TRANSPORTATION 8-12-1997 These transportation solutions are valid for any city. The bus data is for Lexington, Kentucky. PROBLEM: Lextran has removed routes, changing the bus network to a hub and spoke system. Bus schedules have been cut from every half hour to once every hour. This means that it takes an hour to get to work and an hour to get home. Each wait for a bus is an average of a half an hour since the bus comes every hour. You have to change buses once at the bus terminal so it takes an hour to get anywhere. Many people have have lost their jobs since they can't get to work on time. It costs 80 cents to ride the bus and $4.00 for Lextran to provide that service. The $3.20 comes from the government. The feds have cut the subsidy (deficit and all) since Lexingtion has passed a critical size and should be able to subsidize bus rides itself. The city gives Lextran 3.6 million dollars a year. ANALYSIS: Changes in transportation schedules are bad. People get apartments and sign year leases because it is convenient to a bus which just gets them to work on time. People get jobs for the same reason. The job is at the other end of a bus route which has a bus coming just in time to get to work. PROPOSED SOLUTION 1 : Do not change transportation schedules. Commit to subsidize at any level you feel you can afford. Keep the same bus schedules for years. Plan for a total cut of federal funds if that occurs. PROPOSED SOLUTION 2 : Abolish apartment leases. Then people can move closer to work as soon as they get a new job, rather than waiting for their lease to be up. They could choose to live on a convenient bus route which now exists. They could walk or bicycle to work if they lived close enough. To be fair to the landlords, make a 30 day notice necessary. To be fair to tenants, make a 90 day written notice necessary to raise rent. It is bad to move during the school year. Enact this on April 31. That way people can give 30 days notice, and move on Memorial Day weekend, just after the kids get out of school. Do not enact this during the cold weather - moving is no fun in the cold. Starting on May 31, people could move all summer. Advertise this extensively. Perhaps the mayor could get on TV and promote moving closer to work. Walking distance is best. No pollution. No street wear and tear. There would be a big exchange of apartments. The only losers would the apartments which are poorly managed and overpriced. We would have a few deserved bankruptcies. The winners would be all citizens of Lexington. Taxes would go down (or not up as fast) since road maintenance would go down. The other winner would be the environment - everybody downwind would breathe less car exhaust. The cost is zero. The city would save money. PROPOSED SOLUTION 3 : Build pedestrian walkways and bike trails. It costs much less to build a bike trail than a road. A road needs 8 inches of gravel and 2 inches of asphalt to hold the max load - a 72,000 tractor trailer. A bike path is much cheaper - 1 inch of gravel and 1/2 inch of asphalt. Advertise bike riding and walking - it is healthy and cheaper. How to pay for it: Pick a road which is being widened from 2 lanes to 4 lanes. Put off the widening for a few years and use the money to build bike paths. You should be able to build 100 miles of bike paths by delaying the improvement of just 10 miles of road. Alternate method of payment: Instead of buying a 10 acre park, use the money to make a park 10 feet wide and 10 miles long. PROPOSED SOLUTION 4 : Make pedestrian bridges over major roads. Typically a grocery store is on one side of a major road and a subdivision is on the other. You cannot walk or ride a bike to the store without crossing 4 lanes of traffic. So you drive 1/2 mile to the store to pick up a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread. People do not like to walk up stairs, over a road, and then down stairs again. For Man-O-War Blvd or New Circle Road people would use a pedestrian bridge or risk death in heavy traffic. To encourage use and to allow bikes to use the pedistrian bridges, have ramps leading up to the bridge. It would be natural to walk up the ramp if one was walking in that direction. It would be a good idea to have a place for bikes and a place for walkers. Perhaps different levels with a curb like a street and a sidewalk. Bikers usually do OK on a sidewalk if they go slow and are careful but some sort of barier seperating different transportation modes would be safer. Benefits: Exercise, less heart attacks, lower health care costs, less air polution. Money is saved by Lexington citizens. Tax money is saved by reduced road maintenance. Traffic congestion is reduced. How to pay: Levy a tax on the shopping center. Alternate payment: Use road maintenance funds since road maintenance is reduced. Alternate payment: Levy a tax on the subdivision which benefits. Alternate payment: Put a nickel in a turnstile to go across. Alternate payment: Put advertising on the sides of the walkways over busy streets. Alternate payment: Any combination of the above. Alternate payment: In other countries pedistrian bridges have shops on them. The shops pay for the bridge. Also with a shop on the bridge, it would not be necessary to have a shopping center as a destination for a walking trip. It would be possible to replace a shopping center with apartments. Then move the shops over the