Stephen Boyle's List: Transit

• In effect, streetcars are pedestrian facilitators. Mr. Scheib acknowledges the central role pedestrians play in the life of cities, writing that “Proprietors need pedestrians to access their businesses; for them the money for urban circulators would be better spent on bringing people to the urban core or improving the streetscape.” But these elements are all necessary to encourage pedestrian traffic; they are not alternatives to each other. Streetcars’ role is to make it easy for pedestrians to get around downtown by carrying them for distances too long for Americans to walk. Ideally, the streetcar is either fare-free or with a ticket validity of several hours in the CBD, so pedestrians have no hesitation about getting on and off frequently.

• Infrastructure should not be a catalyst for growth but something that emerges in support of productive patterns of development. There has to be a relationship between the infrastructure we build and the value that is created.
• When a railroad is built, it lasts a long time without needing to be replaced an
• d without a ton of maintenance. In financial terms, you can amortize the maintenance charges over a long, long period of time. In contrast, highways require an enormous amount of maintenance, especially up north where I live. And even with good maintenance, a highway will last about a third as long as a railroad.
• We took an affordable, efficient and long-lasting mode of transport that was funded privately by direct value capture and direct user fees and replaced it with an expensive, inefficient and maintenance-intensive system that is funded by politicians with deficit spending and a non-correlated fee.

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• The city recently hired a private contractor, Parsons Brinkerhoff, to manage DDOT and streamline a department long regarded as one of the city’s least efficient. Megan Owens, executive director of Detroit-based Transportation Riders United, said Parsons Brinkerhoff brought in a top consultant who helped oversee restructuring of public bus service in Rochester, N.Y.