RWC Library Book Sale this Weekend

The Friends of the Redwood City Public Library is holding a booksale this weekend. Hours are 10-4 Friday and Saturday. Sunday it's 1-4, and they'll be trying to clear everything out then by selling books for $5 a bag!

The Redwood City Public Library is conveniently located a block SE of the CalTrain station.

O'Toole on BART to San Jose

Our old friend Randal O'Toole has written an article on BART to San Jose in the San Jose Business Journal (here's a link to the article on the Cato Institute site).

O'Toole brings out some familiar tactics, such as comparing ridership of BART (one line) vs that of the region's entire freeway system (the more relevent comparison is rush-hour passenger throughput for the specific corridor serverd) and describing it as a service for wealthy white suburbanites (it's amazing how conservatives suddenly discover compassion for the downtrodden when it serves their needs--it's also clear that O'Toole has never actually ridden BART, which carries a pretty representative cross-section of the public, in my experience).

But he does make some important and valid points. I've written a response, which the SJ Business Journal has apparently opted not to print, so I'll post it here:

Randal O'Toole has made a career of attacking rail transit; he sees only waste in even the most successful systems, and writes of the inevitability of automobiles with an almost religious zeal. But whatever his bias, his criticisms of the VTA's plans to build BART to San Jose are basically correct: as long as Silicon Valley remains a vast sea of sprawling office parks, designed for cars and only cars, even a first class transit system will be irrelevent to most commuters.

Yet the only alternative vision, a perpetual program of highway construction and widening, is a proven failure. That's pretty much what we've been doing for the last 50 years, and yet increasing the supply of pavement only seems to bring out more demand. After a $150 million rebuild, the 101/85 interchange remains a bottleneck, and the 101 from San Jose to Gilroy is slowly turning back into the perpetual traffic jam it was before it's capacity was doubled not many years ago.

There is a solution to our transportation problems. It is simple, and obvious enough to anyone who has a regular job and commutes to it, if not to politicians or think-tankers: build new office space conveniently close to existing transit stations (which means a couple blocks walk, not a shuttle-ride away). Think, for a moment, how much transit ridership might grow if San Jose steered commercial development into a couple of new office towers across the street from Diridon Station.

Unless our regional leaders commit to making transit work, by centering new jobs around it, any new project like BART is doomed to be the failure that Mr O'Toole predicts.

CA HSR RIP

Someday, we may zip between the Bay Area and Southern California on 200mph bullet trains.

Unfortunately, the California High Speed Rail Authority, a state agency charged with planning the railway, will likely just be a historical footnote when the trains are finally running.

Although Schwarzenegger has tried to kill it, or at best put it on a starvation budget, what really seems likely to be the end of this project is the agency's own strange inability to settle on a route.

Two routes have been proposed to connect the Bay Area to the Central valley, one over the Pacheco pass (Gilroy to Los Banos) and one via the Altamont (Fremont to Livermore to Stockton). There are a lot pros and cons to both. The major pros for the Altamont route are that it will serve thousands more people (unless HSR itself triggers massinve new suburban sprawl near Los Banos) and doubles as a useful route to Sacramento. The pro for the Pacheco route are that it makes travel times from San Jose to Los Angeles several minutes quicker.

Both routes also have engineering challenges and environmental impacts, but although proponents of each route like to bring up these issues up when looking for flaws in the other, there's no clear winner in either of these areas.

In building anything, there will be design tradeoffs like this. Sometimes the decision is hard, but in this case I think it's easy: the fact that the Altamont serves more people both makes it a better route and makes the whole project more likely to actually happen: people in places like Livermore, Stockton, and Sacramento are going to have to help pay for it (estimated cost, $30 billion+), and they're only going to vote for it if they can forsee getting some use out of it.

Unfortunately, the HSR project has been in the hands of folks from the south bay who have got it into their heads that anything other than the Pacheco alignment is a huge civic snub to San Jose--Pacheco makes it a "hub", and Altamont a mere "spur". These are the same geniuses who planned the VTA's light rail system (which, while I will admit to having grown somewhat fond of it over the years, still remains the nation's least successful light rail system by far--which almost certainly also makes it the world's least successful one). They even went to the extent of arbitrarily dropping the Altamont route from consideration in the project's initial EIR--if you don't study it, you can't build it!

