Former Washington State Transportation Commission chairman Aubrey Davis has an op-ed explaining why Light Rail is the best solution for transportation on the Eastside. Aubrey lives on Mercer Island, which will be losing their special carpool entrance to I-90, so that means he must be really for light rail to support it this way.

The debate over whether we should invest in more highways, buses or trains has gone on long enough and it’s time that we stop talking and start building.

This means we must invest in the transportation mode that makes sense for each corridor and does the best job of moving the most people. In the case of connecting the Eastside and Seattle, the right transportation choice is building light rail across Interstate 90.

He does have something that I disagree with:

The Eastside is growing at an unimaginable rate. New office buildings, condominiums and retail centers are increasing the urban density in downtown Bellevue. In the very near future, the Eastside will be equal to Seattle in the number of jobs and residences.

Residences might be true, but Seattle is building more office space right now than Bellevue has in total. According to the Seattle PI Bellevue currently has 8 million square feet of office space, about 25% of Downtown Seattle’s 40 million, and will have 13.1 million sq ft by 2020. Some 2 million sq ft will open this year and another 2 million next year, with another 13 million sq ft in design review or development right now between the Financial District, Uptown (the Bill and Melinda Gate’s foundation buildings are 1.9 million sq ft), South Lake Union (Amazon’s campus alone is nearly 3 million sq ft), the Denny Triangle and the Selig Properties on Western.

Why is this important? Because the growth of Downtown Seattle means that connecting the Eastside to Seattle will be even more important in the future than it is today. As more people commute from Seattle to the Eastside and vice-versa, connecting the two jobs and residential centers will be critically important, and as Aubrey says, “Only light rail has the capacity and reliability to serve the cross-lake connection at the level that we are going to need”.

• Community Transit is offering DVDs on how to ride transit. They have produced the DVD in English, Spanish, Korean and Russian, and I can’t wait to get my hands on one.
• The I-405 destruction of the Wilburton Tunnel took less time than expected, so thankfully I-405 will not need a third weekend of closures. The Wilburton Tunnel went under where the Eastside BNSF corridor went and was destroyed so I-405 can be widened.
• Tacoma will start charging for on-street parking downtown. The parking meeters will be same sort as are used throughout Seattle.
• The familar story, this time with a nice graph: Less driving means less money for roads, which puts roads building agencies in a bind. The 34 district Democrats (West Seattle) overwhelmingly support Prop. 1 aka Sound Transit 2.

… or why I can’t wait for Central Link to open:

As I mentioned recently, we sought to endorse candidates for Tuesday’s primary that had taken a strong stand for transportation issues. We even asked for recommendations.

In a sad statement about our State, we didn’t find much in the way of candidates to endorse. We refuse to endorse candidates about whom we can’t say anything positive, except that they’re not as bad as their opponent. So instead, we’re going to release anti-endorsements, candidates you should most definitely not vote for because of their retrograde position on transit.

As an officially non-partisan blog, we’ve stripped away our feelings about other issues to focus on their position on transportation and land use. We also aren’t bothering to evaluate races, like Attorney General, that don’t really matter for transit. So bear that in mind. Hope you didn’t mail your ballot in already!

Governor: We’ve broken down before why Dino Rossi’s transportation plan is probably unconstitutional, hostile to transit, and almost certainly dead on arrival in Olympia. Nevertheless, his plan at least shows that his heart is in the wrong place. Mr. Rossi gains our anti-endorsement.

41st District Senate (Mercer Island, Newcastle, Bellevue , Renton): Bob Baker’s website has a stream of Kemper Freeman talking points and misleading factoids.

We simply need to apply the free-market principles of choice and find ways to accommodate more lanes of road. Period.

Yes Bob! Roads are a free market paradise, not subsidized like those rotten transit riders! Because buses stuck in traffic and cars stuck in traffic make for an infinite universe of “choices!”

