More on Mukilteo: Blogging from Sounder

Martin's let you know that Mukilteo Station is now open on Sounder North, but I actually went!

First, though, I have a sad story about bus transfers in Seattle. I nearly missed the entire thing because my bus passed its timepoint early, but fortunately, as some of you know, I live where I have many options - so another route came along soon enough.

I caught a Sound Transit bus (the 510) to Everett, and then an Everett Transit bus (23) out to Mukilteo. There was already quite a crowd at the new station - I took some pictures that I can post later on.

On the 510, I met a seasoned train rider who had come to be on the first train that stopped at Mukilteo. He wasn't the only one who mentioned it - several on the bus from Everett to Mukilteo were Clinton-Seattle commuters who are looking forward to using the train instead of driving or bussing. I also learned that while the ferry schedule lists a 20 minute trip from Clinton to Mukilteo, the actual time taken is often only some 15 minutes - especially during the calmer waters of the summer months - so the transfer to the train in the morning isn't as bad as we thought.

At the new station, several tents were set up by local transit agencies, and a few food stands were serving free clam chowder (thanks Ivar's!) and other goodies. There were a few hundred people, and several speakers: the Snohomish County Executive, the mayor of Mukilteo, Deanna Dawson (an Edmonds city councilmember), Senator Mary Margaret Haugen (D-Camano Island), and Greg Nickels.

I'm blogging from the train right now - we've just gotten south of Edmonds, and it sounds like the train picked up 350 in Everett and more than another 300 in Mukilteo. Sounder South tops out at a bit over 1000 people per trip with seven cars - we have five cars, and they're all packed! This won't be normal ridership, of course, this is game service being offered for free, but it's nice to see people interested!

Congratulations, Mukilteo!

Welcome to the family of cities that have rail transit.

Mariners service is free today, with regular-fare commuter service starting Monday, June 2.

Eugene BRT: Rosy Outlook and Harsh Reality

Eugene's BRT service is great! Check out the adorable video, complete with butterflies and whistling music. Hmm, though - they sure seem to make an effort to be anti-rail - note the line at the end: "There and back, with no clickety-clack."

Apparently avoiding "clickety-clack" (which doesn't exist on modern rail systems anyway) wasn't such a great idea after all: fuel prices are forcing the Lane Transit District board to cut service - possibly dramatically, with some routes potentially going from 30 minute headways to 1 hour headways, some routes being completely eliminated, and increases in fares. Their base fare is already going up from $1.25 to $1.50 on July 1st, and that doesn't eliminate the $2-3 million shortfall in their $36 million budget.

So, next time you ask yourself "When was the last time a bus route disappeared?" - here's your answer, and it's only going to get worse. All these areas have hydroelectric power with stable prices, too - I learned on a trip to Grand Coulee Dam last year, for example, that they have never increased their rates, and don't plan to. MAX won't be going anywhere, and nor will Link.

Do Seattlites Really Not Know How To Ride A Bus?

This blogger, kj at RajeKaje thinks that Seattlites don't know how to ride the bus. His problem is on a crowded bus, standing passengers don't always file to the back.

Apologies for the rant below: I've found this true, I think it's mildly a protest about more people boarding the already-crowded-bus, but this is no where near worst problem. The worst problem for me is the people wasting time figuring out how to pay when they get on or off (whatever the pay time may be). I don't have the problem on my commuter route very often but I do have the problem when riding around town.

A friend once put it this way: "When it my stop comes, I'm ready like I'm a parashooter over Normandy; I am ready to jump when the read light goes on. Pass out or correct change and standing near the door." Oh, if only all bus riders were like that. Maybe we need a union!

This has happened more often recently, but we have more and more noobies riding the bus. I welcome them, and after a while, I'm sure they'll share the same feelings I have. But in the mean time, I get just a little peeved.

What's your most annoying trait of rush-hour transit riders?

Reminder: Metro Route Changes

Martin wrote about this before, but I wanted to remind you that the route changes take effect this Saturday. Here's the KC Metro site, and here's a Times story for an overview.

Rail, Not Buses

One of the common questions we get from commenters is "why are you so sure that rail is the right solution?" and "why are you so enamored with rail?" Both these questions are often followed with "buses are cheaper". I want to explain the main reasons why high capacity rail transit gets so many more riders, is so much more effective at moving people and why it is in the long run cheaper than bus transit. I want to focus on the argument between "bus rapid transit" (BRT) and light rail transit (LRT), so I'm going to ignore the elephant in the room: most bus rapid transit does not run in its own right of way, thus adding the largest knock against bus transit: buses get stuck in traffic.

Rail transit is more permanent than bus transit. As famous conservative rail transit supporter Paul Weyrich points out, one of the main arguments for buses is their "flexibility". But this flexibility is the source of one of the largest draw-backs of bus transit: inconsistency. That a bus is "flexible" means that the routes are also flexible, and riders aren't sure that a bus line will remain in place into the future. If someone is making a decision about where to live for the foreseeable future, say they're buying a house, they won't make that choice based on a bus line that may not be there in the future.

I've forwarded this argument before, and people have said "when was the last time a bus route was removed in Seattle?" When I was in high school I took the 43 to my running start classes at Seattle Central Community College. We moved from Capitol Hill to Wallingford, and I could take the 43 straight from Wallingford to Broadway. Then, in the middle of the year, Metro split the line: the 43 no longer went from Downtown through Capitol Hill to Ballard: most runs ended in the U District, where the 44 route to Ballard began. I can think of a couple other routes that did this same thing, the old 7 has been split into the 7 and the 49, the old 65 now stops in the U-District. So it happens; service can stop or shift dramatically. That makes people far less inclined to change their life around the bus.

The permanence of rails also leads to more development than buses. For the same reason as above, new development near rail transit tends to be higher density than development near bus transit: if you are building a large project, part of your plan has to be transportation. That's the reason Microsoft settled next to SR 520, one of the reasons downtown Bellevue is so much more developed than, say, downtown Everett, and one of the reasons South Lake Union is currently attracting so much development (this is the streetcar and I-5). Imagine if I-405 weren't permanent; would Bellevue be experiencing so much growth?

Rail is much more attractive to the non-dependent rider, and thus get more riders. As Carless in Seattle has pointed out:

[A]mong bus-based [High Capacity Transit] users, more than 60% of US bus riders do not own a car. But of rail-based HCT, nearly 60% of subway, streetcar and light rail users DO own a car. (Those numbers include Manhattan, where less than 20% of people own a car, vastly depressing the number of rail users in the rest of the US who could own a car but choose mass transit).

Seattle's highest ridership bus routes go through the most transit dependent areas. Even with those routes, ridership is no where near the ridership of a rail line. Each Link station will get as many riders as most bus routes, and some will have far more boardings than even those routes with the most riders - and these estimates do not take into account development spurred by the system. University of Washington station, for example, is supposed to get some 27,000 daily riders in 2020. Recent light rail construction in the US has almost universally has almost universally exceeded pre-construction estimates, with only one exception (VTA, in the South Bay).

Stepping on a train is enough to see why the difference exists. Trains have a smoother ride, more comfortable seats, and more space. Boarding is also far simpler - instead of a dozen people fumbling with fares, there are several doors, and payment is done on the platform where it doesn't affect operation. Anyone who's ever been on a standing-room-only bus can attest to the discomfort. A forty-five minute 545 ride standing up in Friday evening traffic is enough to convince people to drive to work. Here's photographic evidence of the difference.

The most expensive part of building high-capacity, reliable transit is the right of way - with very similar cost between BRT and LRT. Even Ted Van Dyk, the most adamant BRT supporter and light rail opponent, admits that BRT costs at most 30% less than LRT to build. For University Link, for example, 95% of the costs are for tunneling and stations. A BRT system that would serve the same corridor would need also to build its own right-of-way, and would cost just as much as light rail. And since BRT ridership projections tend to be more than 30% less than LRT in the same corridors, even if the Ted Van Dyks of the world were right, LRT would still be cheaper per passenger to build than comparable BRT.

Rail is cheaper to operate per passenger than buses are. Labor is over 50% of King County Metro's costs. Each bus needs an operator, but an articulated bus only carries 80 at maximum, compared to 800 for a Link LRT train. And with diesel already over $5 a gallon, the gap in operations expenses will continue to grow. Even in bus systems with little to no right-of-way costs, total costs for BRT are higher per passenger mile than LRT. Metro takes a .9% sales tax share now, and moves about 365,000 people per day. A fully built out LRT package from Prop. 1 would have moved that many people by 2030, admittedly a long time, but would have cost just .15% to operate. The capital costs for rail are temporary expenses - Metro will keep spending .9% to move that many people for the next hundred years, but Sound Transit would build three Prop. 1 packages with the same money in that time. Considering about two-thirds of the Sound Transit district is King County, Metro would have to move 1,400,000 million people per day, nearly the entire population of King County right now, to be as cost effective in the long run.

Absolutely rail is expensive and takes longer to build than most bus service. But the investment pays off over time in lower maintenance, higher ridership, and more dense development around stations - which can allow for less density pressures away from rail lines. High-quality transit service ultimately makes a region more affordable, more sustainable, and in some ways more fun. That's why we at this blog prefer rail over buses.

Sound Transit: Time to Decide

What do you think of this?


Apparently these have been airing on cable television in our area. I like it for the most part, but the wave at the end is a little cheesy.

14 Miles of Track Completed

Sound Transit has completed 14 miles of track from Tukwila International Boulevard to Westlake Station today. There was a ceremony at the Link Operations and Maintenance to mark the occasion. I'll post the photos I took tonight when I get home, but in the mean time you can check this link for some details and video, and here's the official press release.

Five board members, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, King County Council Member Julia Patterson, King County Council Member Larry Phillips, King County Council Member Dow Constantine, and King County Executive Ron Sims. took part in "hammering the golden spike" signifying the completion. They took turns offering speeches, and I think from their speeches it's possible to glean their support for an expansion ballot measure this year.

Greg Nickels is the ST board chair, and he went first, giving a speech about how great the progress has been, but how just as this project is not finished, the road to expansion of Sound Transit isn't either. Nickels is a vocal supporter of going to the ballot this year, and his speech showed that as well.

Ron Sims was next, and he had no speech prepared, and instead grabbed Link director Ahmad Fazel and sort of put him on the spot to give a speech. It was funny, and while it's refreshing to Ron Sims still have a sense of humor, it also shows how little engaged he is in Link that he couldn't be bothered to give a speech.

Julia Patterson gave an impassioned speech about how much Puget Sound residents are going to want light rail when it gets up and running. The speech was great, I've never head Patterson talk but she's got a definite knack for engaging the listener with fresh phrases, and not tired cliches. However, I wasn't completely happy with the subtext of her message, which I felt was that Sound Transit may want to wait until 2010 to go to ballot.

Larry Phillips I've heard talk before, and he has a natural inclination for straight and clear talk. He made it clear to me that wanted Sound Transit back on the ballot this year.

Dow Constantine was last, and he strikes me as a bit of an intellectual, and spoke about transportation and land use planning, and sustainability. He reminded me a lot of Ben talking.

So of the five that showed up to the ceremony, it looked like two were definitely for going this year, one was leaning against, one made no indication either way, and one looked completely unengaged.