The MTC has now brokered a compromise of sorts--build both routes. Really. You seriously want to go to the voters, and ask them to pay for a $30 billion project which is now going to cost $40 billion because you just couldn't make a decision? Convincing voters to pay for this project was always a longshot--I think now it'd be for the best just to let the Gov cancel it, so the CA HSR can turn off the lights and call it quits.

This is not really such a bad thing. What our state should be focusing on now is incremental improvements to the speed, reliability, and interconnectivity of the rail network we already have (although it is so fractured it's hard to even see as a network). Imagine if CalTrain, BART, ACE, Metrolink and Amtrak all worked well, and worked well together. Imagine if we filled in a few gaps, and started stringing services together, and ran trains at easily achievable speeds, if not bullet train speeds. Shouldn't we try running trains at 100mph before 200mph?

Interestingly, the route proposed for HSR (Altamont) is almost covered by a patchwork of passenger trains already, with the gaps likely to be closed--CalTrain from SF to mid-peninsula, Dumbarton Rail to Fremont, ACE from Fremont to Stockton, Amtrak San Joaquins from Stockton to Bakersfield ... here there's a bit of a gap, though freight tracks bridge it via Tehachapi ... Metrolink from Lancaster to LA.

Suppose there was one through train, with a running time of, say, 6 hours. Would you ride it? I would. Sure, it's not competitive with flying for speed, but it beats driving, and I think there's a market there. I'm sure residents of the Central Valley would find a 2-3 hour train ride to the coast attractive. This is something that could actually be built, probably for an amount of money that state voters would give a thumbs up to without blinking (low billions, perhaps?). And once this is built, and running well--that's the time to ask for the big bucks for bullet trains.

(See also Bay Rail Alliance and Arch21.Org if you want to read more).

The VTA's Hard Sell for BART

Watching Santa Clara County try to sell its voters on BART, I feel a bit like I'm dealing with a slick car salesman.

In 2000 (Measure A) they promised that one tax would cover BART, CalTrain electrification, and a couple of new light rail lines to boot.

Once we were in the showroom, so to speak, it turned out that these extras were a "dot com economy special", not valid during recessions.

In 1996 they tried to get more money out of us by bundling: county health services sounds better than "undercoating", but it's the same tactic: throw in something new to trick you into spending more than you want.

Now they're proposing another sales tax, just a little one. This is the hard sell--just come up a little on the price and we'll have a deal...

This is the point where any self-respecting customer walks out in a huff, determined to "take their business elsewhere".

There are, and always were, cheaper and maybe even better alternatives.

Take a look at the Bay Rail Alliance's proposal for CalTrain Metro East.

When "professionals" fail this badly, it's time for citizens to take planning into their own hands!

People Don't Really Like Cars So Much After All

Conventional wisdom is that Americans love cars. I'm sure most people like to drive somewhat. But as much as we may like driving our own cars, we don't really like anybody else driving theirs, especially on "our" streets!

In the last few days I've read that residents of San Mateo's 3rd Ave, which connects downtown with the freeway, are out waving "Slow" signs at drivers speeding by. And SJ's Willow Glen neighborhood is equally tired of being used as a shortcut, and residents are asking the city for more enforcement, a ban on trucks, and traffic calming measures.

Official responses to concerns over neighborhood traffic are mixed.

Much modern development, especially of the posher sort, is laid out with twists and cul-de-sacs, and even gates, that make streets unusable for passing through, essentially just extensions of residents' driveways. The streets are quiet and safe for pedestrians and kids on bikes (though ironically the layout makes it pretty much impossible to actually get anywhere without a car).

These streets may be plotted and even paid for by developers, but nothing gets built without a stamp of approval from city hall, so this pattern acknowledges that traffic in residential streets is something to be avoided--for some residents, anyway.