road on the pedestrian bridge. This would double the available space. No space would be used for stores since stores would be over roads. PROPOSED SOLUTION 5 : Build bike freeways like auto freeways. Bike freeways would be much cheaper than auto freeways since bikes are lighter than cars and trucks. A bike freeway is a raised roadway like an auto freeway bridge, only smaller and cheaper. This is a futuristic idea which will be accepted some day. PROPOSED SOLUTION 6 : Steel wheeled vehicles (railroad cars) get 2 to 5 times the gas milage of rubber tired vehicles (cars). Build a micro rail system. Micro rail is smaller than light rail. Louisville is planning to put in a light rail system costing $100 million for 2 lines. Light rail is ordinary size rail cars which have the carrying capacity for passengers rather than freight. Forty passengers weigh less than 100 tons of coal. Micro rail is just smaller. Micro rail is larger than a carnival ride and smaller than an ordinary rail car. Start small. Build a single line and see how it works. You could say, ride from Turfland Mall to Fayette Mall for a quarter or 50 cents. Part of the route would go through the Reynolds Road property. You could do a monorail like Disneyland, only smaller. An ordinary T shaped railroad rail has to support a 100 ton rail car. A ten ton passenger rail car weighs one tenth as much. So the rail does not have to be so sturdy. In fact an ordinary I-beam would work for a rail for a microrail car. It would be possible to use the same steel I-beam for the supporting structure and the rail itself. Just support 40 foot I-beams at the ends and have little cars run right on the I-beams. An I-beam can be made as strong as you like by making it deep or making the steel thicker. But 50 foot I-beams are hard to transport on standard 40 foot flatbed trucks. Next time you are traveling down a main road, look up in the air. On one side of road is power lines. On the other side of the road are communication lines. In the middle are traffic lights. But 18 feet above the center of the road, above the traffic lights is empty space. There are low voltage power lines connecting the transformers to the houses on the other side of the road. But is easy to reroute a low voltage power line - to raise it 10 feet. Just extend the 2 inch conduit to the electrical box about 6 feet above the roof. Some of the electric power lines are already this high. It is very easy to move phone lines. It would be possible to put a monorail 2 feet above the traffic lights right down the middle of every main road in town. How to pay: Fares. And tourists would come to Lexington to ride on it. They would spend money buying things while they were in town. The city would also make money on sales taxes. The cost would be low since rail is more fuel efficient than rubber tire busses and fuel is a major cost for Lextran buses. Also road maintainance would be reduced. Put in a rail line instead of adding a lane to a road. PROPOSED SOLUTION 7 : Automate public transportation. Labor is one of the major costs of bus service. This would take state of the art computer technology on busy city streets. A bus in city traffic needs a human to drive it. The micro rail cars in solution 6 would benefit from automated pilot. There is nothing to hit on a rail line like cars on a street. The whole system could be run from a central location, like the traffic lights are now. A half dozen people could run 100 rail cars. PROPOSED SOLUTION 8 : Advertise ecological transportation such as walking and bicycling. Many of our problems can be solved for free, just by changing our attitudes. A thought is free. Perhaps the mayor could get on TV on a regular basis to promote various things which would benefit all of us. Examples: a. moving closer to work b. walking to the store or work c. bicycling instead of driving d. saving water - to lower water and sewer bills e. exercising f. crime stoppers PROPOSED SOLUTION 9 : Give bikes to poor kids, perhaps for good grades. PROPOSED SOLUTION 10 : Have an annual bike race to promote healthy, nonpolluting, cheaper transportation. PROPOSED SOLUTION 11 : Advertise walking and pedaling on buses. PROPOSED SOLUTION 12 : This idea is included to show that to solve problems, you need to let your mind roam free to unusual ideas. It is ecological, healthy, inexpensive, and nonpolluting. Yet people will laugh because it is so strange. Build skateboard ramps. Picture this in your mind. On each street corner is steps leading upwards about 10 feet high to a platform on top of a post. From there, there is a gently sloping ramp which leads downward one block to the next street corner. It would be possible to climb the stairs carrying your skateboard, roll gently downward, and you have traveled one block. On the next street corner is another set of stairs leading up to the top of the next ramp. You could travel as far as you like by rolling down one ramp after another. PROPOSED SOLUTION 13 : Most cars have only one person in them and 3 empty seats. Promote one person vehicles. A one person car would get over 100 miles per gallon. It would have less pollution and cost less for gas. It could be made as safe as you like by putting in foam padding and a steel roll bar. It would cost less than a big car since it is smaller. This is not too practical for city to commission to build since it would cost too