Ok so on to my other thoughts:

• The trains coming out of Beacon Hill into SODO are going to have a great view of downtown, First Hill (which is getting a little skyline of it's own) and the stadiums.
• The Kinkisharyo cars that link will be running make an old-school "clang-clang" to notify pedestrians (and cars I guess). Kind of like a horn on a car, but some how much cooler.

Capitol Hill Station Art Project Getting Cancelled?

Via Daryn blog, I find that Mike Ross, the artist who was chosen to work on the art in Capitol Hill Station, is concerned his project might be canceled due to public outcry over the use of decommissioned fighter jets in the installation:

————— Forwarded message —————
From: Mike Ross mikenon@gmail.com>
Date: May 22, 2008 11:04 AM
Subject: Sculpture may be canceled — please help
To: Mike Ross mikenon@gmail.com>

Hey folks. As some of you know, I was selected to make a sculpture for Seattle’s new subway station in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. I proposed a sort of stylistic sequel to Big Rig Jig, using a pair of fighter jets. The jets would be deconstructed into pieces, painted pink and orange, and spread out along organically-inspired curves above the station platform between the ceiling beams (they have high ceilings in this station). The exact design is not yet finished. But you can see mock-ups of some early variations here:

http://www.mikenon.com/capitolhill/

The project is in now in danger of being canceled, and I need your help.

Several people have written letters to Seattle’s transit agency, Sound Transit, complaining that the piece is offensive, a glorification of war, and culturally insensitive to neighborhood residents. The area’s 43rd-District Democrats have even passed a resolution officially condemning the sculpture:

http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/davidpostman/…

Unfortunately, the only people who have been moved to write letters are those who object to the sculpture, and the transit agency is seriously considering canceling the project. It has been demoted from “approved” to “not yet approved,” and the rest of the station development is now proceeding without the sculpture, until we can
demonstrate significant community support.

I am hoping that some of you might know people in or near Capitol Hill, Seattle, who can see the potential of the sculpture, and who disagree with the idea that it is offensive or a glorification of war. It may use military technology, but it is not just a pair of jets — it’s jets, chopped up, painted pink, and made to look like two birds
kissing. There is a peaceful message there, and I believe the artwork will ultimately be accepted by its detractors as an object and process which references many of their own views. But before that can happen, the transit agency needs to know that there are people in the community who support the sculpture.

If you know anyone who might wish to write a letter or email (emails are just as good), they should send it to the following two people:
Joni Earl, CEO
joni.earl@soundtransit.org
Sound Transit
401 S. Jackson St.
Seattle, WA 98104

Barbara Luecke, STart Program Manager
barbara.luecke@soundtransit.org
Sound Transit
401 S. Jackson St.
Seattle, WA 98104

Thanks for any help you can offer. Please feel free to forward this email.

Mike Ross
mikenon@gmail.com

The 43rd Democrats protested the piece for being culturally insensitive? That's embarrassing. I can understand thinking a local artist should do the piece, though I've seen a lot of local art and I'm not always impressed. Knowing these people are out to sabotage the art, and put something in that inspires less conversation makes me more attracted to the art than I was before. I think using the warplanes as art pays homage to Seattle's former reputation as the Jet City, though it's fair for recent migrants to Seattle to not appreciate this. I also think two pink fighter jets kissing is a nice play on "swords to ploughshares". I also think it's ironic that people who claim to fight for tolerance and a range of ideas oppose something that falls outside their way of thinking.

I like it, and I've written emails to those mentioned above. What do you think? Is this really culturally insensitive or an over reaction?

Non-Transit Related: Prefab Apartments

These pre-fab apartments on Westlake could be really interesting. The article focuses on the affordibility aspect of the units, which cost far less to build than traditional buildings. I wrote a little about them late last year, and I was concerned because the designs I saw at the time were hideous. But the proposed design (warning! huge pdf) is actually attractive, and especially attractive relative to the standard building being thrown up around here. And if this can be built to be affordable to "work-force" renters (those earning between 80~120% of the city's median income), then I would love to see more of these being built when compared to this areas average beige and green building being thrown up.

What do you think about prefab apartments? Would you live in these?

Car Era Coming to an End...

This is a pretty interesting opinion piece about the approaching end to the car era. These days you can't open anewspaper without reading about people moving their commutes to transit, or how expensive gas has become and how it will only get more expensive. So there's nothing really new in this piece, but its succinct and I thought it was worth sharing.

Oh now it makes sense, that's per year!

Carless in Seattle explains what I couldn't figure out from the P-I article on the ULI report last week. I wrote that I couldn't understand how the shortfall was just $800 per person, less than the cost of the any of the major road or rail projects in the region. But CIS explained the missing piece: it's $800 per person per year. Wow. That's a lot of money, more than four times the cost of the failed Prop. 1 measure from last year.

Private Commuter Rail?

Snohomish County has given a private company, GNP Railway rights to operate commuter rail in the portion of the old BNSF railway in Snohomish county. Currently that portion of the former railway is a trail. GNP railway wants to operate commuter rail service from Snohomish to Bellevue or Renton, with a station in Snohomish (the city) where there was one the larger part of a century ago.

In order to accomplish this, GNP would need to make a similar deal with the Port of Seattle, get the capital to add rails where there's currently just a trail, and build stations along the line. It sounds a little iffy to me, because I doubt the line would get enough ridership to make this a profitable enterprise, but GNP chairman Tom Payne has a history of bringing railroads from the dead:

Payne, a former locomotive engineer, transformed a failing rail line into Canada's third-largest railroad in the 1980s and 1990s. He operated a tourist-oriented excursion train out of Tacoma in 2006.

I would be awesome if this works, though I imagine some sort of public-private partnership would be needed. This is going to be an interesting one to watch.

Wow, in a country with bad transportation infrastucture, we're the worst

That's what the ULI is saying. We've got a backlog of about $800 per person in this region, for about $800 per person. Seems low: that's only about $3 billion, the 520 bridge and the viaduct are each more than that. Dallas-Fort Worth is second at about $400 per person, so we're twice as bad as the next worst.

American cities are falling behind Asia and Europe in investing in roads, transit, bridges and other systems needed for growing populations, the study said.

Among U.S. cities/metro areas studied, the Seattle-Puget Sound area's infrastructure-funding gap was nearly twice that of Dallas-Fort Worth, which was second at nearly $400 per capita. ULI, a nonprofit education and research institute that focuses on land-use, population growth, urban planning and the environment, worked with financial consultants Ernst & Young to produce the 60-page study.

"By 2040, the population of the Seattle area is projected to grow by 1.7 million new people, with 1.2 million new jobs ... that's like dropping the population of greater metropolitan Portland into the Puget Sound area," John Hempelmann, co-vice chairman of the Reality Check Task Force for ULI Seattle, said Wednesday.

"That's a big number, and a huge challenge, given the lack of infrastructure capacity and lack of funding."

America is losing the transportation race quickly. If you go to Singapore, China, France, Korea or practically anywhere else the airports are nicer, the trains are nicer, sometimes even the highways are nicer, and it's generally easier to get around than in most US cities, wonder why? Infrastructure spending:

"It's kind of discouraging," he told the audience, that in 1960, the U.S. spent 12 percent of its gross domestic product on infrastructure and now spends 2.4 percent. Japan spends 10 percent, China 9 percent and India 4.6 percent, Hudnut said.
Earlier this year, he said, a bipartisan congressional commission estimated the U.S. needs to spend at least $225 billion annually on transportation systems alone "just to catch up and keep pace with the rest of the world."

It shows in Americans' daily lives. Europeans are connecting major cities using high-speed trains traveling 200 mph, Hudnut said.

But Seattle-area drivers spent about 45 hours in traffic delays in 2005 -- more than a week of vacation -- in contrast to 12 hours in 1982, according to the report.

Some are hoping for a reauthorization of the depleted federal Highway Trust Fund in November 2009, but with a shifted focus from cars to transit.

That'd be a start. But we'd also need to start approving funding for these project on a local level. Let's hope ST2 gets through this year...

A mini-vacation on Metro

This Seattle Times article about miniature vacations on Metro to summer hotspots around town is pretty interesting. Pike Place Market, Pioneer Square, Seattle Center ... Just kidding. The article is about semi-natural and outdoorsy places such as the Ballard Locks, Golden Gardens and Alki. And since it was in the Times, it was written by someone who lives on the Eastside (this time Kirkland). I honestly learned how to get to Snoqualmie falls by transit (271 from Bellevue TC or 209 from Issaquah PNR), which is awesome for moving my carless life forward. Snoqualmie falls is a great place to take friends from out-of-town, and now I can do it without a car.

The Alki directions miss the mark: West Seattle Water Taxi, guys, come on! This is really the only way to get to Alki in the summer months, I can't imagine why someone would want to take the 56 there.

Ok, so what other interesting places can you get to by bus in this area? I can think of the Museum of Glass in Tacoma (a worthwhile visit on ST route 594), Magnuson Park (65), Emerald Downs (152), and the Arboretum (48, 11)? Help me out!

Nickels wants you to consider leaving the car at home

Mayor Nickels is back in the act of encouraging people to consider alternatives to car ownership in the city. The City will provide the following incentives to encourage carless commutes:

To find out more about how to participate, go to www.seattlecan.org. Seattle residents who commit to reduce car trips at the Web site are eligible for the following:

• Commit to eliminating a few car trips, and qualify for a drawing for a $50 gift certificate for bus passes or REI.

• Commit to reducing commute trips for several months, and receive a $150 cash card.

• Sell or donate a car, and receive $200 in gift certificates for bus passes or REI; a $100 discount to Tiny's Organic; $50 off a Zipcar membership; free membership in the Cascade Bicycle Club and Bicycle Alliance of Washington; and a signed proclamation from the mayor.

• For those who already bike, walk or take transit, the city will hold a quarterly drawing for an iPhone.

There used to be flexcar incentives, but when zipcar bought flexcar, they decided to not participate in the program. That's kind of a shame, zipcar is a great way to ween people off car ownership, but I guess that option is still available.

Final South Sounder Project now with pics!

Starting this Friday, BNSF Railway will start cutting over the new main line relocation project which will move the normal main tracks from it's current location to the new construction tracks between King Street Station and South Lander Street. The new main line will enable faster trains between Lander and Spokane Street shaving a few minutes off passenger train schedules.

At Lander Street, the main line will curve from it's current location and shift to the right next to the Seattle School District building. The garbage cars and coal train approaching me were in the way to see the new tracks.



The schedule is as follows

May 1st - 3rd - BNSF installed new crossing gates at Royal Brougham and Lander Street which will protect the new tracks. This also includes quad gates at Royal Brougham to prevent pedestrian incidents. (Completed and Operational)

Friday, May 23rd - MUD Track cut over - This is the Eastern track of the 5 tracks at Lander Holgate Street.

Saturday, May 24th - Main 2 (Northbound track) cut over...since this is CTC (Centralized Traffic Control) trains can run on either main in either direction

Sunday, June 8th - Main 1 (Southbound track) cut over...read note above.

The Lander Main (Main 3 - Work Lead Main for Argo and Stacy Street Yards) is set for cut over June 16. On June 17, track speeds go up! F20/P20 will go to F35/P50 at Stadium. This means 50mph passenger trains between Holgate Street and Spokane Street.

At Holgate Street, shows the new Stadium control point and cross overs and new gates.


Looking the other direction towards Lander Street


The old Main 1 and Main 2 tracks be turned over to Amtrak for switching, storage tracks, etc between Royal Brougham and Lander Street. The photo below showing Sounder approaching on Main 1. The new main lines is on the left on the photo.