On the other hand, if you live in an older neighborhood, officialdom's attitude seems often to be that if you're foolish enough to live on a street where people happen to want to drive, that's your problem. Consider SJ Councilman Forrest Williams' fatalistic response to the Willow-Glennians' pleas:

You can't slow the cars, you can put stop signs, traffic lights, speed bumps -- people have this mentality. Twenty-five mph signs aren't going to make a difference. You could put 50 mph signs and they are still going to speed.

Neighbors seem to disagree, and it's pretty clear that improved enforcement and traffic calming do work, where there's political will.

What does all this have to do with transit?

First, I've long suspected that a lot of the perceived speed and convenience advantages of driving comes down to the fact that we tolerate unsafe driving. If you make full stops at stopsigns, leave a safe stopping distance between you and the car in front of you on the freeway, actually treat pedestrians as equal users of the road--in short, don't let the fact that you're behind the wheel keep you from acting like a human being--you may find that riding a bus or train is a much more relaxing way to get around.

This issue goes beyond the actions of individuals. Traffic engineers themselves too often are willing to sacrifice safety for throughput. And there are vested interests in this status quo. Carless in Seattle has an interesting post about the struggle to improve safety on a single street.

Second, it's a good argument for our cause: make transit work so that we can make driving sane again, take back our streets, and make them safe for kids to cross.

Google Transit Comes to the Bay Area

Google has been working on a transit trip planner, built on top of their maps, at http://www.google.com/transit. Despite their Mountain View location, the Bay Area was not one of the first regions they rolled out to--and given the bewildering collection of transit agencies we have here, I don't blame them!

Now at least they've added BART and VTA. I tried generating a few test itineraries between the south and east bay, and the results look reasonable. Hopefully, they'll add CalTrain soon (I sure see a lot of Googlers on CalTrain).

How they'll handle itineray generation for the basically unscheduled, non-deterministic system that is the Muni (Schroedinger's Bus, anyone?) will be interesting to see.

CalTrain CEMOF (Maintenance Facility) Open House

From a CalTrain press release:

Caltrain Set to Open New $140M Maintenance Facility

Caltrain will officially open its new Centralized Equipment Maintenance & Operations Facility on Saturday, Sept. 29. After nearly three years of construction, this $140 million facility will finally provide Caltrain with its first-ever “home” for maintenance and operations.

The new facility will accommodate critical activities, including inspections, maintenance, repairs, train washing and storage. CEMOF will consolidate Caltrain's existing maintenance facilities and provide the capacity to complete certain maintenance that had to be contracted out until now. The change is particularly welcome for employees, who have had to work outside in all kinds of weather with few amenities, often crawling on the ground to do repairs.

The CEMOF grand opening will be open to the public and include a community open house as well. Attendees will park at the nearby San Jose Diridon Caltrain Station and be brought to the CEMOF site on a special train that will depart the station at 10 a.m. Diridon station is located at 65 Cahill St. Attendees who cannot arrive in time for the train ride can take a special SamTrans shuttle that will depart from the Diridon station for the CEMOF location every 15 minutes from 10:15 a.m. until 12:15 p.m.

The event will begin with a short program at 10:30 a.m., including comments from local, state and federal officials, including Amtrak President Alexander Kummant. Immediately afterward, attendees may tour the facility and get an explanation of the types of maintenance and repairs that will take place at CEMOF.

The special train will return to Diridon station at 12:30 p.m., however attendees are welcome to leave before or after that time via the shuttles, which will run back to the train station until 1 p.m.

Cars Aren't Really Transportation

A counterpoint to statements of US Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who blamed the Minneapolis bridge collapse on frivolous use of gas tax funds to pay for bike paths instead of road repair, when bicycling "is not really transportation anyway".

Now to be fair, cars are partly about transportation. Some cars are pretty much just functional ways from getting you from point A to point B. For example, I used to drive one of these:

It was actually a lot of fun.

Now if you're driving something like this to work,

That's about more than transportation--it's about one ton of transportation (a Festiva weighs 1800 lbs) and two and a half (a suburban weights 7000) of vanity, conspicuous consumption, and self-aggrandizement.

