University Avenue ramp closure solves another problem

I wrote in my last post that, if we care about having a safe, walkable UC Riverside campus, we should close the University Avenue freeway ramps and allow drivers to divert to the 3rd/Blaine and 14th ramps, both of which are on high-speed arterial roadways and both of which are within half a mile of University. Minimal inconvenience for drivers would mean massive safety and quality-of-life benefits for the thousands of students on foot, skateboard, kick scooter, and bicycle who use that corridor.

But something it might also be able to solve is the lack of a centralized transit center at UC Riverside. It was more of a problem back in the days of the Highlander Hauler shuttles, but it's still an issue now: when you take the bus to "UCR," you could be stopping at any of a number of different places, and none of them are conducive to transfer. Most of them are single-route stops. Currently, the 1 stops at Bannockburn Village (on Canyon Crest just north of University); the 16 actually travels through campus on Campus Drive, stopping near Arts and Sproul Hall; the 204 stops near Bannockburn, but on the other side of the street; the 208, 210 and 212 all stop in the backwaters of Lot 30; and only the 51 and 53 link them all (but 51 only runs every 40 minutes, and 53 every 30 and only at night). Furthermore, the 10 and 14 both skirt the campus, but don't actually serve it, with 10 running along Blaine and 14 turning off University on to Iowa.

This fragmentation of routes makes transit use significantly more difficult and confusing than it should be at UCR. Students, many of whom have never ridden a city bus in their lives, see all of these various white buses moving in inscrutable patterns around campus, seeming to veer off in mysterious directions, and they get the perception that if you step aboard an RTA bus, you will have no idea where you're going. I have related many stories before on this blog of students who were traveling to the Canyon Crest Town Center area waiting longer for the "trolley" #51, rather than take the #16.

Fragmentation also reduces effective frequency, which is a serious issue for the short trips that many students make throughout the day. If I want to head down University to one of the various Chinese take-out places around Cranford or Chicago, it doesn't matter to me which route I take- the #1, #14 or #16 are all fine by me. However, there's no place on campus that I can actually wait for all of the above. If I want #1, I have to head to Bannockburn. If I want #16, I need to be in front of Sproul Hall. These places are around a ten minute walk apart. Personally, I use the Bus Tracker and Google Transit to figure out which route is leaving first, but students who have never ridden a bus won't figure this trick out easily-- and so they'll drive three blocks down the street.

Okay, so I've laid out the problem. What does this have to do with the University Avenue ramps?

Real estate.

One of the University ramps is a huge loop leading to and from the westbound freeway. Demolish this, and you'll have a nice parcel of land for a bus station, complete with space for bus layovers (which are a current problem at Bannockburn, where the #1 and #51 compete with the many, many beer delivery trucks that serve the Getaway Cafe). Such a station would be a destination strong enough to warrant the diversion of the #10 and #14 to campus (and give them space to turn around), and would provide a place for every route in the area to come together and provide extremely frequent service to nearby destinations. It's also equidistant between the University Village and the rest of campus, and there are already stoplights at the site (for the present freeway ramps). As long as the current stops on the #1 and #16 were maintained, it wouldn't downgrade anyone's present travel plans, and it would provide better access to both the university (for the community) and the wider community (for university students). It would also give public transit on campus a much more visible and permanent presence, and significantly improve the legibility of the various routes that currently almost-meet in and around the area. Done properly, you could also add automated ticketing facilities, SmartStop arrival boards, etc. that could really improve the transit experience for a whole population of users who, for the first time in their lives, find themselves without ready access to an automobile.

So, close the University Avenue ramps, tear them down, and build a UCR bus station in its place. Introduce a generation of students to urbanism the way it should be.

Radically simple solution: Close the University Ave. ramps

I spend a lot of time at UC Riverside. Those who are familiar with the campus know that it's bisected by the I-215/CA-60 freeway, with the campus on one side and most of the various retail establishments in the area on the other. Those who follow my blog know that one of the things that really irritates me, day in and day out, is the way that Caltrans "improved" University Avenue heading eastbound, by removing a bicycle lane from the most heavily bicycle-trafficked stretch of asphalt in the city. They did this to accommodate two right-hand turn lanes to a freeway offramp.

That's a tragedy in and of itself, and yet another example of the tiny crumbs given to bicycles taken away in order to move cars just a little bit faster, but the real tragedy is this: there are three ramps to this freeway within a one-mile stretch.


View Larger Map

Count them: three. One at Blaine/3rd, one at University, and one at 14th.

Let's take a look at these roads, shall we? 3rd through that section is pretty unpleasant for anyone not in a car, with low-density retail, a high school, crumbling sidewalks and disappearing bike lanes. (It gets better below Kansas or so, though...) The freeway overpass itself is pretty awful to walk or ride across. It's pretty much a car sewer. This is also the exit for one of UCR's larger remote parking lots, Lot 26. Above Iowa there are several student apartments, including many I've resided in, but I usually went down Linden if I had to cross the freeway without the aid of a motor vehicle.

14th is even worse. This road is wide, flat, and there is literally nothing of interest between Chicago and the freeway. There are research orange groves and UCR's massive Lot 30, primary parking lot for the entire campus. This road has a 55mph speed limit, and speeds often exceed that. Nothing redeeming here.

So finally we come to University. This is a thriving commercial corridor. There's plenty of parking, as you might expect in suburbia, but none of the huge student lots here. Most buildings front the street, at least between campus and Cranford. There are plentiful restaurants catering to the student population, along with a good chunk of retail establishments, and Riverside's only modern mixed-use development, Sterling University Palms. This is also a major transit corridor (#1, #14, #16, #51/53), unlike either 3rd (just the #10) or 14th (commuter express routes only). Cyclists and pedestrians clog the sidewalks and bike lanes between campus and the University Village, especially with the untimely demise of the Highlander Hauler shuttle service.