Once all of this work is completed, it is to be said that construction will start on the new Amtrak/Sounder maintenance facility. This will be a medium sized facility with a new State of the Art Indoor Wash Rack, Wheel Truing building, Machining shop that will handle medium service repairs, a new PIT track, and 7 more storage tracks that will hold a 14 car train sets. I'll get more information on this later to make sure this is correct but the last I heard on this was 2 months ago from Amtrak themselfs.

We'll see.

Want to see the progress of the Seattle Construction Project? Check out this post which has been following the construction projects since 12/31/2005 !!

Editors Note: I do not include the Lakewood Extension as part of the "BNSF South Sounder Project"

Amtrak Cascades ridership up due to fuel costs

Today, King 5 did an interesting story regarding how fuel prices are improving ridership on Amtrak Cascades. Check out the crowd getting off Sounder!

On another note.. King Street Station needs to hurry up and get remodeled.. the brief video clips they showed were terrible....

Metro Service Changes

Along with Sound Transit, Metro has rider alerts for their service changes. It's basically a bunch of shuffling of routes around the new Issaquah Transit Center, shifts of stops for the 5X, 358, 230, 914, and 916.

There's one more trip each for the 212, 221, and 271, a nice bonus for the Eastgate area.

The 74 local will be renumbered as the 30.

Also, in July they're raising Off-peak Senior, Disabled and Youth Fares by a quarter. I suppose that's in line with the recent adult fare increases.

New Sound Transit Schedules

It's that time of year again: in a little more than a week, we have new bus and train schedules. Sound Transit's changes, effective June 1, are already online. Highlights:

• The Mukilteo Sounder station opens.
• The Issaquah Park & Ride Transit Center re-opens, affecting the 554, 555, and 556.
• More trips for the 550, fewer for the 540.
  

Cost of Doing Nothing is Not Zero

The California High-Speed Rail Blog, a relatively new blog, devoted to the California High Speed Rail project. The site is mostly specific interest, though some of these posts, like the one above are general interest to any transportation discussion.

The post points to this article in the Fresno Bee about the cost of doing nothing. This bit is particularly interesting:

Opponents of the high-speed system often sound as if this is a choice between spending the $40 billion or spending nothing. That notion is just dead wrong.

Take just one instance. Expanding existing highways and airports to meet the transportation needs projected to come with growth in the state's population would cost two or there times as much -- and would make air quality and congestion even worse. In some cases -- San Francisco, Los Angeles -- existing airports can't be expanded. Bigger and better freeways? Expanding Highway 99 in the Valley to an eight-lane interstate would cost as much as $25 billion alone -- and that's just to serve the Valley, not the entire state.

We have a similar effect here, replace "high speed rail" with "transit" and "airports and highways" with just plan old "highways". Adding one lane each direction to I-5 was projected in the late 90s to cost $25 billion, just within the city limits. The I-405 widening is an $11 billion project, and increasing capacity on I-90 would cost more than SR 520, and just that will cost about $4 billion.

We can't hope to pave our way out of congestion, and if we tried, we might end up worse off, with a sicker economy and a less healthy region. Transit in general, and light rail specifically, is the cheapest way to move people around this region. We can't afford to do nothing.

Kent Station in the DJC

The Daily Journal of Commerce (subscription required) ran a very positive article on Kent Station (built around the Sounder station) and how it is effecting their downtown.

When Kent Mayor Suzette Cooke talked to city residents in 2005, she was shocked to hear some people say they hadn't been to downtown Kent in 15 years. Kent Station, the 18-acre mixed-use development that is about to break ground on its fourth phase, has changed that.

“Downtown was sort of becoming forgotten,” Cooke said. “Clearly the reality of Kent Station has helped residents see what's possible for Kent... It was a wake up call to residents that they actually deserved such services.”

Kent Station, owned by Seattle-based Tarragon, is the public-private centerpiece of Kent's effort to revitalize downtown. Before it was built, the site was home to a functioning glue factory. Today, it's a 240,000-square-foot hub of retail, education and entertainment with a Sound Transit commuter rail station nearby. When complete, the project will stretch across 470,000 square feet.

...

Looking back, Kent Station's success can seem like a well placed bet. “I'd like to say it has been fun,” Hanson said. “All of us were kind of at the edge of our seats thinking when Kent Station was built... where are the people going to come from?”

Wolters said he's always looking to learn from other cities' experiences. Overall, he said it is important to attract a variety of uses to create the needed dynamic. He said Kent chose to pursue retail and entertainment, then housing. Other communities, like Burien and Federal Way, are doing both at the same time. Working with Sound Transit to develop a commuter station nearby, was also crucial to the project.

I think losing a glue factory is kind of sad, but it's cool to see how transit orient development can take root even in low-density suburbs.

Our ever expanding rush hour...

Traffic today was horrible. My 545 bus took 40 minutes, about 15 minutes more than usual starting at 9:30. I got this picture at 10:15 from WSDOT, and you can see traffic still is a disaster. I was listening to Mayor Nickels on the Dave Ross show, and the traffic man said it was 70 minutes from Federal Way to Seattle on I-5, and 50 minutes from Lynnwood to Seattle. 70 minutes at 9:45 am.

What was that thing about light rail being too slow?

Rising Oil Prices: Save Your Money, take transit

Paul Krugman, Economist and New York Times columnist, has been writing a number of blog posts about rising fuel prices and what they mean to the average American. The opinion piece is great, and has nice tidbits like this:

Any serious reduction in American driving will require more than this — it will mean changing how and where many of us live.

To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.

It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.

And in the face of rising oil prices, which have left many Americans stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas — it’s starting to look as if Berlin had the better idea.

Changing the geography of American metropolitan areas will be hard. For one thing, houses last a lot longer than cars. Long after today’s S.U.V.’s have become antique collectors’ items, millions of people will still be living in subdivisions built when gas was $1.50 or less a gallon.

Infrastructure is another problem. Public transit, in particular, faces a chicken-and-egg problem: it’s hard to justify transit systems unless there’s sufficient population density, yet it’s hard to persuade people to live in denser neighborhoods unless they come with the advantage of transit access.

As they say, read the whole thing. This picture is from a post on his blog (via the Sydney Morning Herald).


It's the percentage of income residents of Sydney spend on gas. As you can tell, those in the city's center spend far less on gas than those in the city do. In Sydney, the lack of public transport has left families in the Western suburbs struggling to pay for their commutes.

Pretty scary, I imagine a map for our region would look similar, though the numbers would likely be a lot higher (6% is probably pretty typical here). Metro has a calculator that can help show whether you'd save on your commute by taking transit. If you're not taking transit, at $4 a gallon I bet it's worth taking a second look.

Bridges are Bad sometimes....

Got this in a e-mail not that long ago, regarding Portland's TriMet MAX Light-Rail system:

During a bridge lift on the Steel Bridge this morning, a Union Pacific bridge tender raised the bridge too high, damaging TriMet's overhead electrical system that powers MAX. Three trains traveled through the span section and were damaged. Repair efforts are ongoing, with TriMet staff and contractors working to expedite the repairs.

There is no MAX service along the Yellow Line or the Blue/Red lines between Rose Quarter Transit Center and PGE Park stations.

Buses are serving riders in these areas and riders should expect minor delays.

The shuttles will continue through rush hour this evening and possibly through the rest of the service today. There is also the potential that Tuesday's morning rush hour will be affected.

A friend of mine said it was one hell of a light show on the second train that crossed the bridge.

What If We Did Just Tear It Down?

I think there's a killer argument here that's hard to refute, and hasn't come up yet, and in the interest of continuing this conversation, I'll just post it!

Our viaduct options are basically a) build something else, and b) tear down the failing structure and leave it torn down. I don't really consider the retrofit an option - WSDOT will probably shoot it down as unfeasible and unsafe.

So here's the 2000 pound elephant in the room. For the first several years of implementation, both of these options look exactly the same. The old structure has to be torn down, and even in the best case rebuild scenario, you still have complete closure for years.

Immediately, every viaduct user finds a solution to their commute problem. They get on I-5, or they take a bus, or they plan ahead and change jobs or move before the mess starts - they'll have plenty of lead time.

Two years later? They're still doing it. I-5 can only carry so much traffic - it'll worsen the most at first, but traffic will taper off after this time. Most people will have solved their problems, many more will be interested in transit and trying out the bus service we already have (and maybe 'Rapid Ride'). I don't know when this would be - maybe 2012, maybe 2014. Link Light Rail will be rocking our socks off. University Link will be mostly complete - everyone will be holding their breaths for subway stations. Maybe we'll even have passed Sound Transit 2 by then, and Northgate and Bellevue will be groundbreaking soon.

Another year. Gas will be $8/gallon, or $10/gallon. Maybe speculative bidding on oil futures will have dropped off, and it'll only be $6/gallon - this scenario doesn't require $10 gas. A lot more of the urban condo projects will be done. Developers will be continuing to build in the core, and the renewed demand from people previously commuting across downtown Seattle will help bolster that. Again, all this is regardless of what we choose. Few commuters will just grin and bear it.

One more - say 2016. Four years of closure - the minimum on any of the WSDOT construction alternatives I've seen. This is where our choice matters. In scenario a), we have a new freeway. U Link opens. Some people return to their cars. The waterfront is dead - construction kills some of the businesses, and with the viaduct another 20 feet closer, it's no longer pleasant. By this time, fewer are driving, and it looks like 5 won't be as congested because so many people can't afford to anymore. But we have a new freeway that we've already gotten used to not using.

In scenario b), the waterfront is still dead from construction, but now it has the chance to come back. Seattle has rebuilt the waterfront streetcar line, and four new mixed use buildings are on the way in the old shadow. The same pressures exist to build high capacity transit - the city is ripe for a new western corridor ballot measure. U Link opens, Bellevue is 50% complete, and Northgate is 70% complete. Sound Transit is ready to go to ballot with ST3, where North King money won't quite cover Ballard-West Seattle, but will cover Ballard-Downtown, including a tunnel under 2nd Avenue. The city puts another measure on the ballot to build the other half. With new city residents clamoring for transit, Sounder ridership at 20,000 a day and climbing, and ST3 Link expansion promising Tacoma, Redmond, and most of the way to Everett, both pass.

Sighing?

I have a different take on Jim Veseley's Sunday article than Ben Schiendelman did. In case you didn't read the article, Mr Veseley's argument is essentially that Americans have been adjusting their expectations downward on a number of issues, and the viaduct is the one foremost in Mr Veseley's thoughts. Veseley says he's "ready for a retrofit" of the viaduct, rather than a tunnel, elevated replacement, or surface option. This "lowered expectations" argument is a perspective I hadn't thought of or heard, and it certainly is thought provoking. I think Mr Veseley gets bull's eyes on a few big points, but I think he misses the mark on some of the details.

David M. Lampton, a much-honored China scholar and head of faculty at the vaunted School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, pointed out last week that China now has 68 subway projects under way — and the U.S. has none.

He cited the decaying Interstate Highway System that spans America, but was built in the 1950s and '60s. A trip on Interstate 5 bears him out. If not for the patches, we'd be looking at rebar.

...
I don't see a weakening of our hopes and values, but a realization that some of them belong back in the 1990s. One of our most intensely popular television series, "Lost," comes at a perfect time.

