CURRENT AND FUTURE RESEARCH PROJECTS

In collaboration with my colleague Greg Thompson, I have embarked on a number of interesting transportation research projects at Florida State University. Below we describe some of these projects. Some of them are already under way, but others have yet to begin.

We welcome master’s student and doctoral student involvement in our research.

If you are interested in transportation research, I encourage you to visit the Department of Urban and Regional Planning website to learn more about our graduate programs. Or e-mail me.

Topic 1. The Influence of Planning Decisions on Rail Transit Success or Failure

Since the 1970s, more than a dozen U.S. metropolitan areas have introduced rail transit as part of a strategy to increase transit ridership and improve overall transit performance. Some scholars conclude that this has been a successful strategy, while others criticize these investments as being wasteful and unproductive. They argue that rail investments have consumed scarce resources that would have been better used to provide bus transit service. However, research shows that transit ridership and performance varies considerably among metropolitan areas that possess rail service. Some metropolitan areas have experienced increased ridership and improved performance, while others have experienced stagnant or declining ridership (per capita) and performance. These results suggest that rail transit investments aid transit performance in some places but not in others. Conventional wisdom explains the variation by noting the recent development of numerous rail systems in auto-oriented western cities for which rail transit is seen as a poor fit, but our past findings do not support this explanation. The purpose of our proposed research is to more closely examine transit performance in metropolitan areas that have implemented rail transit in order to discover what planning variables associated with rail implementation lead to transit performance success and what variables lead to decline.

Method: Our research will examine the influence of planning decisions on rail transit success or failure using a case study analysis. Our case study sites consist of fifteen urban areas with between 1 million and 5 million persons that have rail transit systems. The urban areas are: Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Miami, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Portland, Sacramento, Saint Louis, Salt Lake City, San Diego, and San Jose. These fifteen urban areas represent a broad cross-section of all U.S. urban areas. Some of the study areas experienced growing transit ridership (controlled for population) between 1990 and 2000, while others experienced stagnant or declining ridership. The study areas are located throughout the United States, in very different kinds of urban environments. Some are industrial locales in the midwest and northeast while others are sunbelt locales in the south and west. Most of the study areas have light rail transit, although a few have heavy rail transit. Some of these areas recently implemented rail transit, while others have had it for many years. Some urban areas have planned their transit systems to serve dispersed destinations, while others focus their service on the central business district (CBD).

Topic 2. The Influence of Light Rail Transit in an Edge-City Environment: The Case of the Mission Valley Line in San Diego, California

The Mission Valley of San Diego. This is an east-west oriented valley situated about five miles north of central city San Diego. It is about a half mile wide and 10 miles long, containing an east-west interstate freeway (I-8), a six- to eight-lane high speed arterial road (Friars Road) parallel to the freeway, and a recently-constructed light rail line running between the freeway and Friars Road. Last summer the light rail line was extended about six miles to the east to serve San Diego State University and to connect with an older line running much farther to the northeast. Four north-south freeways built to interstate standards (I-5, SR-163, I-805, and I-15) cross the valley at different points within about six miles and are connected to I8 and Friar’s road with elaborate interchanges. At the west end of the valley the light rail line connects to a north-south light rail line and numerous bus routes. Other bus routes interchange with the light rail line at several stations in the Mission Valley and to the east. Through these connections the valley has a high degree of transit access to other parts of the region and to Mexico.

Land uses: At the west end of the valley is a tourist destination. Other land uses include a golf course, tourist-oriented motels dating from the 1960s, up-scale high density apartments and condos, one of the two largest malls in the region, another mall composed of big-box outlets, mid-rise business buildings and business hotels, other big box outlets scattered about, numerous restaurants and bars, super markets, book stores, and a sports stadium. Activity levels are high; traffic congestion is acute. All of the development contains huge parking facilities, but pedestrian facilities have been retrofitted into the valley to connect the light rail and bus stations with much of the development. Some of the most recent development looks like what the literature calls, “transit oriented development,” and although it contains substantial parking capacity, it also is oriented to light rail stations.

We are aware of no other instance in the United States where a rail transit investment has been oriented so exclusively to serving edge city development, and as such we consider it an experiment that should be evaluated. We intend this to be an initial exploratory probe to establish contacts, summarize existing data, and to define questions for further exploration.

Topic 3. Can variation in transit ridership change be explained by route structure?

One of the questions facing a transit agency is: should it provide a coarse grid of routes that offer frequent service or a fine grid of routes with infrequent service? Previous research indicated that changes in service frequency and in service coverage were among the most important explanations for ridership change between 1990 and 2000 among MSAs with more than 500,000 persons. However, this research did not offer guidance as to the appropriate mix of frequency and coverage. The research proposed here would address this issue.

Method: We propose to conduct case study analyses of transit service in 14 MSAs. The case studies consist of MSAs that experienced ridership growth per capita between 1990 and 2000 and those that experienced decline. The study includes seven MSAs with populations between 1 million and 5 million and seven MSAs with populations between 500,000 and 1 million. Five Florida MSAs are included in the set of 14 cases. We will examine these MSAs with respect to service orientation, service frequency, service coverage, and a set of socioeconomic and urban form variables.

Topic 4. What role does the method of transit finance play in explaining variation in service, ridership, and system productivity?

Previous research suggests that the MSAs where service, ridership, and productivity increased between 1990 and 2000 were the places that rely heavily on dedicated, return-to-source finance instruments such as state-imposed and locally adopted sales taxes. However, a large body of literature has criticized such instruments, which are best exemplified by the Transportation Development Act’s state-imposed, return-to-source sales tax in California, for resulting in a proliferation of supposedly ineffective and inefficient suburban transit service. The research proposed here would attempt to better explain the connection between finance and service, ridership, and productivity by examining the performance of the suburban services that are brought into being by these finance instruments. The research will consider the roles of different types of finance instruments and their importance to agency budgets. The research will also examine whether successful areas are spending more money per rider (or less per rider) than their less successful counterparts.

Method: We will conduct a statistical analysis of all 82 MSAs with more than 500,000 persons in 2000. We will develop multivariate models that explore the relationships between: a) ridership and finance, b) service and finance, and c) productivity and finance. We will also examine the overall change in operating expenditures (total and per capita). We will include variables that measure the share of operating costs borne by dedicated funding sources (versus fares and contracts), the amount of money (per capita) attributable to dedicated funding sources (versus other funding instruments), and a set of socio-economic and urban structure variables.

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