Read it: it’s so bad it’s good. Needless to say, Mr. Baker earns our most emphatic anti-endorsement.

41st District House (Mercer Island):  What is it with Mercer Island?  The threat to their precious express lanes (which will be fully replaced by one HOV lane in each direction before the rail goes in)?

Rep. Judy Clibborn has fought the installation of rail on I-90, which would effectively kill light rail to the Eastside.  You would think a city that would be among the first to get rail service wouldn’t have so many of these kinds of characters.  Anyway, Clibborn gets our anti-endorsement.

10th District Senate (Camano Island): I don’t know if we have any readers out there, but Mary Margaret Haugen was the driving force behind governance reform this year. She gets bonus points for claiming that her constituents “don’t even know who their Sound Transit representative is,” which makes sense because her constituents lie outside the Sound Transit district and therefore don’t have a representative.

Sample Afghan Ballot from Wikimedia Commons. Good candidates all, but I wonder what their positions are on Sound Transit 2?

View here.

Today both the Seattle Times and P-I have pieces up about the end (at least for now) of Metro shuttle service to Seahawks games. First, I want to say this is a ridiculous issue. This is the federal government cutting local transit service off at the knees with the pretend “let’s see what happens if we privatize something” attitude that simply ignores everything we’ve learned from the last century of transportation. It’s like selling the only bridge to an island to a private company, then tolling it to “see if it gets any revenue”. It’s a handout to a private company at the expense of the users.

That said, both articles completely ignore the existence of Sounder service to regular season games. An earlier P-I article only mentions Sounder to say that it won’t serve the upcoming pre-season game - that’s great, Sounder has never served pre-season games. The implication that this is a change from the status quo is ridiculous.

Both articles imply that there’s no transit service to Seahawks games anymore, period. Bending over backwards to use the term “transit shuttle service” or “bus trip” seems to me like a pretty dishonest way of avoiding mentioning Sounder - when Sounder will serve every regular season Sunday home game, just as it has for years. Perhaps they don’t mention it because Sounder costs far less than the new Starline service? With free parking at Everett, Tacoma, and many points in between? We can’t have mass transit undercutting private businesses, now, can we?

Here’s contact info for the authors. Perhaps we could mention to them (politely, please) that it’s a little odd that Sounder game service goes almost entirely unmentioned?

Susan Gilmore: 206-464-2054 or sgilmore@seattletimes.com

Larry Lange can be reached at 206-448-8313 or larrylange@seattlepi.com.

Update, see below.

The Bush Administration recently changed federal rules around transit agencies providing game-day service to stadiums. Under the new rules, if a private company is interested in operating the routes, the transit agencies need to step aside and let the private company operate the route. The rule itself is a little fishy, if the private company wants to operate the route in addition to the transit agency, what is the problem with that? If the whole idea is to bring market forces to the transportation market, isn’t competition the most fundamental market force?

If that wasn’t bad enough, the new rule has effectively eliminated all shuttle service to Seahawks games. Starline Luxury Coaches of Seattle wanted to operate the route, but the fare would have been higher, and Starline would not have picked up passengers from park-and-ride lots. So the Seahawks wouldn’t agree to the contract, but since Starline is still interested, Metro can’t operate the service. Even if the Seahawks had agreed, the fare would have been $20 instead of just $6 for Metro. As Ben notes above, Sounder will still operate game-day service for regular season games since no one is capable of competing on that route.

So thanks to the Bush Administration, there will be no buses to Seahawks games. George Bush: eliminating opportunities since 2001!

Update:

An agreement has been reached with a private vendor for Seahawks service. The new service will cost $12.50 each direction, needs to be ordered 48 hours in advance and may or may not go to park-and-rides. Nice one, Bush!

Commenter Brian Ferris sent us a link to his new One Bus Away site a few weeks ago. Why the delay in posting about it? Well, we wanted to give One Bus Away a real world testing period on our computers and our phones. You see, One Bus Away is a modern version of mybus.org on steriods. That is, you enter in a stop you want to go to, One Bus Away tells you what buses are upcoming at a stop.

