember how wheelchairs even got on them. The Skoda design was a breakthrough in ADA compatibility, both for those in wheelchairs & scooters and those who simply can't walk fast. It has the halo effect of being much more inviting to the general public. I always thought the green line's high floor LRV's were great until I saw the Skoda low floor vehicles in action. It's a brilliant design in so many ways, but fare collection is its one shortcoming. Having fare machines at stops would help but the machines themselves are quite expensive and probably only needed at Government Square. After many fits and starts due to technical problems, the Green Line now has low-floor light rail vehicles built by Breda. On trains where two LRV's are paired together, one of those LRV's will be a low-floor unit. Before then, they had sort of a makeshift system with a ramp and raised platform at some stations to allow riders in wheelchairs to board the high-floor Boeing-Vertol cars.
April 28, 200916 yr ^ I like the sticker idea. Anything that makes it totally obvious who paid and who didn't would lead to self enforcement and would be economical. What is more expensive, the upfront costs of ticket machines that dispense stickers or indefinite use of paid enforcement officers?
April 28, 200916 yr Here is a link to a blog post describing Boston's struggles with ADA compliance: http://wmasspi.blogspot.com/2008/12/boston-beat-church-cracks-in-boston.html Here's a view of the high-floor streetcars in Boston (obviously wheelchairs are in trouble): It's hard to see in this simage, but the front doors of the Skoda streetcars also have steps: BUT, they also have these two giant doors that are exactly level with the curb. These ramps extend for wheelchairs:
April 28, 200916 yr I like the idea of dispensing stickers from new parking meters along the line. Say you paid $1.00 and that bought you two hours riding time or one hour at a parking meter. If you were at the machine at 3:37p, it would spit out a streetcar sticker that said 5:37p in really big type for all to see. I'm sure there are glues that do no damage to clothes. If you wanted a parking meter ticket, it would dispense a printed ticket that said 4:37p. You would stick this on the inside of the driver's window. So you could ride the streetcar until 5:37p or park until 4:37p. In the latter case, you could move your car to another location and not lose the time you had bought on the meter. A complicating factor is, how do you deal with people who have passes?
April 28, 200916 yr Author The pass is scanned, which produces a sticker. the pass cannot be scanned again until the sticker expires.
April 28, 200916 yr ^ How do you prevent someone with a pass generating multiple tickets througout the day and selling the tickets at a discount? I can see how you could ensure that it wasn't done more than once every couple of hours, but still there will be some abuse. Even if scanning a pass locked-out ticket generation for the next two hours, someone could simply go to another meter -- unless, of course, the ticket machines communicated with each other. But I bet that's really expensive and a maintenance nightmare.
April 28, 200916 yr Having stickers and labels is awkward and will decrease ridership. Keep your ticket in your wallet or pocket, and one of Cincinnati's finest or perhaps a plain-clothed undercover city employee will check your ticket and if you're ticketless, the fine should run no more than $50...if that. These spot checks only need to occur a few days a week. No biggie.
April 29, 200916 yr There will be political pressure to have free transfers with Metro busses, which will further complicate the issue. A planner at Queen City Metro told me that his single biggest hassle is transfers. Often, people will want to make a stop for shopping and then continue in the same direction with a transfer.
April 29, 200916 yr Streetcars would have many benefits http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20090428/EDIT02/904280377/1019/EDIT Fifty-eight years ago Wednesday, Cincinnati's last streetcar went off duty at 5:55 a.m. At that time Cincinnati's population stood at over half a million. Over the next 50 years, the city's size declined. By 2000 our population had fallen by over 170,000, a loss of about 33 percent. Not all neighborhoods lost population equally. Downtown and Over-the-Rhine, some of our densest and most transit dependent neighborhoods, both lost more than 70 percent of their residents over the past half-century. Over-the-Rhine alone lost 23,000 residents - more than the entire population of Norwood.
April 29, 200916 yr I don't see any reason why free (or at least heavily reduced-fare) transfers between the streetcar and Metro and TANK shouldn't be part of the plan; to do otherwise would only discourage ridership and/or cause the streetcar to be used purely as a tourist attraction rather than an integral part of the region's mass transit network. Inter-agency transfers invariably create some accounting headaches for the agencies involved, but the focus needs to be on what's best for the riding public, not what's best for the accountants.
April 29, 200916 yr Nice to see the Enquirer writing pro-transit articles concerning the streetcar. I'm surprised...
