Public Meeting To Discuss Bruce B. Downs Boulevard Widening

Here's the press release for the public meeting I mentioned last week. It's on Thursday, April 1st at 6:30PM

Public Meeting To Discuss Bruce B. Downs Boulevard Widening

Hillsborough County and the Hillsborough Metropolitan Planning Organization will hold a public meeting to provide information and discuss Segment A of the Bruce B. Downs Boulevard widening project from Bearss Avenue to Palm Springs Boulevard in the New Tampa area. The purpose of the meeting is to receive input from citizens as to whether this segment should be reconstructed as a six-lane roadway, per the recently adopted Long Range Transportation Plan, in order to preserve right-of-way for future rapid transit, or as an eight-lane roadway as currently designed. Construction is estimated to start on the designed eight lanes in the summer of 2011 and should be completed by spring of 2014. The projected cost of the project is approximately $55 million. County and MPO staff, local agencies and consultants will be at the meeting to discuss the details of the project and future transit plans and to answer any questions residents may have. Please attend; we welcome your input. Date: Thursday, April 1 Time: 6:30 p.m. Place: Tampa Palms Elementary School , 6100 Tampa Palms Blvd. All meeting facilities are ADA compliant. For additional assistance, or for more information, please call Steve Valdez, Public Works Department at 272-5275 (TTY: 301-7173) or visit the MPO website at: www.hillsboroughmpo.org Para información, llamar al 272-5275.

Hey, I think we're being dissed!!

Check out this NY Times article questioning why the first US high speed rail line is being built to serve the Tampa-Orlando route. Do you think the writer (and many of those who've posted comments) have a point, or do you think this is just typical northeastern "ethnocentrism" with a dose of northeastern scorn for we backward Floridians?
I still can't figure out the hyperlink thing but here's the url, and the article is pasted below: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/us/23train.html?scp=7&sq=Tampa&st=nyt

TAMPA — The drive from Orlando to Tampa takes only 90 minutes or so. Despite the short distance, the Obama administration awarded Florida $1.25 billion in stimulus money to link the cities with a fast train to help kick off its efforts to bring high-speed rail service to the United States.
Chip Litherland for The New York Times



The Florida train would indeed be high speed — as fast as 168 miles per hour. But because the trains would make five stops along the 84-mile route, the new service would shave only about half an hour off the trip.

Time-pressed passengers may also find themselves frustrated at the end of their trip. Neither city is known for great public transportation, so travelers may discover that they have taken a fast train to a slow bus.

Proponents of high-speed rail worry that the new line, which is scheduled to be up and running in 2015, might hurt rather than help their cause, if it comes to be seen as little more than an expensive way to whisk tourists from Orlando International Airport to Walt Disney World, which is slated to get its own stop.

Even Representative John L. Mica, a Republican whose district in northeast Florida stops about 20 miles short of the proposed line, has questioned whether his state was the best choice to receive some of the $8 billion that was set aside in the stimulus act for high-speed rail.

Mr. Mica wondered if the notoriously congested Northeast corridor from Boston to New York to Washington, which was largely shut out of the pool of money, might have been a better choice.

“That would have the most dramatic impact, as far as a positive result for the country,” said Mr. Mica, who added that he was grateful for the investment in his home state.

State officials say they have been planning the route for decades and own most of the right of way needed for the tracks — a big selling point to the Obama administration, which saw it as the fastest and cheapest way to get a line up and running.

And Florida hopes that it would be only the first leg of a high-speed line that would eventually stretch south to Miami, linking several of the state’s tourism and business centers.

But it is unclear where the state will get the money to extend the train line. As it is, officials are uncertain where they would get the rest of the $2.6 billion that they believe is needed to build the Orlando to Tampa route.

Supporters of high-speed rail often argue that it can be a way to lure passengers off airplanes. Orlando and Tampa are so close, however, that no airlines fly between them.

The drive took less than 82 minutes on a couple of recent test runs by a reporter; the train is expected to cover the same ground in 54 to 58 minutes.

Even the Florida project’s planners have acknowledged it would have a limited impact on traffic. An environmental impact statement issued in 2005 estimated that the train would draw 11 percent of the 4.5 million people who drive between Tampa and Orlando each year.

It also said the drivers who opted instead to ride the train “would not be sufficient to significantly improve” traffic flow on Interstate 4.

Tourists who try to use public transportation, rather than renting a car, may find themselves seeing sights they would rather avoid and missing some they would like to see. As the Frommer’s travel guide to Tampa advises, “Like most other Florida destinations, it’s virtually impossible to see Tampa’s major sights and enjoy its best restaurants without a car.”

A couple of tourists from Chilliwack, British Columbia — Allana Strickland and her teenage daughter, Sarah McKenzie — learned this firsthand recently. When they took the public bus from Tampa to the Salvador Dali Museum in nearby St. Petersburg, a major draw in the region, they found themselves on a journey that lasted more than two and half hours to go less than 20 miles.

“It’s not as easy to get around here as it could be, for sure,” Ms. Strickland said.

The Florida route was one of only two true high-speed rail projects — with trains capable of going more than 150 miles per hour, as is common in Europe and China — to win some of the $8 billion in high-speed rail money in the Stimulus Act that was awarded in January. (The Acela trains on the Northeast Corridor are capable of going 150 m.p.h., but average only around half that because they operate on crowded, curvy tracks.)