It's been pointed out before that America could be fuel-self-sufficient if everyone drove reasonable sized cars. Less discussed, but just as true, is the fact that larger cars exacerbate conjestion--it's not just that they take up more roadway themselves, but cause drivers leave more pavement unoccupied, because you just can't see around those things. And, obviously, a heavier vehicle wears out bridges and aslphalt that much faster.

So, if we're going to talk seriously about spending transportation funds purely on transportation, let's acknowledge that commuting in any car bigger than a compact is a matter of luxury, not transportation--and subsidizing it (by charging nothing for using as much road space as you feel like filling) is a ridiculous was of our taxes.

Streetcars, Light Rail, and Sensible Engineering: Making a Left Turn at Albuquerque

It is becoming more and more apparent that much of what is constructed as "light rail" is, in fact, just very over-engineered streetcar lines--or conversely, that "modern streetcars" are light rail built sensibly.

Take a look, for example, at the complex overhead on a piece of the VTA's Tasman West line:

You would think this was built for bullet trains, but I doubt the VTA's trains ever run much more than 40 MPH here.

This sort of construction may be merited in other, faster parts of the VTA system, particularly the southern stretches, where faster speeds are possible. Speed may justify fancy overhead, heavier cars (for safety) and the consequently heavier and more expensive track construction these cars need (even in the parts of the system where they putter or crawl along). Certainly, there are light rail systems in other regions, such as San Diego's and the LA Blue Line, which really haul ass and clearly needed to be built like real railroads.

VTA trains are positively zippy compared to the Muni's, which outside of the subway operate in classic trolley car fashion, with all its charms (you guys know I'm a foamer, right? Read my other blog!) and failings--including the new T line, which even when it's bugs are eventually (someday?) worked out, will still just basically be a streetcar line (with the advantage of running a reserved median), built for $100 million per mile, but not hitting speeds much faster than "modern streetcar" lines that other cities, like Portland, have built for a quarter of that cost.

But we're the wonderful Bay Area, right? And entitled to world-class transit, whatever it costs? AARRGH!!!

Meanwhile, other cities, less convinced of their own entitlement to fabulousness, or perhaps where local politics requires a clearer ROI on transit investment (i.e., underpeforming boondoggles will get you voted out of office), have figured out how to get things built much cheaper than we do, and this is starting to make streetcar/light-rail systems practical for much smaller cities. One is Albuquerque, which is designing a streetcar system to be built with funds left over from other projects (!).

I am optimistic this project will reach fruition, given New Mexico's track record getting their Rail Runner Commuter Train up and running in a mere three years from proposal to first run, which must be some kind of a record.

There are plenty of smaller cities in California that might do well to look at streetcars. Santa Cruz has studied transit uses for an existing railway right of way, but has balked at the price for light rail, estimated at something in the $300 millions as of the the early '90s--admittedly an awful lot of money for a metro region with less than 100,000 people. But perhaps this project, out of reach at "light rail" prices, might be feasable if recast as a "streetcar".

I wrote about some of these issues in this earlier post. Here is a recent (and good) post on the subject (with lots of links) in The Overhead Wire, and here's a very thorough article in LightRailNow. If Bay Area transit were only run by the online transit blogosphere, how much better our lives would be!

You Might be able to Drive Faster, Maybe

In the middle of the night, ignoring all stopsigns.

I noticed my tires were squishy, reinflated them, and noticed I'm riding a lot faster. So I decided to see if I could beat my personal best commute time. Here's how it worked out this morning:

9:20	Leave home, in SW Redwood City
9:33	Arrive at Menlo Park CalTrain (3 miles from home)
9:35	Board Train 332, SB Bullet
9:46	Arrive, Mountain View (7 miles from MP)
9:48	At office (3 blocks away)

According to Google Maps, this trip is 13.3 miles, and takes 20 mins by car--but I assure you, it takes longer when you (and everybody else) are trying to get to work. Total time for my intermodal commute is 28 mins--which is pretty much the same as the actual time it takes to drive here, in my experience.

Yellow Pages Train

Varying opinions were voiced on the platform about this train:

I kinda like it. Anyway, variety is good. I'm just glad they didn't paint over the engineer's window.

