Urban Transportation OKC 2020

[Patrick]

Guys, I think it's pretty obvious that we need to jump on the band wagon to try to save the Unino Station Rail Yard. The highway could easily be realigned at that point to preserve the rail yard. I challenge you to contact our mayor at mayor@okc.gov. This is important for the future of our great city.

[Midtowner]

Guys, I think it's pretty obvious that we need to jump on the band wagon to try to save the Unino Station Rail Yard. The highway could easily be realigned at that point to preserve the rail yard. I challenge you to contact our mayor at mayor@okc.gov. This is important for the future of our great city.

The thing is Patrick, and I'm playing devil's advocate here -- what is the reason that they chose to destroy the railyard in the first place? It's hard to know why this is without the other side giving their story. I'm very concerned that they don't feel like the need to give their story. That tells me that they don't want to be accountable to the people that are footing the bill here.

[Patrick]

The thing is Patrick, and I'm playing devil's advocate here -- what is the reason that they chose to destroy the railyard in the first place? It's hard to know why this is without the other side giving their story. I'm very concerned that they don't feel like the need to give their story. That tells me that they don't want to be accountable to the people that are footing the bill here.

Actually, the other side has already given their story. They feel this is the best place for the highway, and they don't see a need for commuter rail in our city, now or ever. Thus, they don't see the need for the rail yard.

It might be a little more costly to move the highway a bit further south to avoid the railyard because it would take it out of the railway righ tof way, so they'd have to condemn more property.

But, Tom brings up a good point...simply redecking the existing crosstown would have been cheaper than relocating it. If they really wanted to put in on the ground, I still don't understand why they couldn't have left it where it is now, and simply rebuilt one side at a time! I asked Jack Money several years ago why they couldn't keep it in the current location, and he really didn't have an answer.

[Pete]

I believe there were many issues that needed to be resolved other than just re-surfacing, such as: adding more lanes/capacity, adding shoulders, lengthening on and off ramps, etc.


Also, an elevated highway in the exteme heat and cold of Oklahoma means a maintenance nightmare. As long as I can remember, that stretch has always had problems.

[gtelmore]

The Crosstown needs to be completely redecked. Done with modern, corrosion resistant materials which were not available at its orignal construction, and reengineered to modern ramp standards and so forth, the highway would become, essentially, new -- probably for about $50 million, which we have in hand today.

As to adding lanes and capacity, I ask very simply, "why?" When you add lanes, you induce traffic to abandon other routes in favor of the new "funnel." You absolutely ensure more through-truck traffic. Meanwhile you increase air pollution, danger, noise and in this post-9-11 era probably security risks as well.

One friend with a long background in the travel industry (he's also a seasoned civil engineer) from Midwest City asks an entirely rational question: Do we really NEED a "Crosstown Expressway" at ALL?

When the Crosstown (the "Stanley Draper Expressway," opened in 1966) was built, there was no I-240 or I-44, and certainly no Kilpatrick Turnpike. Why do we WANT through, cross-country truck traffic induced to come directly through the heart of downtown? Why do commuters NEED to use the Crosstown who don't work or have business down there? Why would discouraging extraneous traffic with no business downtown be a bad thing?

Bricktown, etc, etc, would hardly be visible from the "New Crosstown" at all. It'll be mostly running in a nominally 14-foot-deep ditch!

Why would simply declaring the I-240 route from the fork in the road east of Tinker AFB to also be the new I-40 route, at least for heavy, through trucks, be bad? Along with that, it might be a really good thing just to do away with the Crosstown as an Interstate route altogether, replacing it only with the proposed new "Boulevard" on the path of the current structure. No "division," psychological or otherwise, after that between north and south downtown.

If, however, we absolutely MUST have an Interstate highway bisecting our downtown, why isn't where it is as good as where they want to put it? Why is an elevated highway "more of a barrier" than a long, 10-lane wide ditch? (Plainly -- PLAINLY -- it ISN'T, at all!) Why isn't LIMITING the amount of traffic using it by deliberately keeping it at current capacity a better thing for downtown? As I've noted -- send the heavy trucks which comprise one-third of the daily traffic AROUND on better bypass routes, and you put the Crosstown back into design parameters on daily traffic counts!