Roads and transit are just two signs of our decaying infrastructure in the United States, airports and seaports also spring to mind. Still, when most of our best new highway and transit systems were built, the US was spending ten percent of its GDP on infrastructure (H/T to Frank for the link), today it's just one percent. If a show were to come at the perfect time to describe the state of infrastructure in this country, it'd be called "Broke".

Veseley puts a sly dig in on Sound Transit expansion:

We see that in the calls for a pause in the funding of transportation projects. Megaprojects are on hold everywhere. A Sound Transit vote for the fall has as many supporters as it has people saying give it a rest, come back to us the following year, or maybe later.

That's not what the polling I've seen has shown, support is much higher for an ST2 expansion than against it. The rising gas prices certainly have something to do with that.

As for the viaduct, I certainly don't want a large one, as a new elevated option would be, or any super-expensive option, such as a tunnel, when in my mind that funding could be better spent on transit expansions. I've heard a retrofit would have a shorter life span, and thus might not get much bang-for-the buck, but as long as it's cheap enough, I won't get upset. What about you?

SLU Streetcar ridership up

While not official from SDOT/Metro Transit, the SLU Streetcar ridership has climbed from 960 riders a day to 1325 riders a day. With the start of the Summer tourist season, new buildings in Downtown Seattle opening, and the recently opened Lake Union Park contributing to the increase.

Per the operator of Sunday's run, weekdays between 6am to 8am and 4:30pm to 6:30pm are the busiest, being near crush load (130-145)

Average ridership appears to be gaining as construction eases however some trips are still only 2-6 passengers.

He did mention that the City is trying to improve the signal timing and add priority queue to the Streetcar, giving the operator the ability to change the light or leave the light green an extra 15-30 seconds. By doing this, would shave the run to dramatically but SDOT is studying if this would benefit the system or not. (duh)

Re: No Question...

A few points that I think were missed in this weekend's Battle Royale about the Rainier Valley segment:

1. Federal funding rules don't allow transit agencies to take TOD into account when doing ridership projections. So a line through Sodo's warehouses would have had lousy ridership projections, and probably not have earned any federal dollars. So a Sodo alignment means no alignment at all. People actually live near the Rainier Valley line.
   
2. Seattle's neighborhoods are famously risk-averse, and likely to fight a rail line that will ultimately benefit them. Poorer neighborhoods are generally less litigious and less politically active, meaning that both political and engineering risk were lower for this segment.
3. The Rainier's valley development pattern was unique. MLK is/was a fairly underdeveloped strip of auto repair shops and small, run-down apartment buildings, but also is two or three blocks from major arterials on either side: Rainier Avenue and Beacon Avenue. This made it uniquely suited to draw ridership from two vibrant and transit-intensive populations while still being capable of inspiring large TOD projects with minimal political opposition.
4. I would have liked to have seen our Ballard/West Seattle contingent -- leading advocates of in-city before regional rail -- come out a little more strongly for the Rainier Valley segment. I think the Seattle-first argument would have substantial merit if transit were being funded by a dictatorship, but fortunately we actually require democratic assent in this country. Unfortunately, the electorate is shackled with extremely narrow parochialism. At any rate, Central Link was an opportunity to provide substantial in-city service while also meeting regional goals: the best of both worlds.
   

Furthermore, as several commenters pointed out, what's done is done. If you're concerned about operating delays incurred by the Rainier Valley segment, the proper response is to pressure the city and Sound Transit for additional safety improvements to improve operating speeds. For instance:

• Pedestrian overpasses, instead of signalized, at-grade crossings.
• Crossing gates at all auto intersections.
• Fencing along the route to discourage pedestrian crossing at unauthorized points. It doesn't have to be triple-strand concertina wire; even a tasteful, 4 foot black iron fence would be a sufficient deterrent in 90% of cases.
• Construction of underpasses for major arterials.

Most of this stuff is relatively inexpensive, and can be added incrementally as funding and political will allow.

The American Way

Buried deep in the PI business section a few days ago:

The Commerce Department reported Friday that housing construction rose by 8.2 percent in April to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.03 million units. While apartment construction rose by 36 percent, building in the much larger single-family sector of the market fell by 1.7 percent, the 12th consecutive monthly decline, pushing single-family activity down to a 16-year low.

This is another data point showing that a home in the "country" and a huge yard aren't irreducible demands by Americans, but just another taste that is responsive to economic incentives.

Bad economy or no, the population is in a very pro-transit mood right now. 2008 is the year to go to the ballot.

Comment Etiquette (III)

It's been a couple of months, so I'll make this request again:

Please select a nickname and type it in under the "nickname" box on our comments page. Going through a comments thread with "Anonymous" is tedious and confusing. I can distinctly recognize at least two regular commenters using the Anonymous tab, and it's annoying.

It doesn't require getting an account or anything. Just type in a name, like SLOG.

Example above, with the correct box indicated in red. For whatever reason, Blogger doesn't allow you to turn off "anonymous" without doing the same for "Nickname".

Thanks!

Widening Our Highways Will Never Make Sense - But Narrowing Them Already Does.

Jim Vesely, one of the editors of the Seattle Times, commutes to work in the I-90 express lanes and on the Viaduct. On the Mercer Island to Seattle stretch, he doesn't even have to be HOV, because Mercer Island residents are apparently worth two plebians. He has likely never ridden a bus or a train. He is one of the last remnants of a school of thought that can no longer add knowledge to their understanding of traffic - he can't grasp that adding more lanes causes more congestion than it could ever relieve, or that congestion can never be reduced through promotion of alternatives, but only through a limitation of capacity.

The mayor of Bogota understands these things. The mayor of New York understands these things. The mayor of Seattle understands these things. Urban planners and transportation engineers know that while you can smooth intersections, you cannot reduce congestion by adding capacity, because every minute of congestion you reduce on the highway you expand, you add twice or more to every roadway it connects to - because you create an inbound and an outbound trip elsewhere for every new trip on the highway itself.

This makes sense to everyone, doesn't it? It's not rocket science. But Jim Vesely and his ilk just don't get it. They cling to the ancient idea that if you add a lane to SR-520, you'll somehow separate people from each other - but you don't. You just make room for more people.

Now for the contrary - and this is what terrifies people like Mr. Vesely. If you narrow a highway, you will, indeed, reduce congestion. Not on the highway itself - but on all the roads around it. We've heard plenty of times that light rail will only carry a small percentage of traffic (a ridiculous argument anyway) - but so do our highways. The streets surrounding them carry far more trips.

So when I hear Mr. Vesely champion retrofitting the Viaduct, I can only regard it as the sad selfishness of someone completely out of touch. We have an opportunity here to change our urban landscape, to erase a horrible mistake made many years ago. Why would we accept as sound advice the opinion of someone who has been so wrong on so many issues - someone who has always come out in favor of things that benefit him personally, and damn the rest of us? It's obvious that this man supports retrofit because it is the one thing that will delay major closure of the viaduct until after he has retired.

Don't let those with prehistoric ideas plan our future.
We know better than that.

No Question: Rainier Valley was the perfect place for Link

Matt the Engineer questions running light rail through the Rainier Valley because Matt thinks it's slower to the airport than a bus and the train isn't building communities by going through existing neighborhoods.

I think Matt is wrong about a couple of things. Sure, the line may be slower to the airport than the 194, but the 194 is much slower to the airport than Link will be from Beacon Hill, the Rainier Valley, and also Capitol Hill and the University District when U-Link gets built. That's an important thing to think about, Central Link was not built to be the only line, and U-Link construction is ready to start.

I'm sure Martin, who lives in the Rainer Valley, can comment on the level of development taking place on MLK due to link, including bike trails people will actually use, some 1,500 homes by now (the line doesn't open for a full year) and massive revitalization in general. The line would have gotten a fair ridership without that TOD, but the ridership with it will be massive. As the city shows, car ridership in the Valley is the lowest (pdf link) in the entire city.

I think it's a great routing. Better than the industrial areas by a fair amount, better than Rainier Ave by a fair amount, and a lot cheaper than West Seattle. We will definitely need a route through West Seattle some day (ST3?!?), but, for now, I think they've made a great decision.

Pause for Light Rail

Lance Dickie, who I'm not very familiar with, has written a pretty convincing op-ed piece arguing for Sound Transit to wait until 2010 to go to the ballot. Here's a choice quote:

Sound Transit first got traction in 1996, another presidential-election year. Turnout matters. After voters slapped down a package of roads and transit this past fall, there is a strong pull to try again, sans roads with a transit-friendly cohort.

The other view — one I tend to share — counsels a pause until 2010. By then, mobs with pitchforks and torches will be demanding more transit. Gas prices will resemble those in Europe, without Europe's plentiful alternatives to a car. Taking the bus or riding Sounder commuter rail will move from being mocked as a personal virtue to unvarnished economic necessity.

Most important, the 16-mile line from downtown Seattle to Sea-Tac International Airport is scheduled to open in 2009. After years of talking about how great it is going to be, light rail finally will be a visible, tangible and popular reality.

Emphasis added. I agree that by 2010 the desire for transit will be more urgent, but isn't that almost an argument to start early? We don't want to fall another two years behind. As gas prices rise, construction prices will as well, so the sooner the better from the cost standpoint. I also think that we're already seeing the realization from a lot of people that transit really is an alternative.

The next big suburban land rush will be aboard light rail. The cliché about driving till you qualify for a home loan will be updated. Homes in Arlington will sell to young families whose daily car commute is to a park-and-ride lot and transfer to the light-rail station in Everett.

Want a sure bet in public transit? The Seattle streetcar extension from South Lake Union to the University District. An absolute no-brainer. The future is at Westlake Avenue and Denny Way. An urban neighborhood is blossoming. The employment base is already an extension of the University of Washington, so a line north via Eastlake makes perfect sense. As Portland discovered, investment flourishes along streetcar rails planted in the ground.

I have been hearing homes out in the far-off exurbs are those that are falling in prices fastest, while those close to jobs centers are retaining value for the most part. This is, again, an argument in my mind to go forward now. We don't have a lot of time to spare, and we'll lose competitiveness as a region if we let transportation costs get out of control before we approve an expansion. Gas prices have risen tremendously in the last few year. Do we really want to wait for $6 a gallon gas to start building a transit expansion?

Really, I was surprised to read such a pro-transit article in the Times, which usually ranges from lukewarm support to outright hostility to transit. I think the argument is pretty well-reasoned that 2010 will be a sure thing, but I think 2008 will be as well, and I don't see any advantage to waiting if we think it'll pass this year.

Puyallup Herald asks the same question

What to do with all the transit riders?

Our Slow Construction Will Save Thousands.

For the last few days, we've all been reading about the earthquake in China - tens of thousands dead, many more homeless, whole towns destroyed.

There's speculation that this quake could have been caused by the massive shift in weight caused by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the addition of millions of tons of water (175 meters, eventually) to an area near the Jiuwanxi and Zigui–Badong fault lines. It is, so far, unclear which fault line caused this quake, and it may not be either of these.

Regardless, though, of what caused the quake, one line about a collapsed school in a horribly depressing (take that as a warning) New York Times article today caught my attention:

One man said officials built two additional stories on the Xinjian school even though it had failed a safety inspection two years ago — allegations that could not be verified.

There are two problems here. One is the obvious - two additional stories on a structure that failed a safety inspection? The other problem is far more insidious - you can't even check. The result? Hundreds of kids crushed to death.