A Bus Ride is Worth Paying For

The San Francisco Board of Supes has been discussing the idea of free transit (again). The reasoning seems to be (seriously) that the Muni does such a poor job of collecting fares, that it might as well just give up. Extending this line of reasoning, we could suggest that since Muni busses and trains are usually late, and sometimes don't show up at all, it should stop running them altogether.

Since nobody's proposing a source of funds to replace the fares that the Muni does, sometimes, actually collect, this whole fare-free transit idea should pretty much be regarded as so much talk, which is no more likely to lead to a change in policy than the Supes' periodic resolutions censuring the president. Still, if they're going to talk about fare-free transit (and they do, about once a year) it's worth pointing out some of the reasons why this is a terrible idea.

• It's not going to boost ridership. It's not like people drive cars in the City because the Muni is too expensive, for crissakes!
• It will turn Muni vehicles into moving homeless shelters.
• Most seriously, it changes public transit from a service which riders pay to use into a welfare project.
  • Which takes away riders' right to complain about the service.
  • Not to mention dignity.
  • And it dooms transit from ever being taken seriously by the general public.
• Dependency on farebox revenue, even if there are other sources of funds, forces transit agencies to think in healthy, business-like ways: about improving efficiency and attracting users.

As I've said before: I'm happy to pay the full cost of my CalTrain rides if I can be excused from paying taxes for freeways.

Does Muni Need a New Control Center?

There's no denying that Muni's current control center, which dates to the mid-70's opening of the Muni Metro subway, is a museum piece:

From an SF Chronicle Article

They would like to replace all this with up-to-date equipment. The estimated price tag is $120 million, which seems a bit steep to me. For comparison, that's enough for a whole fleet of LRV's (they go for about $2-3 million), one mile of streetcar tracks at San Francisco prices (or 6 miles they way the build it in Portland--see my earlier post on streetcar engineering here), or a heck of a lot of busses.

Up-to-date does not necessarilly mean top-dollar. Certainly, if one were motivated, something could be put together with off-the-shelf equipment for far less than that.

Muni has a lot of problems, but what it needs most of all is competent and honest management. A state-of-the-art control center will not help address the fact that, due to equipment breakdowns and understaffing, many runs never even leave the barn! Put the right people in charge, and they'll run the system well with walkie talkies and notepads--and then we can start talking about what technology can help them do their jobs more efficiently.

More Reading Around the Blogosphere

The N-Judah Chronicles blogs commuting life on the often dissed but somehow endearing SF Muni--which still as much of an adventure as I remember from my youth.

MetroRiderLA led me to Militant Angeleno, online journal of a bike and subway riding LA citizen. Read it, find out a few nice things about LA, and a vision of urban evolution. Rage on, brother!

Fighting Back Against Transit Cuts

A Sacramento Bee Article reports that California Transit Association has filed a suit to block the recently-passed state budget's transfer of $1.3 billion of gas tax revenue from transit to general funds (see my earlier post, a toned-down version of which was printed in the Mountain View Voice).

The law seems to be pretty unambiguous:

According to the lawsuit, the shift violates a string of constitutional amendments approved by voters. Proposition 116, which voters passed in 1990, established the Public Transportation Account funded by motor fuel sales tax. The state was directed to use the money "only for transportation planning and mass transportation purposes," and subsequent propositions reinforced the account.

The Legislative Analyst's Office had warned that parts of the accounting move were legally unworkable.

As a side point, I notice that this Bee article repeats a statement I've seen many times in the press, which is just plain not true:

The account, which is partly funded by the sales tax on diesel fuel and gasoline, has been flush with cash because of high gas prices.

The California gas tax is a straight 18¢ per gallon, not a percentage of sales price, as this graphic from the state energy department makes clear:

So if gas tax revenues are increasing, it's got nothing to do with the cost of gas, just that people are using more of it--indicating an increased demand for transportation, which can reasonably imply an increased need for transit. This is more a technical point than a political one, but c'mon, get your facts right!

Watch out for the Yakuza

Our friendly CalTrain conductor this morning (he says he's been working it 22 years, and has a big SP belt buckle to prove it) related an interesting incident from last week.