An improvement over mybus.org, One Bus Away tracks all stops rather than the select few that mybus.org. More over, it uses the official Metro stop id numbers, so you can look at the posted schedule at every bus stop and instantly know what to enter in — unlike mybus.org’s more tedious search.

The site has three services:

1. A phone number you can call, where you can enter in a stop id and an automated voice will read upcoming departures.

2. A Google Maps mash-up to find stops around an address or on a particular route. When you select a stop, you go to another page that tracks buses going there. You can bookmark a tracking page and check it when you want to grab a bus, for example.

3. An iPhone web app and a text-only mobile site that allow you to use the site on the go. See the screenshot for the iPhone site.

One Bus Away is the new king of bus arrivial prediction sites, and fills in a big gap for a strong iPhone contender. We’ve been using it for weeks, and we recommend you do the same.

This New York Times article about the streetcar’s rebirth is pretty informative. It mentions a dozen cities have streetcar lines, but 40 have plans to build them! And I didn’t know that Portland was the first city to build a modern streetcar line. I also noticed that everyone who’s planning streetcar’s seems to be using the same Ikedon/Skoda cars that we’re using here.

Andrew Austin reports that Pierce Transit is also seeking to raise fares in January.  Fares would go up by quarter for local service (unchanged since 2006) and 50 cents for the Olympia Express (unchanged since 1999).

Since Pierce Transit runs on Compressed Natural Gas, I would view this more as general inflationary pressure, rather than the sales tax/gas price implosion facing Metro.

Sometimes the title doesn’t really go with the subtitle, and this one is one of the all-time greats. From a USDOT press release:

American Driving Reaches Eighth Month of Steady Decline
Trend Signals Urgent Need for New Highway Financing, Officials Say

I know, of course, that a reduction in driving reduces the gas tax receipts that fund roads, but if highway use was skyrocketing, I have no doubt that these same “officials” would be pointing to the need for more road construction. We’re often accused of being rail dead-enders (and I suppose we are), but when more driving is an argument for roads, and less driving is an argument for more roads, I have trouble imagining a scenario where you don’t call for more roads.

Snark aside, we have finite resources to subsidize the various transportation modes. We can spend it on a mode that’s increasingly expensive for working people to use, or we can fund one that’s better for poor people, the environment, and public health. As a bonus for the latter, we send less money to Venezuela, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Why this is a difficult decision (for anyone who isn’t a major stockholder in an oil company) simply escapes me.

Photo from www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk

Anyone else notice the ‘no on mass transit’ campaign is running against last year’s ballot measure? The P-I article from yesterday links to the ‘no’ campaign’s website which is exactly the same as the website from last year. And the P-I puts up with this for what reason? If the ‘yes’ campaign’s website was still promising roads, I doubt they would have tolerated it, so why is the P-I letting the ‘no’ campaign pretend they still have the Sierra Club’s support?

It’s offensive, and dishonest. The fact is, Sound Transit listened to the voters. Virtually all of the polls after the election showed that the roads and the cost were the two main factors for ‘no’ votes. But this time around, the package costs half as much as the package from last year, and the roads are completely absent. It’s not the same package by any means whatsoever. The agency and the board listened to the voters’ concerns and drafted a new proposal that doesn’t include roads and isn’t anywhere near as expensive. So why is the ‘no’ campaign running against the proposal from last year?

The only reason I can gather guess is that the ‘no’ campaign has barely a leg to stand on. The environmentalists are with the campaign this time around, despite the ‘no’ campaigns lies and the proposal is not nearly as expensive, despite the ‘no’ campaigns lies. We need to keep the ‘no’ campaign from getting away with this misinformation. Their only chance to win is to pretend that 2008 is still 2007, but with the public’s changing views on climate change, gas prices and the economy, we all know it’s different. Let’s not let them get away with it.