Every time I tell someone that Link Light Rail will get to Husky Stadium around 2016, I know to expect the immediate response - a complaint that it takes too long. I have a new answer:

In eight years, I'll probably have a child of my own. Some of my good friends here have kids already who could be going to school on Link. And inevitably, we will wake up to an earthquake one morning - maybe a 7, maybe an 8, but it could devastate our city. As emergency crews are cut off by collapsed fifty year old bridges, and I am running down the street to pull people out of a hundred year old apartment building, the one thing I do not want to worry about is kids on their way to Roosevelt or Franklin on our brand new light rail system.

I don't feel a need to "speed up" the processes through which we build infrastructure. Public meetings, design reviews, these are all time in which people with knowledge can speak up. The real answer is the same answer to a lot of our problems: We must learn to plan ahead.

Update: I want to add something to this. I know that much of the time taken between, say, now and when U Link opens has to do with the way money is collected. I am not writing about that - I'm writing about the public comment periods, the design reviews, everything that makes more people aware of what's being built and able to say something. Don't you suppose that if we were building a Three Gorges Dam here, a group of USGS seismologists might have had something to say? I'm saying that while I'd rather not see East Link delayed or cost more because people in Beaux Arts are NIMBYs, I'm happy to let them complain to the Sound Transit board when it means that someone with a real issue can bring that forward as well.

Sound Transit survey

Sound Transit is asking your opinion again. 0.4%, 0.5%, 12- and 20-year plans are all on the table. So are both 2008 and 2010 ballot measures.

I'm really skeptical of the actual value of these kinds of self-nominating survey responses, but I figured I'd suggest what I'd heard at the meetup, which is that the 0.4% measure go to the ballot, with an additional 0.1% measure. That maximizes our chance of getting something passed.

Of course, what'd happen is that the 0.4 would fail and the 0.1 pass, leading to more confusion.

More than anything, I just want them to propose whatever their polling tells them has the highest chance of passing. The details aren't important, because I know that the highest priority segments are the ones that are going to be built, regardless.

ST Ridership up 15%

UPDATE: Correction Below.

Sound Transit's Quarterly Ridership Report is up, and it's good news. It's brief, so go have a look. Weekday boardings are up 15% from the same time last year, which is pretty impressive given the relatively small amount of service added in that time. Some interesting nuggets:

• South Sounder ridership is up 30%, largely because of added trips. I think this shows that ridership is a little less elastic with respect to parking at the station than some would assume. In other words, creative solutions (like satellite parking) are able to continue building ridership after the nearby lots are saturated. That isn't to say that parking shortages aren't a problem.
  
• Sounder cost-per-boarding is down slightly to $10.79, while the express bus cost is up slightly to $6.73. Without seeing the station breakdown, that puts farebox recovery for Sounder at around 40%, about the same as ST Express and pretty good for a transit system. That includes essentially empty reverse-commute trains. As economies of scale build up on Sounder and gas prices increase, I expect the comparative numbers to improve further.
• Tacoma Link ridership is only up 1%. It may simply not have the scope to serve many people, especially since the 594 most Express buses takes a needless detour into downtown on its way South.

Picture Credit: Seattle Times, August 14, 2007.

Transit Report Card: Washington, DC

Second in an occasional series where I wildly generalize about a transit system based on limited experience.

Segments ridden:
Red Line: Shady Grove - Union Station
Blue Line: Springfield - Stadium/Armory
Orange Line: W. Falls Church - Stadium/Armory
Yellow Line: Gallery Place - National Airport
Green Line: Gallery Place - Navy Yard
Time ridden: You name it. I grew up here, so I can't even begin to recapitulate it.

Scope: A
There aren't a ton of places to go in D.C. and the surrounding area that you can't get to via Metro, but it falls a bit short of the blanket coverage you see in New York. The vast majority of the service lies inside the Beltway (analogous to I-405) which has all kinds of benefits for preventing sprawl and allowing a car-free lifestyle.

Service: A
Service is frequent except in the wee hours. Message boards tell you when the next train is coming, in pretty much every station.

Routing: B
The Red Line in Maryland follows some major arterials, rather than the nearby freeway. That isn't the case along the Orange Line in Virginia, however. Inside the beltway, where most of the system lies, there really aren't enough freeways to even tempt planners to route along them.

Grade/ROW: A+
As with all third-rail systems, no pedestrian or auto is ever going to get anywhere near the track.

TOD: C
Revisiting this with a newly critical eye, the TOD is kind of disappointing. The city itself is really dense, which was the case before the Metro came. Although many stations are underground and therefore impossible to evaluate without stopping there, my limited experience in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs at the ends of the line is pretty disappointing. My read is that local authorities are really starting to get it, however.

Culture: A
For many suburbanites, driving to work is unthinkable. They're certainly not deterred by park-and-ride fees approaching $5.00 a day, on top of a fare of as much as $4.50 each way. I don't personally know any people that work in the city anymore, but what I gather from sources like Matt Yglesias is that in the core a car-free lifestyle is increasingly viable and popular as the city emerges from epic mismanagement a couple of decades ago.

*************

If you are visiting DC for the traditional tourist itinerary, there's no good reason to rent a car. Driving and parking are difficult in the main tourist areas. The Metro goes right to National Airport, and there is straightforward bus service if you must fly into Dulles or BWI.

I happened to be in town the very day the USDOT reversed itself and gave the go-ahead to Dulles Rail. Having spent most of that trip in the Dulles Corridor, I can say that there's tons of high-rise office space surrounded by parking. That's a good sign, as it indicates that there's tons of available real estate with mild zoning restrictions. Furthermore, it's certainly interesting to see how the attitude of federal bureaucrats can change when the system is in their direct experience, while it's "let them take buses" out here in the stix. But let's give Virginia's leaders credit for persevering in the face of really negative feedback.

In terms of sheer beauty, little in the transit world really compares to a DC Metro Station. The underground architecture, while composed mainly of concrete, is roomy and appealing. Interestingly, as far as I can tell, exactly 0.0% of the capital expenditure was devoted to public art. If it were up to me, I'd encourage all transit systems to build intrinsic beauty into their architecture, rather than add some art of controversial value to each station.

I'll finish with a brief anecdote. I attended a game at Nationals Stadium downtown, which was built half a block from the Navy Yard station. I was impressed with WMATA's event management, with the nearest gate to the stadium being exit-only before the game and entrance-only afterwards. Additionally, there were lots of WMATA personnel around to direct the crowds in the station and make sure that every last car was packed to the gills. It was an extremely well-organized operation, especially considering the stadium had only been open for a month.

At any rate, I soon was waiting for a transfer at L'Enfant Plaza, when I overheard this conversation:
"The next train comes in eight minutes."
"Eight Minutes?!"

Think of the implications of that conversation:
(1) The agency is able to predict with precision the next arrival.
(2) They inform riders with a simple-to-use message board.
(3) The riders are conditioned to think that 8 minutes is an unreasonable time to wait at 10 pm.

Jealous, aren't you?

Photo courtesy of washingtontravelcast.com

What to do with an overcrowded park-and-ride?

That's the question Sound Transit and Puyallup are asking themselves. The Puyallup station has 680 spots between four lots near there, but the spots are nearly always full. The News Tribune likes the idea of having the drivers park at satellite lots and take buses to the train station.

One remedy would be a healthy-sized parking garage at the station. A garage would have been built had voters approved the Roads and Transit package last November; now the project awaits possible approval of a scaled-down package.

Sound Transit has already been pursuing a more elegant solution: satellite parking, a decentralized form of park-and-ride. The idea is to let workers park their cars outside the core and take a bus to the station. The bus gets the commuters to the train quickly and on time. There’s already a satellite parking center on South Hill and another in Bonney Lake (which takes people to Sumner Station).

Assuming the bus connection is fast and reliable, this works for everyone. Downtowns don’t get buried in parked cars, and commuters can leave their cars closer to home and not panic about finding a spot near the station before the train leaves.

If satellite parking lots are extended to the suburbs, train service will become more accessible and the reach of mass transit will be extended.

As one of the first small cities to get big-time transit service, Puyallup is a laboratory for other Puget Sound communities. Its parking solutions are probably going to be the region’s parking solutions.

The idea is interesting, to put the parking lots closer to peoples homes and run shuttles. However, the transfer might not be appetizing to all riders, and it could turn some riders off of Sounder. The whole problem makes me think about an idea Martin had at our last meet-up: charge a small amount for parking each day at the main lots, and let the people who don't mind as much park in the shuttles. I imagine you'd see more carpools, more people walking, and more people biking. The parking money could go to possibly getting more parking, installing bike lockers, operating the shuttles, or really anything. The article also mentions people driving from Sumner to park in Puyallup to avoid crowding, these people might decide to stay in Sumner and park there. As long as Puyallup is a laboratory, we should really try something different.

What do you think? Would you pay for a park-and-ride to avoid crowding? Anyone here bike to a park-and-ride?

California Highspeed Rail Interactive Map

Take a look, it's awesome. I hope to be able to ride this someday.

H/T to Frank.

Re: Waterfront Streetcar

I finally got a response back from SDOT:

Dear Mr. Bundridge:

Thank you for contacting Mayor Greg Nickels regarding the Waterfront Streetcar. I was asked to address your concerns on the Mayor’s behalf.

As you mention in your letter, restoration of the waterfront trolley is connected to the final solution for replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct. It is prudent to have a full understanding of the details of the viaduct replacement, what the impacts of construction will be and how the waterfront will function after construction is complete to ensure there will be no conflicts with the streetcar. A final recommendation on how we replace the viaduct along the central waterfront will be made by December 2008

The city of Seattle believes that unique opportunities exist for Seattle to expand its streetcar network. Currently, analysis is underway on which additional lines should be pursued for early implementation as part of an overall streetcar network. Part of that analysis will also include looking at the best north-south lines and whether a waterfront line or a line on First Avenue would provide the best opportunities for moving people in Seattle. We just delivered a draft of the report to the Seattle City Council, and you may access it online at http://www.seattlestreetcar.org/future.asp.

Finally, you wrote that you have heard that the Waterfront Streetcar facilities would be removed, beginning this summer. There is currently no plan for removal of the Waterfront Streetcar facilities.

Thank you again for contacting the City of Seattle on this issue. Should you require additional information, please visit our website at http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/.

Sincerely,

Grace Crunican, Director
Seattle Department of Transportation

Mukilteo Sounder Station Opening

Mukilteo sounder station opens at the end of the month, and Sound Transit is having a free return trip for north bound Sounder riders for the mariners game May 31st.

Join us as we celebrate this new station and train service Saturday, May 31. In honor of Mukilteo Station’s opening day, Sounder Home Run Service will be free from Everett, Mukilteo and Edmonds stations.
Project info:
Mukilteo Station includes a platform on the north side of the tracks for passengers, 68 parking stalls, and public art by Whidbey Island artist Linda Beaumont. The second phase of the project will include a south platform, pedestrian bridge and additional parking spaces.