In any case, drivers on University at Iowa are never more than 1/2 a mile from either 3rd or 14th. So why should we strangle a real opportunity for burgeoning urbanism, among a population of disproportionately car-free and car-lite residents-- not to mention the safety of said residents when bicycling-- in order to save drivers 1/2 a mile and a touch of congestion?

Close the University Avenue ramps. Make University between Iowa and Canyon Crest similar to Canyon Crest itself, with only one lane per direction, along with wide bicycle lanes and perhaps even a bus lane. Maybe even add some pedestrian plazas with the extra right-of-way, pleasant places people can go and enjoy their lunch between classes. Commuter students and other drivers will divert to the other ramps, or (hopefully) divert to car-pooling or transit, and the rest of us can be left to enjoy our campus-- all of it.

Suburban thinking

It's everywhere. I'm reading through the 2008 American National Election Study codebook for a project I'm working on. For those who don't know, the ANES is a fantastic survey that looks in to Americans' political views and vote behavior. It's conducted every election year by interviewers who physically go to people's homes, and one of the things the interviewers are supposed to note is the condition of both home and neighborhood.

So, as part of the survey, interviewers are asked to code any of the following "within sight of the housing unit," presumably as an indication of neighborhood decay:*

• Boarded houses or abandoned building 
• Graffiti 
• Abandoned cars 
• Demolished houses 
• Trash/Litter/junk in street/road 
• Trash/litter/junk around buildings in neighborhood 
• Factories or warehouses 
• Stores or other retail outlets

The variable is a simple count of the number of things observed by the interviewer, so each item on the list is equivalent in the data set. If you read my blog, you're probably already aware where I'm going with this.

That's right- living in a mixed-use neighborhood, one that contains a factory and a store, is a sign of neighborhood decay in this dataset. It's treated equivalently to living somewhere with graffiti and abandoned buildings. Now, I'm not going to say that there aren't gritty, impoverished places with mixed uses, but there are also some very nice places-- most of the Upper East Side of Manhattan would get a point against it for having stores within sight of a subject's home. Similarly, there are some very depressed single-use neighborhoods in this country, which might have all 7 of the other factors present-- but the most-decayed neighborhood in the study must, by definition, be mixed-use.

This is yet another example of how ingrained suburban thinking is in our conversations about poverty and affluence. In our culture, we link green lawns and row upon row of detached single-family homes with suburbia, and hence prosperity, and small apartments above the corner store with the city, and hence with poverty. See similarly what the phrase "inner city" means in our political dialogue- it's generally a code word used by conservatives to mean low-income and African-American (and, in doing so, generally incite the racial fears and prejudices of their voting base). Set aside the finding of the most recent Census-- that poverty is more prevalent in the suburbs than either rural or urban areas, and poverty is rising faster there as well. There's something wrong here.

I also urge scholars investigating the link between neighborhood conditions and politics to build their own metric based on only the first 7 items in this list (which are coded individually in the dataset), rather than utilizing this variable.

 
*V084029, 2008 ANES Panel Data Study, for those who are curious.

Bus Watch!

No, not that Bus Watch. An anonymous commenter on this post claims that RTA #2110, the bus involved in that nasty crash downtown a few months back, has been restored and put into service with a Trilogy three-position bicycle rack. If anyone sees this particular bus, a photo would be appreciated.

I want to also note, though, that the new cutaways that run the 51 and commuter routes have only two-position racks, and their purchase dates from around the same time. So maybe RTA thinks that only the full-size buses need three-position racks, but I've personally found the commuter express routes among the most useful for bike/bus combinations. I can't count the times I've taken 216 to Orange and biked to Fry's Electronics. I don't know what the economics are on two- vs. three-position racks, but I strongly encourage RTA to accommodate as many cyclists as possible.

Have we learned nothing?

If you spend a lot of time in the livable-streets blogosphere, as I admittedly do, you end up reading a lot of success stories: highways stopped, or torn down, or planned to gracefully transition into urban boulevards; rail projects moving forward; bike lanes painted or (better yet) buffered. Living in the suburbs, and having roots in the hinterlands, makes staying in this happy bubble of burgeoning urbanism ever more difficult. It is thus, with a heavy heart, that I report on the continued progress of the High Desert Connector.

As you might guess, this Connector is rather unlike the Regional one in downtown Los Angeles. It's a brand-new, 63-mile freeway being run from the desert outpost of Adelanto to the desert outpost of Palmdale, through greenfield desert. The justification is truck traffic, but you can bet that there will be some sprawl-enabling going on here.

If you want to try and stop this monstrosity, there are public meetings noted in the article. However, at this point, I think that lying in front of the bulldozer will be your best bet.

We're waiting, Sunline!

San Bernardino County, despite being a bit larger than Riverside, long ago became the first Inland Empire county to be completely covered by Google Transit. At the time, Sunline Transit Agency, the major transit provider in the Coachella Valley, was the only agency in Riverside County not to be covered by the transit trip planner. At the time, the agency's web site listed Google Transit as "coming soon," and had for several months. It's now been several years that that tantalizing graphic has sat upon Sunline's web site, and we still don't have Google Transit data for the agency. This is despite the fact that they have a Google Maps-based bus tracker, and have thus geo-coded every stop in the system.

Sunline, release your schedule data and join Google Transit already!

SOPA, PIPA and Internet Censorship

Several major web sites, including Reddit and Wikipedia, will be down from 8:00a to 8:00p today to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, two similar bills (one House, one Senate) which would implement an extrajudicial Internet censorship regime in the United States. I can't take this site down, but I can encourage you all to visit AmericanCensorship.org, learn about the threat to the openness of the Internet, and call your representatives to speak out against these bills.