April 29, 200916 yr Nice to see the Enquirer writing pro-transit articles concerning the streetcar. I'm surprised... This is a guest editorial piece from a Brad Thomas.
April 30, 200916 yr Nice to see the Enquirer writing pro-transit articles concerning the streetcar. I'm surprised... This is a guest editorial piece from a Brad Thomas. Which Brad Thomas? :)
April 30, 200916 yr I believe Council passed a resolution last spring which essentially said the fare for the streetcar could not be set less than the base fare for Metro.
April 30, 200916 yr Is there some reason why Metro wouldn't end up actually operating the streetcar? Even if it isn't built by SORTA, the City of Cincinnati could still give SORTA a contract to operate it. (Sort of like how Boston's transit agency pays Amtrak to operate its commuter rail lines.) For pricing, I'd treat the streetcar just like another bus route, and handle transfers the same way you would if somebody is transferring between two different bus routes. Of course, I haven't ridden Metro in years and I have no idea how they handle fare collection and transfers... If they're still using tokens and paper transfers, perhaps it's time to upgrade the entire system to a stored-value card like almost every other transit system has done by now.
April 30, 200916 yr ^Tokens were removed a few years ago. The transfers haven't changed at all. They are just delicate paper slips. For an infrequent rider like myself who never carries much change, the current payment system is somewhat of a deterrent. I really wish you could just swipe a credit card and hit a button for how many fares and which zones. I used the bus a few days ago and I only had a ten and a single dollar bill in my wallet. Now I only was going about a mile, but the fare is $1.50 and they cannot give change. It was too early to go into a shop and ask for change, so I was kinda screwed. It seems minor, but it was a real hassle.
April 30, 200916 yr So Metro is purely cash-only unless you buy a monthly pass? If so, that really sucks.... I love Cincy, but they have a lot of catching-up to do when it comes to mass transit.
April 30, 200916 yr Agreed. The cash-only determinant (among other reasons) is one of the rationales that I use to not take Metro. It's far too inconvenient. I think that using a credit/debit card would not be justifiable, though. The interchange fees would add up, especially for such low fares. A reloadable debit card administered by Metro would work much better.
April 30, 200916 yr ^Tokens were removed a few years ago. The transfers haven't changed at all. They are just delicate paper slips. For an infrequent rider like myself who never carries much change, the current payment system is somewhat of a deterrent. I really wish you could just swipe a credit card and hit a button for how many fares and which zones. I used the bus a few days ago and I only had a ten and a single dollar bill in my wallet. Now I only was going about a mile, but the fare is $1.50 and they cannot give change. It was too early to go into a shop and ask for change, so I was kinda screwed. It seems minor, but it was a real hassle. As a side note-- At my old job, I dealt with lots of boxes of rolled change, and we would constantly get Cincinnati bus tokens in our rolls of dimes. I kept them and therefore have a stockpile of bus tokens at home. I wonder if I could trade these in for anything.
April 30, 200916 yr Couple noteworthy streetcar news items from around... Feds approve $75 million for streetcar expansion http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2009/04/feds_approve_75_million_for_st.html Feds pony up big time for streetcars for the first time. The commitment of federal dollars will allow the the Streetcar Loop Project to expand beyond its current presence on the west-side by sprawling across the Broadway Bridge into Northeast Portland. It will also spread south to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. The line would then cross a new bridge to connect with the existing system. Construction on the 3.3-mile extension is estimated to cost about $77 million, out of a total project cost of $147 million. More info on the extension here - http://portlandstreetcar.org/pdf/loop_fact_sheet_and_map_feb09.pdf TTC head hails decision to go ahead with Bombardier-built light-rail vehicles http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/625680 Toronto embracing modern rolling stock designs. Investing over $1 billion into streetcar projects. The TTC's choice won't serve just 11 existing routes, but also the seven proposed Transit City lines running to the outer reaches of the city. It has probably also blazed a trail for Mississauga, York Region and Kitchener-Waterloo, all considering light rail.
May 1, 200916 yr So the Feds agreed to fund the expansion of the Portland Streetcar, but no news about funding the one in Cincinnati? Does this mean we didn't get the funding?
May 1, 200916 yr So the Feds agreed to fund the expansion of the Portland Streetcar, but no news about funding the one in Cincinnati? Does this mean we didn't get the funding? Exactly what I was thinking. I love that we always get the shaft by first shafting ourselves.