Elevated highways are "bad," you say? Why did they build so much of the Centennial Expressway up in the air? Why is so much of the Ft. Smith Junction built that way? Any and every bridge in the state is essentially similar -- and some have to be longer than others.

These questions have not even really been ASKED, let alone seriously pondered, because, as Garner Stoll said, the "fix was IN" on the "D" Route before the whole business started. That's one of those well-known "open secrets" among the "engineering community."

Let me remind you, however, that the elevation stakes outlining the perimeter of the prospective excavation for the new highway are already driven around the Union Station yard. Call the Governor today. He can stop this thing -- and is probably about the only man who can. Of course, strong words from the Mayor and City Council might well have an immediate effect, too.

TOM ELMORE

[Pete]

If the fix was indeed in, why? Who benefitted from this?



Also, how do you redirect trucks from an interstate highway to other roads? Aren't interstates funded specifically to carry interstate traffic??

And how is diverting traffic to I-240 (with capacity issues of it's own) or other more suburban roads a better solution?

And finally, as I recall there is virtually no shoulder or center median on that stretch (or at least most of it) and I was once in a bad accident because there was simply nowhere to go.

I drove I-44 to downtown every day for 7 years and always hated that section because I though it was extremely unsafe.


When I initially heard of the plan for the new route, I didn't understand why. But after more thought it seems like a good idea to me.

[gtelmore]

When you speak of "the plan for the new route," do you refer to the "D" Route for the "New Crosstown?"

As you say -- the urban segment of I-44 is dangerous -- but it wasn't all that long ago that
I-44 was "new." Much was promised when people's land and homes were being taken away from them that was never delivered. Aside from the minimal shoulders, etc, "people-friendly" aspects like adequate sound attenuating walls between the road and the neighborhoods ripped up to make way for it -- were never provided -- so those who live near the road get not only the danger, but the constant din and racket. (Ever have a flat or try to help somebody else chage a tire along I-44? I have. I was still shaking when I got home --and I'm pretty hard to rattle!)

I-240 between May and I-35 has been "re-engineered" since I-44 was completed. "Compromises" had to be made -- and WERE made. Then there's I-35 south, massively over time and over cost -- ultimately to add only one new lane each direction. Or we could discuss the "NEW, improved Ft. Smith Junction..." Amazing that the story's always the same.

Let me assure you -- whatever the final outcome, the contractors got their money and went home.

Garner Stoll warned that the claimed cost of the "New Crosstown" was always massively understated. He was absolutely right (one of the reasons OKC government ran him off...). They sold it as a "$236 million project," but the "projected cost is now up to "$360 million" -- and the first spade of earth on actual construction has not yet been turned. It's well known that the price of steel and other key materials has minimally tripled since THAT "projection" and yet the figure is still ostensibly the same -- only they don't have half of the funding for THAT number available. Remember -- it was sold as a project that would ALL be federally funded, back in the "good old days." It's probably minimally a one-half billion dollar project or more -- and the money simply isn't there for it. But you believe it will necessarily somehow end up a "safer, better highway" -- which is to say "superior to every other in the metro?"

Sorry -- I don't buy it. When the project is completed (if it ever really is, that is...) we won't only NOT have a better highway system, we also won't have the superior, irreplaceable rail yard -- probably the only major transport facility in the state that actually WAS "overengineered."

But I think the thing that REALLY bugs ODOT and its hangers-on about Union Station is that it's actually PAID FOR. Think about that! That's just not the way they do things! It must also be danged annoying to them to see the fine condition of the 75-year-old Robinson and Walker underpasses -- which were actually built to last, not to "be regularly replaced to keep the money flowing to the contractors..." (Compare them to the 39 year old Crosstown or any other ODOT bridge in the state. They are absolutely, oeverwhelmingly superior in every way -- by orders of magnitude -- and BEAUTIFUL, to boot!)

There is simply no way around it -- the state's roads are a terrible mess -- and the unfunded cost of that mess is apparently growing in excess of 40% a year. So comes the question -- is the answer to that mess to let the people who created it continue to do the same things they've always done -- and allow them to destroy superior, pre-existing infrastructure to do it? There are no "good answers" any more to our roadway problems. But there ARE obvious improvements that can be made to the overall transport system if we take a restrained, conservative view of existing assets -- and maximize their usefulness instead of letting the concrete cowboys destroy them.