much to develop. Existing designs are low volume production and cost about $8000 each. Mass production would lower the cost to half of a conventional car - about $3000 each. No U.S., Japanese or German manufacturer produces single person vehicles. Larger cars have a higher profit margin. This is not practical today, but will become popular in the future as the price of gas goes up. We have about 50 years worth of oil left. Life will change drastically within our children's lifetimes. When the oil runs out, we will be left with a huge, useless infastructure which is dependent on cheap oil. This could happen earlier if there is another war in the Persian Gulf. PROPOSED SOLUTION 14 : Amsterdam, Holland bought 5000 bicycles, painted them white, and set them around the city. Anybody could grab one and ride anywhere. They were community property. Unfortunately, all the bikes disappeared, but the experiment lasted several years until they were all gone. This is probably not practical in America. But it is food for thought. PROPOSED SOLUTION 15 : Put in more bike racks so people can lock their bikes up when they go somewhere. PROPOSED SOLUTION 16 : Make one street in every neighborhood half for cars and half for bicycles. Pick a residential street which goes all the way through the neighborhood. Make it a one way street. Stripe one half of the street with light blue paint. Put up a sign not to drive or park on the blue side. Ticket any car which does. PROPOSED SOLUTION 17 : Build an apartment complex across from an industrial park. Everyone could walk to work. This would bring industry to Lexington. With vastly reduced tranportation costs, workers would be happy working for a dollar an hour or so less than otherwise. If there was a super market in walking distance of the apartment complex, it would not really necessary for a person to own a car. It would be handy to be on a bus route however so people could go to K-Mart and other non-food stores. Rather than putting industry all by itself, miles away from living places, we could cluster work, living, and shopping. It might be possible to give people a discount on the apartment if they work in the industrial park. It would be necessary to have only light industry. No one wants to live next to a steel mill. PROPOSED SOLUTION 18 : Make it a police priority to prevent muggers. Many people do not walk the store because of fear. Have more policemen on foot. This would save the city money. Shoes are cheaper than gas. PROPOSED SOLUTION 19 : In England, there are pedistrian pathways behind houses like alleys. The bobbies on the beat and intense detective work prevent crime. People in America would probably not want anyone walking past their back fense. PROPOSED SOLUTION 20 : Remove barriers to bicycles. To prevent cars from going from one parking lot to another without going on the street, barriers are put up. Businesses generally do not want through traffic to cut through their parking lot. However, a bicyclist does not want to go out on a busy street. It is dangerous. A bicyclist should be able to get from one parking lot to another, easily and safely. The hole in the barrier should be half as wide as a car. That way a bike can go through, but a car can't. PROPOSED SOLUTION 21 : Make little bike bridges over drainage ditches. Make pathways for bicycles which allow total freedom of movement from subdivisions and through shopping centers. PROPOSED SOLUTION 22 : The United States is one of the richest countries in the world. Americans can afford to waste money and do things inefficently. In order to find better ways to do things, we can look at how things are done in other countries. In many other countries, and a few places in Lexington, apartments are built over stores. The family that runs the store lives over it. The trip to work takes thirty seconds. You just walk down stairs. Also, since the family lives there, they have 24 hour security. There is no pollution or traffic congestion if you can walk to work in 30 seconds. Ordinarily developers come up with ideas, present their proposal to the city council, and get approved or rejected. The council could preapprove a shopping center with an apartment over each small store. The apartment and the store underneath it should be sold as a unit. It should be a deed restriction to work as intended. The family that lives over the store should run the store. PROPOSED SOLUTION 23 : An ordinance should be passed requiring all new subdivisions to include bike and pedestrian paths. PROPOSED SOLUTION 24 : Reduce real estate commissions below 6% to make it cheaper to sell houses. This way people can cheaply move closer to work. This would reduce traffic congestion and pollution. PROPOSED SOLUTION 25 : Build more overhead walkways connecting the second stories of buildings. PROPOSED SOLUTION 26 : Someday Lexington will be large enough to need a subway system. Because of the rainfall in the bluegrass and the porous limestone underneath Lexington, a subway system would need drainage tunnels to keep it dry. The first step is to buy a tunneling machine and dig a tunnel from the Kentucky River to underneath Lexington. The same tunneling machine can be used to make the subway tunnels. There must be lots of mining equipment and experienced underground workers in the coal fields of Kentucky. Also, underground tunnels could be used for storm drainage.