May 1, 200916 yr Still not yet gone through: http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,19077.0.html
May 1, 200916 yr So the Feds agreed to fund the expansion of the Portland Streetcar, but no news about funding the one in Cincinnati? Does this mean we didn't get the funding? Exactly what I was thinking. I love that we always get the shaft by first shafting ourselves. This is what happens when you have a member in congress aggressively lobbying for these kinds of funds. In Cincinnati we had Chabot working against projects in our inner-city and have only just recently replaced him. Fortunately for us I think Driehaus will be a big ally...just let him get settled in first.
May 1, 200916 yr Some Coast members were in Oakley the other night trying to get signatures from drunk patrons at 2 am at the Tavern. My buddy called him out in front of other patrons and got some new streetcar supporters as a result. The tactics these anti transit activists use are disgusting.
May 3, 200916 yr Teh stupid continues... The Dean™ of Cincinnati is now claiming that streetcars can't turn corners, as if every other streetcar in every other city operates in a perfectly straight line. He's even got some amateurish sketches on his blog to "prove" his point. I've got somewhere I need to be right now, but later this afternoon I'll hopefully have time to crank up AutoCAD and give his argument the geometric smackdown.
May 3, 200916 yr Seattle's line, although much shorter than Portland's, has a few points of interest from a technical standpoint. Here is a spot where the tracks jog from a one-way portion of a street to a two-way section: At this spot the tracks swing wide, all the way to the center line. I watched the streetcars negotiate this about 8 times and it caused no trouble. This is a very lightly traveled side street, which is why I presume they picked it for the spot where the line diverges from 2-way operation on one street to running on parallel one-ways: Here is the reverse angle of this same track: Here is a very wide turn the Seattle streetcar makes while transitioning from exclusive ROW back to in-street running: I think the turn at McMicken St. will look something like what you see above, but will swoop all the way to the north side of McMicken St. That street has almost no traffic so signal priority here won't cause any trouble. Also, if the shops are built here, there will be a tangle of tracks anyway. A couple new anti-Haap posts at The Phony Coney: http://thephonyconey.blogspot.com/
May 3, 200916 yr FYI, here is The Dean™ of Cincinnati's argument about the turning radius issue, along with a couple of badly-drawn sketches that supposedly prove his point. Here is the response I posted to his blog, repeated here in case it gets "moderated": The amount of willful ignorance on this issue is staggering. Does The "Dean" of Cincinnati really think that the engineers designing the streetcar are so stupid that they haven't accounted for the streetcar's turning radius? Is this really the best argument The "Dean" can concoct as justification for opposing the project? The city's feasibility study is just that: A feasibility study. It is not a set of construction documents by which the streetcar will be built. So any attempt to assume dimensions or clearances from the study is pointless. As for Mr. Patton's sketches, they're absolutely amateurish and could have been done by anybody in a high school drafting class, and they in no way reflect the realities of modern-day light rail or streetcar systems. But just to refute this line of argument using the same dimensions given in Mr. Patton's sketches, I've created a couple sketches of my own that show how the streetcar can make the turn without cutting the corner or taking anybody's property. Sketch 1: Intersection of Elm and 12th Street (PDF) Sketch 2: Intersection of Elm and McMicken (PDF) (And in case anybody has AutoCAD and thinks I'm cheating on my dimensions, they're welcome to download my DWG file here.) Yes, the streetcar would have to swing to the left in order to make the turn. This is no different than how a fire truck, bus, or tractor-trailer makes a wide turn on city streets. With stop lines at intersections placed an appropriate distance away from the intersection, and with streetcars given priority by the traffic signals, it works even better. I'm a Cincinnati native, but I currently work for an architecture firm with over 40 years experience on rail transit projects here in the NYC area (a city that knows a thing or two about rail transit), and I've ridden streetcars, light rail, subways, and commuter rail systems in almost every major US city. Cincinnati isn't trying to re-invent the wheel here, people. What Cincinnati is proposing is inherently pragmatic and feasible, and as with similar projects in most other cities, the naysayers will be proven wrong and subsequently ignored when future projects are in the works. This whole turning radius issue is just another in a long line of small arguments by small people who want to keep their world small and simple. These people build nothing; they only live to tear down what other people work hard to build. The sooner Cincinnati starts ignoring these people, the sooner it can become the city it has the potential to truly be. My own sketches show pretty much the same solution that jmecklenborg shows in the Seattle photos above.
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