How do you divert trucks to other routes? Put up signs saying "use the bypass." Enforce it. If it's OK for OKC to fill its coffers with ticket-writing jags on the "New Broadway Extension -- a road designed to a 70 mph standard with artifically low 60 mph speed limits -- then why isn't it OK to make the truckers tow the mark? Actually, bypassing the Crosstown would be a great help to truckers -- because it avoids the treacherous Ft. Smith Junction, and, of course, the Crosstown. With all the big talk about "Intelligent Transportation System" management, why not use the digital ITS signs to tell truckers "go around....?" Isn't that what ITS is supposed to be about? Moreover -- why would you allow the misuse of the Crosstown bridge by swarms of daily trucks far heavier than it was really designed to carry while ignoring superior routes better for the taxpayers and better for the truckers? (The ever-sparkling Neal McCaleb explained this to a Channel 25 news man at a Crosstown meeting at the Civic Center several years ago: "Because that traffic adds to the vitality of downtown" he told the newsman. This lightning stroke of glib rhetoric so dazzled the newsman that he had to stride proudly back over and tell ME (you would have thought he'd just heard Moses speak from Sinai or something...) -- grinning broadly -- what McCaleb had said. "Great, " I said. "What does that MEAN -- and why are people like you so impressed by such absolute nonsense?" The newsman, suddenly crestfallen, turned on his heel and walked away.

"If the fix was in, who benefitted from it?" you ask. That's a really, really good question. We'll all know soon enough if the project gets underway. Meanwhile, the "usual suspects" are involved and profiting from the project itself -- while ensuring that any new rail system that's eventually built will cost 50 times as much as simply using what we already had.

Think about it.

TOM ELMORE

[Patrick]

This pretty much sums up what Tom Elmore has been trying to tell us.

This is from downtownguy's site, originally pulled from Charles Hill at Dustbury:

"And I'm still vexed about the destruction of the Union Station railyard, which insures that if they ever do decide to build a passenger-rail system in the city, it will cost a whole lot more, since they will have to recreate all that infrastructure from scratch. There are philosophical reasons to dismiss rail transit — mainly, almost all such systems built recently are heavily subsidized because they don't earn back their costs in fares — but you could scrap the bus system for the same reasons, and nobody (well, maybe your friendly neighborhood hard-core libertarian) is arguing for discontinuing the buses. (Chris? Jacqueline?)"

[bubfloyd]

Patrick Wrote: There are philosophical reasons to dismiss rail transit — mainly, almost all such systems built recently are heavily subsidized because they don't earn back their costs in fares

There is nothing more subsidized than highways, which have become little more than transportation corridors for the trucking industry. Trucks cause nearly all the wear and tear on highways and don't even come close to paying their own way in fule taxes. Trucks now clog the interstate system and make passenger travel increasingly dangerous. More and more trucks on the highways are hauling fast food restaurant supplies and "stuff" for WalMart and other demartment stores and we all pay the hidden shortfall in construction and maintainence on April 15th. Subsidizing the McDonalds and WalMarts of the USA is not something that most people would do willingly. Unfortunately, the same political pressures that keep these subsidisies under the table are the same ones that promoted the "D" option and failed to give the general public all the relevent information about what would be lost in the process. Namely the Union Station rail yard.

[gtelmore]

Bubfloyd is absolutely on target.

The Oklahoma Railway (trolleys and interurbans) was a private company operating under a public franchise for nearly 50 years. It struggled through periods of famine and overwhelming demand -- but, finally, following WWII, fell victim to a nationwide effort by the highway / auto / oil lobby -- which painted all such systems as "quaint" and "outdated" by cheap-oil-sodden, postwar standards. Ultimately, even many of the rock-solid commercial freight railroads were pulled down by a combination of their own bad management (which seemed, itself, to buy the idea that its own technology was "outdated") and the provision of public roads to heavy trucks.

In short, the governments and politicians that preach "free enterprise" have made free enterprise and real competition in surface transport nearly impossible -- but the "political faithful" out here in the hustings who lionize, idolize and follow those knotheads around like dumb little puppy dogs just keep buying their hyper-expensive line of bull.