Several passengers, in different cars, made complaints about harassment from each other, which no-one else had seen. One was Black, one Italian, and one Russian. Of course as long as they were riding in different cars now, it didn't much matter. The Black guy got off the (southbound) train in San Carlos, and as he headed down the ramp, our conductor noticed, from the departing train, the Russian following after at a brisk pace--even though he'd had a ticket good for the whole trip down to San Jose.

I suggested that the only logical conclusion was that the Russian Mafia was making a hit.

Our conductor had reached the same conclusion himself, and called over the ticket inspector to prove that someone agreed.

Well, if we're not going to get WiFi on the train, we're going to have to make up our own entertainment!

I Half-Agree with Wendell Cox

"Notorious" anti-planning and anti-transit crusader Wendell Cox has written an interesting article, appearing in the Orange County Register, predicting that, despite most predictions, California's population will grow slowly in coming decades, noting that growth has stalled or even reversed in the last decade.

His makes points that I agree with:

What is going on? Try housing affordability. In the three large coastal metropolitan areas, median home prices have exploded to more than 10 times median household incomes. Historically, this "median multiple" has been 3.0 or less and remains so in many parts of the United States. People have moved inland to take advantage of lower housing costs. But now housing costs are escalating substantially inland and, not surprisingly, growth has slowed.

...

In fact, California has brought the housing affordability crisis and the resultant slower growth on itself. California's strict and bureaucratic land-use regulation has driven the price of developable land through the roof.

...

California may be pricing itself out of the future. Given the choice between a rental unit 20 miles from the coast in San Diego and a 3,000-square-foot house on a third of an acre in the suburbs of Kansas City or Indianapolis, it is not surprising that places like the latter are now domestic migration winners.

As readers of my frequent rants against stupid NIMBYs will likely guess, I find much to agree with here. Adamant opposition to denser housing by California cities' current residents, and the simple fact that the only land left open for new sprawl is a hundred miles or so from employment centers, has produced a housing availability/affordability crisis (which I've tried to quantify in this post).

So why can I only half-agree with Wendell Cox? You would not know if from this article, but Mr Cox is known among pro-transit circles as an anti-transit, anti-smart-growth crusader, funded (unsurprisingly) by groups associated with the highway building business. And while he may portray himself as a type of less-government/less-spending conservative, like many conservatives, he's pretty selective in what spending and what regulation he criticizes. He apparently sees no contradiction between opposing subsidies for transit while lobbying for handouts for highways. And whatever merits there may be to his criticisms of growth limits in this article, he is most vocal, in fact relentless, in attacking "smart growh" regulations such as Portland's--rather than the zoning that actually produces scarcity of housing, that which enforces low-density sprawl, and prohibits the kind of efficient land use that can boost the supply of housing units.

Years ago, I came across a libertarian website which advocated ending subsidies for all forms of transportation. They pointed out, correctly, that a century ago, public transit was a profitable business, until publicly funded highways undercut it--and advocated privatizing of roadways, turning all freeways into toll roads. At least the argument is logical and honest. These days, conservatives/libertarians only believe in "small government" as a club to beat programs they dislike, rather than a principle.

I am intrigued by the idea that transit ridership might actually grow in a less regulated, less subsidized environment. Planning has been used so much for exclusion--basically, cities are zoned to keep "too many" people from moving in--that I've become wary of it, even when it has better intentions. And I cannot deny that public subsidies for transit have produced wasteful overengineering, intattention to cheap and simple solutions, and all too often a diregard for the needs of passengers than no private enterprise could get away with showing its customers. And given that car commuting is only marginally bearable with constant and massive infusions for cash, it's tempting to speculate that if we just stopped spending money on transportation at all, we'd have instant gridlock so severe that public transit would turn profitable overnight.

There are more subtle ways to move in this direction. We could make drivers pay for more of the real cost of car commuting, such as by raising the tax on gas. Ultimately, maybe transit could be less subsidized too. Hell, I'd happily pay for the full cost of my CalTrain rides (CalTrain's farebox recovery ratio is about 40%, so my $60 monthly pass would be $150) if I could be excused from having to pay for freeways I barely use. Cities could also be planned more by incentives than decree. Let developers build, more or less, what they want or need to--but make them pay for whatever burdens it places on the community (as I advocated in my manifesto), for examply by taxing them per parking space.