Schedule of events:
10:00a.m. --- Grand Slam Family Fun Celebration Start
10:30a.m. --- Speaking Program and Station Dedication
11:26a.m. --- Inaugural Train leaves Mukilteo Station for a Free Ride to Safeco Field.
(For SnoCo and other North end residents: 35 Minutes AFTER the Mariners games ends - Free return train leaves King Street Station for Edmonds, Mukilteo and Everett Station)

Old Guy At Crosscut Hates Rail, No Surprise

Ross Anderson, a sixty-something retired journalist has the most insulting anti-rail screed I've read yet at Crosscut. While Ted Van Dyk embarrassingly admits that "governance" is about killing light rail in its cradle and generally comes off as obsessed, Mr Anderson manages to interview and complement nearly every anti-rail activist in our area. Not surprising from a man who used to work on transportation for the Discovery Institute, a group who thinks deep-bore highways are the solution to Seattle's transportation problems.

First Mr Anderson sets out to belittle trains and those who like them, first with the title "Seattle goes gah-gah over choo-choos". Who says "choo-choo"? Mr Anderson must actually want transit supporters to appear juvenile.

We have seen the future of Seattle mass transit, and it looks suspiciously like the past. It is shiny and red and goes clackity-clack between South Lake Union and Westlake. It travels at a maximum speed of 20 mph and costs about $40 million per mile to build.

First, the streetcar doesn't go "clackity-clack". It has a welded rail and has a smoother ride than anyone trying to drive a car on city streets.

Second, as we learned this morning from the Mercer street mess (nearly $400 million a mile), as we are learning from the 520 bridge (over $2 billion per mile), and as we are learning from the Alaska way viaduct (also $2 billion per mile), roads cost a lot more than $40 million per mile. What's the maximum speed on Mercer? And the Ikedon Trio, the train type the SLUT uses, has a maximum speed of about 45 mph. The trolley tops at 25, which is the speed limit.

Seattle, it seems, has gone downright gah-gah over choo-choos. Whatever the price in dollars and aggravation, the city is determined to take the A-Train. We haven't yet completed that $2.7 billion-dollar rail lines to Sea-Tac, but Sound Transit is desperately seeking more billions to extend that line to Northgate. We have the new South Lake Union Streetcar. And this week, planners unveiled their sketchy visions for streetcar lines in neighborhoods like Capitol Hill and the University District.

All this stokes the ongoing debate: How do we best relieve traffic, or at least provide an alternative way to get around? More roads? Or buses? Or rails? If the rail buffs have their way, we'll soon be looking at and living in a cityscape reminiscent of another century — the 19th.

Sure there have been streetcars since the 19th century, but there have been paved roads for some six thousand years (talk about old technology), and cars and buses have been around since the 19th as well. And don't get me started on those old-fashion boat things, or dare I say it, walking. So unless Mr Anderson is fighting for helicopters or Segways, there's nothing new under the sun.

And has Seattle gone "gah-gah" (Mr Anderson writes like rail supporters are two year olds) over trains? I wouldn't say so. We have one streetcar line, two commuter rail lines, and are building a first light rail line. You know a place "gah-gah" over trains? New York, where the vast majority of people use public transit, or Tokyo where there's an average of a train station every 1.5 square kilometers. Seattle rejected Prop. 1, and most other transit expansions in its history. Hardly "gah-gah".

Not statisfied just trying to make modern trains seem silly and old-fashioned, ironic coming from a man whose ideas involve brand new super-highways, Anderson decided to interview practically every anti-rail critic in the region, none of whom provide an alternative:

Rail critics see their own conspiracy. Randal O'Toole is an Oregon economist and self-styled libertarian who argues that Seattle is about to join dozens of cities that have got little or no benefits from the billions spent on light rail. Trolleys and streetcars are 19th century technology that is too slow, too dangerous and too expensive, he says. "Light rail is simply one more way to take money from the pockets of ordinary taxpayers and put it in the pockets of wealthy businesses."

Is that what Light Rail is? I thought that people ride it to work, too.

John Niles, a transportation consultant and critic of light rail, is a little kinder toward streetcars. They are probably a mistake, he says, "but the scale of the error is so much smaller than with light rail."

By "consultant" Anderson means John Niles is on Kemper Freeman's payroll. Niles is about sixty, and grew up during the auto boom in 1950's when 10% of the GDP went toward building highways. In his way cars and buses are the only way anyone should want to get around.

Streetcars aren't the answer to our traffic mess here. Neither is light rail, but its a great alternative to driving. But to oppose rail so strong as Mr Anderson, Mr O'Toole and Mr Niles do, it makes me wonder whose thinking is old-fashioned: the people trying to bring progressive public transportation options to Seattle, or the people stuck with 20th-century, carheaded thinking.

Chief Sealth Trail

One of the things I learned on the lunch bus from Roger Pence is that the contractor who built light rail in the valley helped build Chief Sealth Bike Trail

For years, SDOT has heard requests for this trail from southeast Seattle neighborhoods as part of the planning for the City's non-motorized transportation and neighborhood plans, and light rail on MLK. In early 2004, RCI/Herzog offered to build the trail as a method of recycling excavated soils and concrete from the Link Light Rail project along MLK. The City welcomed this innovative construction approach as it resulted in a major savings of taxpayer dollars and it provides the City with a new trail within a reduced timeframe—at least two years earlier than was originally envisioned. Over the summer of 2004, SDOT worked hard to design and acquire all required permits for the trail and with Sound Transit, completed the environmental analysis. In May 2007, RCI/Herzog and SDOT completed the trail along the Seattle City Light right of way.

Pretty cool stuff, and a nice side-effect to getting a rail line. The bike trail crosses MLK at the same place as the Rainer Beach station, and it goes the New Holly development.

In a Continuing Series on How Expensive Roads Are

Making Mercer a two-way Boulevard for just one half a mile from SR-99 to I-5 will cost $192.9 million dollars and the widening of the Spokane Street Viaduct from Marginal Way to 6th Avenue (about half a mile) will cost $168.5 million.

Link Under Budget?

According to the Daily Journal of Commerce, Central Link from Seattle to Tukwila may be as much as "$150 million cheaper than expected," though the airport extension is over budget.

With 90 percent of construction complete, Fazel estimates the final price tag will be $2.294 billion, down from $2.437 billion.
...
The 1.7-mile light-rail extension to the airport, unlike the Seattle-to-Tukwila segment, is over budget.

The "float" in schedule for the construction has all but disappeared, though it doesn't seem to be getting worse:

Work in the Beacon Hill tunnel, which has already eaten up most of the cushion in the light-rail project's construction schedule, is still challenging, Fazel told the board. Originally that cushion was six months, but now it has shrunk to nine days.

“We're honestly a little bit edgy about it but (the 9-day cushion) has held now for several months,” said CEO Joni Earl.
...
Work in the Beacon Hill tunnel is on the critical path of the entire project.
With so many tall buildings under construction around Seattle, finding workers to install the high-speed elevators at the Beacon Hill station will also be a challenge.

“They're highly skilled and very much in demand,” said agency spokesperson Bruce Gray.

The Beacon Hill station will have four elevators with a 165-foot drop between the surface and the station platform. It will take 20 seconds to travel from the surface to the station.

SDOT Changing South-End For Link

The Daily Journal of Commerce has the scoop on proposed changes for South-End neighborhoods the City is considering when light rail opens. SDOT wants want your comments:

The Seattle Department of Transportation wants public comments on transportation improvements it is planning for southeast Seattle when light-rail service begins next year.
SDOT wants to make it safer and more pleasant to get around in these growing neighborhoods, and to improve access to light-rail stations.
Between Rainier Beach and Columbia City, SDOT recommends that Rainier Avenue South be converted to three lanes from four lanes.
On Beacon Hill, SDOT wants to extend the median on Beacon Avenue South through the business district and add pedestrian crosswalks. It also wants to build a public plaza between the Beacon Hill Station and El Centro de la Raza.
...
In Rainier Beach, SDOT recommends providing a safe bicycle route from the Othello light-rail station to Renton Avenue South. SDOT also wants to make the Rainier Beach business district more pedestrian-friendly.

In Mount Baker, SDOT recommends improving two high-collision intersections and reconfiguring the intersection at Rainier Avenue South and Martin Luther King Jr. Way South.

In Columbia City, it wants to improve South Alaska Street to the light-rail station. SDOT also would make three pedestrian crossings on Rainier Avenue South safer.
SDOT would also add bike routes at both ends of Rainier Valley and connect the Chief Sealth Trail across Interstate 5.

To read the plan and to make comments ... Comments must be received at SDOT by May 31 at 5 p.m ... can also be emailed to Tony.Mazzella@Seattle.gov.

The neighborhood already looks completely different on MLK than it did before, and I'm really excited about what light rail is going to down there.

Danger of Speeding Buses!

I just watched the silliest "special report" on Komo news (no link, sorry) about speeding buses and how dangerous they are. It was embarassing. Sure, I can see it could be a problem if buses are running red lights or breezing through stop signs, but is a bus going 37 in a 35 zone really news worthy? I really bet most drivers even would rather buses go faster. Why does Komo want buses to go slow?

Transit Up Nationwide, Funding Here at a Stand-still

The Seattle Times ran a modified version of this New York Times article about transit use rising nationwide. The New York Times piece identifies rising gas prices as a primary reason for the rise in use.

The sudden jump in ridership comes after several years of steady, gradual growth. Americans took 10.3 billion trips on public transportation last year, up 2.1 percent from 2006.

Transit managers are predicting growth of 5 percent or more this year, the largest increase in at least a decade.

"If we are in a recession or economic downturn, we should be seeing a stagnation or decrease in ridership, but we are not," said Daniel Grabauskas, general manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which serves the Boston area. "Fuel prices are without question the single most important factor that is driving people to public transportation."

Transit use rose the most in the West, where transit is traditionally used the least, which makes sense because a place like New York where more than half of commuters use transit has half as many people who don't use transit compared to a place where nearly no one uses transit. In King County about 10% of commuters use transit, and in Seattle the number is about 17%.

The transit ridership gains here are impressive:

Sound Transit ridership grew 12.3 percent in 2007, according to the agency.

In 2007, nearly 14 million riders boarded Sounder commuter rail, ST Express buses and Tacoma Link light-rail trains, according to the agency.

The biggest ridership increase among Sound Transit's three modes was on the Sounder commuter rail, with a 27.4 percent increase in 2007, according to the agency, the fourth-biggest commuter-rail ridership increase in the nation for 2007.

In Seattle, Metro ridership has grown 18 percent in the past three years, spokeswoman Linda Thielke said. She said that in the first three months this year, ridership was up 6 percent from the same time last year.

Sounder's growth can be attributed the number of trains being run. Obviously, more trains carry more people, but a new schedule run also encourages more people to ride the other scheduled trains even if they never ride the new service. Just knowing there are more trains keeps people sure they won't get trapped in the city without a train to take home.

Buses are getting more crowded, which has got to get painful on buses that don't come often or were already crowded. I bet the number 7 bus is standing-room only on each rush-hour coach. The problem is that even though demand is high, funding for Metro, especially in the City, has not kept pace. The New York Times but points out a kind of catch-22 in the way we fund transit:

But meeting the greater demand for mass transit is proving difficult. The cost of fuel and power for public transportation is about three times that of four years ago, and the slowing economy means local sales tax receipts are down, so there is less money available for transit services. Higher steel prices are making planned expansions more expensive.

Typically, mass transit systems rely on fares to cover about a third of their costs, so they depend on sales taxes and other government funding. Few states use gas tax revenue for mass transit.

At least transit is a way for some people to save money. The states that use gas-tax money to pay for transit are likely really hurting.