The other high-speed route is in California, which was awarded $2.25 billion, a small fraction of what it will need to build a rail line for trains that could travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco at speeds of up to 220 m.p.h.

The rest of the stimulus money was divided among 31 states, mostly to speed up existing train service by improving track and signal systems. Supporters see the Florida line as a hedge against future population growth and congestion.

“We believe it’s a mode for the future, and we have to start today,” said Nazih Haddad, the chief operating officer for the Florida Rail Enterprise, a division of the state’s Department of Transportation. He said ridership studies projected that the route would attract enough passengers to cover its operating costs.

But when America 2050, a planning group, ranked potential routes last year in a report called “Where High Speed Rail Works Best,” the Tampa to Orlando route did not even make the cut, because the group found that cities should be at least 100 miles apart to capture riders.

The planned route from Tampa through Orlando to Miami did make the list, though: it was ranked 100th among potential routes in the United States.

If the project is built but is not successful, it could make it harder for other high-speed rail projects to get money in the future. Florida knows about that possibility firsthand: its voters once passed a constitutional amendment requiring the state to build a high-speed rail system, only to repeal it later over cost concerns.

As it stands, the proposed route does not have the easiest connections. It would go to downtown Tampa, but not to Tampa’s airport. It would go to Orlando’s airport, but not to downtown Orlando.

Orlando is planning to build a commuter rail system, but the current plans do not connect it to the proposed high-speed rail line. Tampa is debating a new light rail system, but construction could be years off.

In the short term, experts predict that up to a third of the train’s ridership would be for the 19-mile trip between the Orlando airport and Walt Disney World, which has agreed to donate land for a stop.

A recent visit to the Tomorrowland Transit Authority, a retro-futuristic people mover in the Magic Kingdom, shows the enduring pull of car culture in Florida: a sign at the station announces that it is presented by Alamo, the car rental company.

Here's an article about light rail costs and the cost/technical factors that will influence decisions about the route.

http://www2.tbo.com/content/2010/mar/15/151524/potential-light-rail-routes-tampa-have-challenges/

Urban Planning Game

Hello everyone,

there is a facebook application social city where you plan your own city and get points by how much your city residents are happy with their city and facilities. It is called Social City and it is very interesting. you can practice planning the city you want with walakability and hotels and business areas and factories.

USF Employs Automatic Vehicle Location System

USF recently unveiled their new bus tracking system. I knew that there was research going on, but I never imagined the USF Bullrunner having live tracking feeds. I wonder what this will do to ridership. I'll definitely be more likely to ride transit if I know exactly where the vehicle is at any given moment. The system removes the apprehension associated with uncertain reliability of the system. I suppose the real question is: How much will it impact ridership, and what are the marginal benefits of the system? Research will definitely be easier to conduct!

In any case, the technology is exciting and really fun to play with.

Go to http://www.usfbullrunner.com/ and check out the system. Future improvements of the system will include ridership count per vehicle.

The Official Press Release Reads:

USF introduces new bus tracking system - TAMPA, Fla. (Mar. 2, 2010)

The University of South Florida Department of Parking & Transportation Services is unveiling a new program Mar. 2 that will provide riders of the USF Bull Runner, the USF Tampa campus shuttle, with enhanced convenience and security. The program is an Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) system which is available on the web and can be downloaded on mobile hand-held devices.

The AVL offers several services including the ability to see arrival predictions for all buses at all stops, the ability to track buses along the routes so riders can plan their day accordingly, the ability to set up alerts for recurring use via text message and bus viewing in real-time. In April, USF will also implement automatic passenger counting on buses so riders will be able to know how full a bus is before it arrives.

The new system can be viewed at www.usfbullrunner.com. To see the application working, click on the "Live Map" and choose a route. As always, a valid USF ID is required to ride the USF Bull Runner. USF is the only university in the State University System that owns its own buses and offers the AVL program.

Those road projects....

Ray Chiaramonte mentioned some south county road projects that are the sticking point in approving the transportation ballot initiative. Here's more about that(sorry that I just can't seem to make this work as a hyperlink!)


http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/local/road-projects-become-a-sticking-point-in-transit-tax-plan/1077264

Transportation Network Efficiency Expert, Slime Mold

I found a very interesting experiment that places a slime mold specimen in a situation that encouraged it to grow in a way that lent insight into Tokyo's rail system efficiency.

Some organisms have the ability to create efficient networks that allow them to access resources with minimum energy output. A team led by Atsushi Tero of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan set up an environment that mimicked the Tokyo metropolitan area with food crumbs representing destinations. Researchers placed the slime mold Physarum polycephalum into the environment and allowed it grow and establish its own feeding network. The final result was a remarkably efficient network eerily similar to Tokyo's existing rail network.

Researches critically compared the organism's design with Tokyo's design and used what they learned to create biologically inspired algorithms for more efficient transportation network design. Innovation is definitely interdisciplinary.

Here are links to the published research in Science Magazine, a good supporting article by Wolfgang Marwan of Otto van Guericke University (Germany), and a concise overview from MSNBC.

• Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design
• Marwan Article
• MSNBC's "Better Transit Design through...Slime Mold?"

If the links don't work, try searching "Network Design" on sciencemag.org. USF's online database subscriptions include this journal, so you should be able to access it through the USF library.