And the costs of keeping up "public roads" are not nearly the only costs associated with them. Some years back, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety published a study concluding that the monetary costs, alone, of yearly highway deaths on US roads exceed the annual negative effect of the national debt. But that's "OK," isn't it?

While the morning OKLAHOMAN gave center- front page dominance to a full-color photo of the terrible Japanese commuter train crash (73 dead, they say), not mentioned was that today and EVERY day, US highways produce roughly 120 deaths. However, that's "the norm," as was the daily sacrifice of infant children to idols of Moloch by the heathen tribes of Old Testament times. "Just the price of doing business..." and all that.

Maybe OKLAHOMAN editors thought the Japanese train crash deaths notable not just because such incidents are so rare, but because the dead were plainly sacrificed to "a strange god..." After all -- the nerve of those people: Think of all the auto-insurance premiums, oil, gas, tire and maintenance charges -- everything from "deodorizing fuzzy dice" to "custom body work" the people who regularly ride those trains DON'T pay. In America, they might be seen as "slackers" not holding up "their part" of the contemporary social contract centered around "automobile ownership..." (And what about those "helicopter-flying tort lawyers?")

Sorry to get off into such rambling, but many literary and historical analogies to the mess we're in often come to my mind. "Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it," goes the old saw. If the "New Crosstown" doesn't remind you of "Urban Renewal," then you need to do a little more reading.

It's really quite simple: Within its service profile, nothing can match rail. Nothing is close -- in carrying capacity, in safety, in fuel efficiency, in maintenance costs. Rail has nothing to prove. It was all proven many years ago. Rail transport stood on its own, building the country and repaying public support of its creation many, many years before the Interstate Highway era.

If it is a "given" that government just HAS to be forever in the middle of the competitive equation in surface transport, mucking up the works with perpetual subsidy of the least efficient modes to the detriment of all others -- then shouldn't the people DEMAND, minimally, equality of subsidy? Trouble is, we live in a nation of people who really believe "the cars they drive say all that need to be said about them." Ironically, that's actually generally truer than they'd care to believe.

One more observation: I'm always amused in talking to public officials and their assistants when the old "population density" argument raises its head. Strange, isn't it, that we apparently "HAVE" the "population density" to support $40 billion in unfunded highway maintenance need here in Oklahoma; we "HAVE" the density to pay 2.16 cents for a gallon of gasoline; we "HAVE" the density to pay (perhaps now) three-quarters of a billion dollars for 3.96 miles of unnecessary urban highway; we "HAVE" the density to support endless maintenance charges on infrastructures involved in infinite sprawl development; we "HAVE" the density to allow hordes of heavy trucks paying 20 cents on the dollar against road damage they do to savage our public highways -- but we "DON'T" have the "density" to thoughtfully, conservatively reuse historic, elegant and irreplaceable infrastructure to provide cheap, fuel-efficient, strategically redundant and universally accessible transport for all our people!

When they give me that typical "gotcha" grin and say the words "population density," I grin back and say -- "do you really want to use that argument?"

[Patrick]

I'm glad both of you brought up the point about how our state and federal government subsidizes the trucking and vehicle industry, because that is so correct. Personally, I don't see the difference between putting funds towards building highways and subsidizing trains. All in all, you're subsidizing a form of transportation.

Rail has so many benefits...it's actually cheaper to haul freight via rail....you can put a huge load behind a train and send it one direction. Much cheaper than running several trucks across highways. Trains are safer...fewer accidents. Rain, snow, etc. don't stop trains.

I think the reason highway deaths aren't mentioned is because they're so common place, but Tom you are right...more people are killed on highways in one day than are killed in train accidents in an entire year.

Trains make complete sense. They're more efficient, they're safer, and they can be more convenient. Personally, hate always having to look for a parking place downtown. Wouldn't it be nice to catch a train at Penn Square Mall and have it drop me off at Union Station in downtown? That would be a lot less hassle than having to drive downtown, struggle with traffic, and then struggle to find a parking place.

Yeah, I guess I could use our bus system, but all one needs to do is look at a bus routemap and know how confusing that can be.