The money quote is right at the end of the article:

"Nobody believed that people would actually give up their cars to ride public transportation," said executive director Joseph Giulietti, executive director of the authority.

"But in the last year, and last several months in particular, we have seen exactly that."

Imagine that.

I want to know: are any routes getting seriously over-crowded? There was a time when the 545 was always at crush load, but it's lightened up a bit thanks to more runs from Sound Transit, and more Microsoft Connector buses.

Nice Meet-up

On the same note, we had a great meet-up Friday. A good, 15-20 people showed, including Frank from Orphan Road, Will formerly from Horse's Ass, and all our permanent bloggers except Brian, plus a ton of commenters like djstroky, phil, nickb, and more. I always learn a lot from the people who show up, and this was no exception. Djstroky talked about a Viaduct meeting he went to, and Nickb mentioned the lack of pedestrian access from Beacon Hill down to the Dearborn site I blogged about Friday. We'll do another in about a month, I hope you can make it!

Sounder locomotives to get "Hot Start" and new gen sets

Good news for the environment

Our Sounder train locomotives are about to get outfitted with a new system that will not only save fuel, but will benefit the environment as well.

The Sound Transit Board on Thursday approved the purchase of equipment that automatically shuts down a locomotive’s engine when it’s idling for long periods of time. The system, through Rail Systems, Inc., also automatically starts the engine when necessary.

Because engine idling will be reduced by an estimated 34 percent, the system is expected to cut a total of more than 1.8 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year from the agency’s fleet of 11 Sounder locomotives. It will also provide significant fuel savings and reduce noise pollution where the locomotives are stored at night.

The contract, approved Thursday by the Board, is for $230,596. The agency was also very pleased to learn that the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency has designated a $100,000 grant toward the purchase of the equipment.

The work will be done at Amtrak's Los Angeles, CA Redondo Yard.

Sound Transit is also installing new generators for Head End Power, or "HEP," the main engines in a modern locomotive, from the CAT company. This will switch them from the existing, fuel thirsty 12 cylinder engines to a new fuel efficient 6 cylinder design. This work is being done at CAT in Tukwila, Washington.

Non/Barely Transit Related: Dearborn development

A lot of people are talking about the City's second endorsement of this massive Dearborn-Goodwill site development. HugeAssCity hates it, Dominic Holden of the Stranger stays objective, and there are various opponents and proponents duking it out online. The last step for the project to go forward is for the City Council to approve an up-zone, and in my opinion they absolutely should.



The most of the main problems with the site are it's size: 565 residential units, 675,000 sq ft or retail and 2307 parking spots. 565 units on that site would be great, especially since a couple hundred of them will be affordable housing, so I don't think a lot of people are arguing against that. The retail is massive, a little bigger than the "Northgate-North" project from a few years ago, but at least one of the anchor tenants will be Goodwill, an admirable organization, and the rumor I've heard is that another of the tenants will be Fry's, a computer retailer. So it's not exactly like it's a Home Depot and an Office Max going in.

Sure 2307 parking spots is a ton, but is it really better that city dwellers drive to Renton for Fry's or Northgate for Target (or whatever else goes in)? That area will be well served by transit, especially if ST2 passes there will be a light station on I-90 and Rainer, about five blocks away, and a streetcar will run on Jackson, about three blocks away. If a streetcar expansion takes flight, one of the secondary lines was an extension down Rainer from Jackson, meaning a streetcar would literally run next to this project.

The other main argument against the project is that it's out of character with the rest of the neighborhood, Little Saigon to the north, the south CD to the East and the northern tip of the Rainer Valley to the south. I concede it is out of character with the size of the buildings, but how is the current, massive Goodwill parking-lot and warehouse in character?

The last argument is that the city is giving up right-of-way to the developer. If you actually go down to the road, Lane St is wholey within the Goodwill Site's parking lot. The city is really not losing much.

Here's the real question: What is the best use of this land about a mile from downtown? 565 housing units, 230 of which are affordable, is a good start. Sure, I'd get rid of the parking and make the individual retail sites smaller, but wouldn't you rather have the big-boxes built on top of each other than next to each other across parking lots? Generally, this project will save a lot of people from having to drive long distances to Northgate or the Eastside, is a much better use of the 10 acres near downtown than parking lots, and a project of this size would take up maybe 50~100 acres somewhere on the Snohomish Plateau. I say go for it, City Council.

A Google Maps tour of Central Link, part 2

Hey there! It's been a few days, and I thought I'd finish showing off the recent satellite photos of Central Link construction.

We left off with Beacon Hill. Here's the east end of the tunnel (upper left), as well as Mount Baker station (lower right). This is an elevated platform, set back from the street with a few businesses in between. I centered this link so that you could see both the tunnel exit and the station, so you may need to scroll a bit on a smaller screen to see everything. Just to the east (right) of the station, where you can see a couple of construction trailers, there will be a pedestrian plaza connecting the station to the street.

The next station is Columbia City, the first surface level station on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. You'll notice that I didn't center the image here on the station - I want to bring attention to the east-west street at the south end of the platform, Edmunds Street. Sound Transit replaced the sidewalk and curb ramps between MLK and Rainier Avenue to make pedestrian access between Columbia City's downtown and the light rail station more pleasant.

There are two more surface level stations, Othello and Rainier Beach. Othello is the more exciting of the two - built across from the only continuous block of street-fronted businesses on MLK, it's extremely pedestrian friendly, and with 1500 housing units in planning around the intersection, it should become even more so. Rainier Beach isn't particularly interesting right now, aside from the new Chief Sealth bicycle trail built in the adjacent Seattle City Light right-of-way (that's the green part), and it does offer great access to the p-patch just to the north. Look for changes here over the next decade.

Here it gets interesting again. The light rail crosses both I-5 and the BNSF tracks. This BNSF crossing could be the site of a future station, as Sounder runs here and there's plenty of space - maybe we'll see a combined Sounder/Link/bus facility if Sounder eventually runs all day. These crossings used an interesting construction technique called a 'balanced cantilever' - central columns were built on each side of I-5 and the tracks, and from each column, aerial concrete segments were added one at a time to each side, keeping the weight to each side of the columns balanced. Eventually the segments met in the middle of the space they span.

Most of the aerial guideway was not built this way, though - it was built with this amazing big yellow gantry. This gantry, now gone (this part of the construction is complete), would pick up a dozen sections of trackway at a time, lift them into place, and hold them there while they were tensioned from the ends. Once the columns were in place, it could build about two spans a week, "walking" to the next empty span after building trackway across each.

This elevated trackway continues, unbroken, until Tukwila International Boulevard Station (why wasn't it just Link Tukwila Station?) - where even this new imagery shows its age. The adjacent holes in the elevated trackway have long since been filled. This station is basically complete, with only the park and ride really left to finish paving. This is the only parking lot in Central Link, and I hope it's later converted to transit oriented development!

The final leg of our tour is Airport Link. While Central Link is scheduled to open in July of next year, the last mile or so to the airport itself was dependent on the Port of Seattle's airport expressway realignment, and opens at the end of the year. See this loop? That's now paved and open, the new 'return loop' for drivers who have arrived at the airport before the people they've come to pick up are ready. Cars aren't allowed to simply park in front of the arrivals hall, but congestion was getting bad, so the Port (as I understand it) wanted to extend the amount of pavement available for circulating traffic. A side benefit of this was to provide Sound Transit with the site for Sea-Tac Airport Station.

This station will have a pedestrian bridge over to the parking garage, so the walk will be similar to parking a bit away from the terminal. Sometime in the future, when all this construction is complete and the roadway has been moved to its new location, the Port would like to extend Concourse D (the short one just west of the light rail station) much as they have Concourse A (the southernmost concourse). This will likely present an opportunity to build a new, much shorter route for Link riders in the future.

One more note - when Central Link opens, shuttle buses will meet the trains at Tukwila Station to get you that last mile until Airport Link is done - so don't worry, you won't be stranded with your bags hailing a cab!

Eastside Rails

The Eastside BNSF Rail deal is finally done. The Port of Seattle has purchased the track from Renton to Woodinville for $109 million, and King County has purchased the right to build a bike trail there for $2 million from the Port. The Seattle Times is pleased, though I still feel that the ridership will simply not be worth the expense of refurbishing the rails, placing stations and buying DMUs (heavy diesel trains, like Sounder). Anyone seen the price of diesel lately?

I did see this article about Google on the Eastside, and it looks like at least part of the line could eventually be useful, and I noticed the Eastside BNSF line right next to where that campus would eventually be. It got me wondering, would DMUs be the right choice? What about light rail for portions of the track? DMUs work better for longer-haul trains with fewer stops, while Light rail works better in configurations that have stops every a couple of miles.

There are parts of the right-of-way that wouldn't get much in the way of riders for either system, but the portions Bellevue and north could make sense for an eventual north-south eastside light rail line.

Regional Transit Map Book

Last year, I was thrilled to discover the Regional Transit Map Book, a booklet that consolidates system maps for the three counties in the ST district, and also includes easy-to-use charts showing service times for various routes.

Without a doubt, I found it to be the best portable tool for figuring out routes on the fly.

Unfortunately, it's also hard to find. I imagine it costs a mint to print. Anyhow, I discovered yesterday that the 2008 edition is available in the downtown post office, across from Benaroya Hall.

Pick up one before it's too late; alternatively you can get a pdf version here, but I'm all for carrying around the booklet while reducing my own printing costs.

Kudos to Sound Transit for putting this together. Together with mybus and tripplanner, I think it's one of the big usability improvements we've seen in the last decade or so.

And while you're on that website, there's a ton of very appealing (and yet spectacularly obscure) maps and documents about road planning, getting around on Capitol Hill and the U-District, etc.

Reminder: Transit Meet-up

As requested, this post is a reminder that our transit meet-up will be Friday, May 9 at 7:30 pm.

We'll be in the back of the Collins Pub in Pioneer Square.

If you have a bar that would like to host the transit meet-up, and are reasonably accessible by transit, we can make that happen for nothing but a few free, delicious beers.

A little more streetcars

I want to clarify a few things. I am not 100% for streetcars, though streetcars with their own right-of-way are worth building in moderate-capacity areas. Streetcars simply get more ridership, attract more development and increase the overall reliability of the general transit system than buses do.

On that note, this P-I article has a good, the bad and the ugly situation going on with that piece vis-à-vis the streetcar expansion plans:
The good:

The department's chief of staff, Casey Hanewall, said his agency views streetcars as one attractive alternative to car travel, not the best alternative.

"Although we think there are great benefits and an expanded streetcar network can attract more users and get them out of their cars ... we don't think that that option is necessarily a more important one than others," he said.

The department will supply Rasmussen with the additional information he seeks, he said.

"The thinking is that there isn't any one transit option, that there's room for various modes and they fit very nicely with each other," Rasmussen said.

The bad:

Estimates show operating costs were $120 per hour for an electric trolley (STB: trolley-bus) and $160 per hour for a streetcar, but were comparable when ticket revenue is factored in. Assuming $50,000 individual sponsorships of streetcars or stations, the net cost for a streetcar could be $25 per hour less than for a trolley.

Cheaper operation is interesting, but the real number should be cheaper operating costs per rider per trip or per mile. Not per trolley. You know what costs more to operate than a Cessna? A 747. I'll let you guess which costs more per passenger.