Returning to Mr. Cox's article--he is correct to remind us of the links between development, population, and economic growht, and to point out that the status quo is destroying California's future. Simply put: NIMBY's opposition to new housing drives away residents, and ultimately business. Calfornia and especially the Bay Area must grow or wither--and the only way to grow is as cities--denser and mobilized by transit more than cars.

Can't Get Enough Transit Blogging?

Blogger Pantograph Trolleypole has created a City Transit Blog Aggregator, where you see new posts from dozens of transit blogs daily, all in one convenient place.

Mr. Trolleypole's own blog, The Overhead Wire, is a good read too.

Fareboxes can Blue-Screen?

Everything's got a damn computer in it these days.

Computer Error Disables Fareboxes
$200,000 Lost Because Many Passengers Got Free Rides

By Lena H. Sun
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 5, 2007

A computer glitch knocked out Metrobus's system for collecting fares yesterday, resulting in a loss of about $200,000 as many passengers rode for free during the first half of the day, officials said.

By afternoon, engineers had made a temporary repair that allowed fareboxes to work, Metrobus operations chief Milo Victoria said.

Victoria said the problem was caused when two internal computer systems failed to communicate properly. "We're still trying to figure out why it went down, but we think part of the hard drive got corrupted," he said.

Metrobuses are equipped with a system that automatically tracks their location. That system is connected to a farebox system, which works only when a bus driver is logged on.

But about 3:45 a.m. yesterday, the computer system for the fareboxes crashed because of an outage in the locator server. The crash automatically triggered electronic messages logging drivers off the system and taking the fareboxes out of service, Victoria said.

About two-thirds of the 1,200 buses on the road during the first part of the day were affected, he said.

By early afternoon, engineers and computer technicians were able to electronically disconnect the two systems at all but one of the 10 bus divisions "so they don't talk to each other and so bus operators can log on," Victoria said.

Additional supervisors were dispatched to the streets to monitor buses. The bus operations control center now must rely on radio communication with drivers to track their location.

This is the second time in several months that Metrobus fareboxes have not functioned properly. In the spring, a different type of problem prevented drivers from logging on, officials said.

Be dubious if someone tells you some new gizmo is going to save you money. I'm a firm believer in the KISS principle...

Save Safe Routes to School

As much as I like to talk about trains and bikes, the real "alternative transportation mode" (or really the original mode of getting about to which all others are alternatives) which we should be fighting for is walking.

This is a winnable fight--even the most car-bound, transit hostile among us have a vague idea that it would be nice to walk around a bit more. Encouraging pedestrianism and walkable communities is probably our last, best, hope for preventing mankind from evolving into helpless entities, incapable of surviving in the natural world, perpetually bound to wheeled mechanical shells, like daleks.

Where better to encourage walking than with kids, who, since they can't drive anyway, are relatively liberated by walking, compared to the total lack of control they have in cars. The exercise won't kill them, either.

Our state government has a Safe Routes to School program, which funds improvements to neighborhood streets to make walking to school more viable for more children. The state has been funding $24 million worth of these improvements per year, for the last seven years. According to studies by CalTrans, this program has actually produced results in terms of decreasing numbers of kids hit by cars on the way to school, and increase walking and biking to school. Unfortunately, this program has been another victim of our latest state budget. That's right, folks, we can spend $10 billion (b) on new freeways, but can't scrape together $24 million (m) to keep kids from getting run over.

The Transportation and Land Use Coalition has put out a call to action to save this program, which I wholeheartedly second.

We need you to call Senator Perata’s office and Senator Torlakson’s office to ask that the funding be restored on the Senate Floor. This is urgent, otherwise there will be no additional funding for Safe Routes to School after the call for projects that will take place later this year. Please make these phone calls ASAP or California will set a horrible national precedent.

• Call Senator Don Perata (President Pro Tem) at his Capitol office - (916) 651-4009
• Call Senator Tom Torlakson (Senate Appropriations Chairman) at his Capitol office - (916) 651-4007

See also the National Safe Routes to School Partnership.