The ugly, from the first few paragraphs:

Streetcars? Why not electric trolley buses?

That question popped up Tuesday as Seattle City Council members were briefed on four possible streetcar routes to extend the system now only in South Lake Union.

Prompting the discussion were money concerns.

City transportation department officials told council members the most promising streetcar extensions would be north to the University District, Fremont and Ballard, and south to Pioneer Square and east to the International District and Capitol Hill.

Total estimated construction cost: $599 million, in 2010 dollars, not including the cost of running each line each year.

Not including? Total? No one is planning on building all at once. Yikes, like streetcars much, Larry?

Sorry, I'm still upset that the Waterfront Streetcar was destroyed, at which time little or no news was written. Now some people want expansions, and so now it's time to get upset, NIMBY style...

Amtrak Cascades: Families & Discounts

A few follow-ups to points raised in the comments to the previous post:

K said...

You've heard of these groups of more than 2 people called "families", yes?

Yes of course! I was one of 7 myself. First of all, as you might expect, Amtrak maintains discounts for children 15 and younger, fully 1/2 off:

Child	2 - 15	50%	Up to two children per paying adult. Children must travel with adult. 1, 2
Infant	Under 2	Free	One infant per paying adult. Infants must ride on adult's lap.

Also, as Steve points out in the comments, Amtrak maintains an off-season discount program from November to May which offers free companion travel (2 for the price of one) for trips from Seattle to Portland. Fully half the year! This ends on the May 23rd, but is something to keep in mind for your spring travel next year.

But my point extends to any number of people, discounts or no. It all comes down to how much your time, the environment, &c., are worth to you. Some are better off driving and some not, but in order to know who is which, it's necessary to look at the numbers, to help overcome our natural biases.

I've extended the calculator to take these options into account here. Simply adjust the size of your party, the cost of tickets, or the MPG of your car, to get personalized information of what the costs are.

bellevue said...

I wish they would offer a multi person ticket rate, I like taking public transit but I'm never alone so the cost just does not work out.

See the above points about discounts and such.
Again, I'm not saying rail makes sense for everyone everywhere. I do think that people (even transit-savvy people) underestimate their options when it comes to Amtrak, though.

So even if you're skeptical, please do check out the updated calculator and fill in your info, to get a real sense of the costs and how it compares to driving.

Amtrak Cascades: A Better Value Than You Might Think

Your local ex-motorist (Ben W.) finally had his first rail trip last weekend, down to Portland and back, and I've some thoughts on the process, which I'll be sharing over my next few posts.

The first question, for the many who have never taken regional rail or thought much about it, is why take rail? What does Amtrak have to offer, compared to the other options: the road-trip or the short distance flight?

I'll skip over flights here because they're easy to dismiss, particularly if you're paying for them. They're almost 3x the cost ($159 vs. $56), and while they're faster in flight, when you count travel to and from the airport and security clearance time, the advantage wears down.

Cars on the other hand, you may see as your old, trusted companion for these trips, when perhaps they shouldn't be. It may seem obvious to you that the $60 round trip cost of a train ticket is more expensive than driving yourself, but it's as often false as true. One of our natural human biases is that we often ignore costs which accrue over time, if we're not confronted with them directly. For example, as I mentioned in an earlier post, depreciation costs thousands a year, but you think more about this cost if you're confronted with it each year than if you buy the car outright. This is despite the fact that the salable price for your car continually declines, so the economic cost is the same. Likewise, a roadtrip may feel like a liberating, low-cost experience, while the cost of the Amtrak ticket may seem high, when in fact the out-of-pocket costs are the same (for a single traveller, with the fuel efficiency below). You might think differently because paying the cost of fuel isn't a precondition to starting your voyage, the costs come up after you've committed to the trip, and are thus easier to dismiss.

I put together this calculator to quantify this point. Note that you can edit the calculator values to put in your own car's fuel efficiency, for example.

Now, this shows Amtrak and driving costs (for the single traveler) are essentially equal, on average, but there are qualifiers on both sides of this comparison. First of all, fuel costs are by no means the full cost of the car trip. Other costs include depreciation from the mileage you're putting on your car, the potential cost of an accident, and the cost of your time in the car. Just like busing it to work, in the train you can work, read, or watch a film, while you can't do the same in a car, and this has real value, as we'll see.

Finally, the train is much more fuel-efficient than your car. While it's difficult to say exactly how much more, wikipedia puts the figure somewhere between 1.25x and a whopping 20x the efficiency in the train. Note too, that the unimpressive lower figure is dubious, and more likely to be in-line with other rails systems, at 6x or better. Naturally, a train which uses less fuel also emits less pollution, to a similar extent. Adding to this effect is that rail, as point to point transport, encourages walkable, dense cities, rather than the highway system's sprawl, so your use has long-term effects even beyond the benefits of the ride.

On the other hand, to be fair, cars do offer you greater flexibility, in timing, destination and route, and, importantly, the fuel and depreciation costs are fixed, while the rail costs are per-person. So you can pile 5 people into a car and travel at a fraction of the cost of the multiple rail tickets you'd need to buy. So there are legitimate reasons that it may be reasonable or necessary to take a car.

But even these points may not be as clear as they seem. While 5 people splitting the costs may be a clear win, 2 people is much more common scenario, and isn't necessarily clear-cut. Even though the rail costs are now twice as much, this extra $60 over the cost of fuel has to then be weighed against the value of your free time. That $60 works out to just $5/hr of time ($60/(2 people * 6hrs round trip)), and as I mentioned, rail time is computer/book/movie time, while car time is often just that. Now, I'm not saying one is always and everywhere a clear win over the other, but along with the environmental and city benefits, one might think that paying $5/hr to be free to work or to write may be well worth it. Put another way, even at minimum wage, it takes fewer hours of work to earn those costs than the time over which you enjoy the benefits. At a standard wage (WA median household income / (52 wks * 40hrs) = roughly $30/hr), you're each working for an hour to liberate yourself for 6.

So there you have it, for 1 person it's a clear win, and for 2 or more, or for last-minute, higher-cost purchases, you should weigh the time and environment you save against the costs you pay. The point here is not to say that we should never need or use a car, but to give these things their appropriate measure, and have them coexist. So for your next trip to Portland or Vancouver, consider leaving the car at home and checking out Amtrak.

Update: I've got a follow-up post on Families and Discounts, in response to some questions in the comments.

Streetcars are a great idea

The P-I has summary of the city's streetcar plans. The lines proposed (quoted from the article):

• A 3.5-mile line to the University District from Westlake Center, extending the South Lake Union line northeast via Eastlake Avenue East, the University Bridge, Northeast Campus Parkway and up University Way to Northeast 50th Street. Estimated cost: $179 million in 2010 dollars, or $50 million-plus per mile.
  
  The city estimates it could carry up to 3.1 million riders per year. Major costs include reinforcing the University Bridge and reinforcing or replacing a span on Fairview Avenue that crosses a corner of Lake Union.
  
  The 1.3-mile South Lake Union line, opened last year, cost $40 million per mile of track and is projected to carry about 330,000 annually. Since Dec. 12, its first day open, 200,000 have ridden the line.
  
• A four-mile line through downtown on First Avenue, connecting the King Street Station area and extending north to Seattle Center. Estimated cost: $180 million, roughly $45 million per mile. Ridership is estimated at up to 4.9 million annually.
• A 4.4-mile line from Westlake Center to Fremont and Ballard, extending along the west side of Lake Union, across the Fremont Bridge and up Leary Way Northwest to 22nd Avenue Northwest and Northwest Market Street. Estimated cost: $130 million, roughly $29 million per mile, with up to 2.7 million riders per year.
  
• A 2.8-mile line from Pioneer Square to First Hill and Capitol Hill, extending up South Jackson Street from Fifth Avenue east to Boren Avenue and Broadway, as far north as East Aloha Street. Estimated cost: $110 million, or about $39 million per mile. This line was part of a transportation ballot measure rejected by voters last fall but could be included in another Sound Transit expansion proposal if one is put to a vote.

The biggest challenge is obviously funding, and as the article mentions public-private partnerships would likely be needed. Some on the City Council are against spending on the Streetcar without proof of results. This is ridiculous to me, I think we can already call the SLU street car a massive successful from a least development standpoint. Millions of square feet of office space are being build around the SLU streetcar, the Amazon buildings by themselves are some 2 million square feet, with 1918 Eighth Ave, 818 Stewart the West 8th building and the office portion of the Enzo nearly another two million combined. The other Vulcan SLU properties combine to reach almost another million square feet. All of these are within just two blocks of the streetcar. Each million square feet of office space generally counts for about 4,000 office workers, so those offices could be 20,000 desks and jobs. That's not even including the massive residential developments happening.

Obviously, all of that cannot be attributed to the streetcar, but some of it can be. I am sure the city would not have agreed to the taller buildings for Amazon had it not been for the streetcar. The heights along the other routes aren't high enough to allow for the kind of density in the Denny Triangle and SLU, but some major developments are going on in the Westlake area that the Fremont proposal would serve.

So I'm definitely for extending the SLU line to the UW, that seems like a no-brainer. The others also seem like a good idea, though I wish the First Avenue line would be a proper subway, and would go up to at least Uptown around the Seattle Center. A 1st Ave streetcar might ruin the chance of that ever happening, and might especially keep a 1st Ave subway from getting federal funding.

Update I originally wrote the 1st Ave Streetcar would cost $180 per mile, it would instead cost $180 for four miles. I have removed the offending text, thanks Brad for pointing it out.

Books on the Bus

The Seattle Library Blog has a list of books that were spotted on buses last week. I noticed most of the books were fiction, which I've found myself reading more and more often too. Back when I lived in SF and had a long train ride to San Jose, I would read only non-fiction books because I could make quite a lot of progress in the hour trip. Now with my 25~40 bus ride, it's hard to really get through a long non-fiction book, and I find myself reading almost entirely novels.

Space may also be a factor, the bus generally has less elbow room than the train had, and novels are smaller usually than non-fiction.

So, do you read on the bus? If so, what do you read? If not, how do you pass the time? I'd be especially interested to know whether there's more non-fiction on Sounder as a test of my theory.

Precursor to Congestion Pricing Started

Anyone been on the "HOT" lanes on 167 yet? A friend snaped these pictures northbound from Auburn Friday.



It'll be interesting to see how they are used, and whether other HOV lanes will become HOT lanes. The first ones to spring to mind are those on 520 and 405.

Steepest Streets in Seattle

Cool little google maps thing, interesting for bicyclists. One of them is right by my house!

Nearby Supermarkets?

I just read this incredibly depressing article in the PI about the neighborhoods in Seattle where carless people cannot find groceries without serious effort. The story chronicles a 55-year-old Delridge resident who needs a bus and some serious walking to get groceries. I've always lived pretty near to at least one supermarket (I have one two blocks away now), but where my mother lives, off Greenlake, the nearest supermarkets are several miles away.

What neighborhoods are lacking nearby supermarkets? Obviously the Meridian/Tangletown neighborhood, and I know most of Downtown is missing supermarkets, though one store is coming to the Financial District and a Trader Joe's supposedly is coming to a Belltown/Denny Triangle development in a few years, though I can't comfirm this. I also can imagine that most far-off neighborhoods in the far north and south are missing supermarkets. I'd love to live in a city where no matter where you lived, it'd be easy to walk to get necessities. Can you walk to a grocery store from your house?