Here are some photos I took a few hours ago of ST 105 testing between the pocket track near Henderson Street Station and the Duwamish River.

Update: Link running at 45mph as of 6pm

As always, a big thank you to Sound Transit for the invitation out to photograph the movement!

For the rest of the images, head over to my Flickr account for more light-rail testing.

It’s just that buses are expensive. The P-I has an article about Prop. 1 that discusses the claim that there isn’t enough new bus service in the package. The West Seattle Times argees, though they don’t support rail to Lynnwood over West Seattle, an argument there’s really no way to get around without telling them to look up what “subarea equity” means.

Ron Sims is being slightly disingenuous in his saying that skyrocketing ridership means we need more service hours on buses. Absolutely we do need more service, but the reason Sims wants Sound Transit to pay for more of what would essentially be local buses is that Metro has already reached the state legislature-defined cap of .9% sales tax. Metro cannot possibly raise any more money without the state legislature increasing the cap and another Metro ballot measure passing. Pierce Transit and Community Transit are in a similar situation. I would support both of these, though I doubt the legislature will move on the former.

As a regional agency, Sound Transit should not be in the business of paying for local buses, and with the region’s long term interests in mind, we should not be providing buses at the expense of light rail. My reasoning is simple - apologies in advance for all the numbers - the proposal on the ballot would bump Sound Transit’s portion of the sales tax to .9%, which for the North King subarea, 100% would be spent on light rail construction and bond servicing until 2009, when about .1% will go toward operating Central Link. In Seattle, Metro moves about 135,000 people a day for .9% in Seattle, Sound Transit will move about 45,000 for .1%, the operations portion of the link budget. After at most 30 years, Central Link’s bonds will be paid off, at which time Central Link will cost just .1% of sales tax to move more than 45,000 people per day. Similar results will be seen for North Link, East Link and South Link. All of light rail in Prop. 1 will be operated for just .2% sales tax, and by 2036 when the bonds are paid off, the other .7% could be reinvested into building more light rail.

For an example of how rail can more more people more cheaply, we need only look to Washington DC. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the operator of DC Metro, spends almost exactly the same amount of money as King Country Metro does, $560 million to $580 million. Except for that $560 million DC metro moves almost a million people a day on rail (three times what KC metro moves per day with its buses) and the WMATA agency provides buses that carry another 120,000! It’s only possible because of the investment put in place years ago, and residents there can reap the benefit of a reliable, traffic-separated transit system that’s relatively cheap.

For increased bus service, 100% of the money would go toward operations. Even assuming operation costs will not rise, that tax capacity could never be spent on service increases in the future beyond simply keeping up with the rise in population. But that rise in population seems to be ever more reliant on transit as a means of getting around, as noted 6.7% increase in bus ridership in 2008. Making matters even worse, operations costs are rising far faster than sales tax receipts because of fuel costs, which is why Transit Nowwill end up providing so little.

I understand that we have real transportation challenges facing us, but in the end, buses are just much more expensive to provide in the long run the rail is. We need the willpower and patience to not just go after the quick solution now, but provide a solution that can grow and be expanded in the future. If Metro needs more money for buses, Ron Sims should go to the legistlature and ask for taxing authority. Or maybe he should just cancel his foot-ferry idea and put the money to buses. That $24 million a year could be a lot of service hours.
Update
Mutlimodal Man points out my numbers on the DC metro comparison are a bit off, but the main point still stands.

In this Crosscut piece, Clark Fredricksen talks about the Mass Transit Now campaign, the campaign fighting for the Sound Transit expansion measure that will be on the ballot this November. It’s good reporting from Mr. Fredricksen, he states the campaign’s position, who the major opponents are, where the story is the same as last year and more importantly, where it’s different. If you haven’t been following the politics of the transit expansion measure and would like to, that article will get you off the ground pretty quickly.

I have two comments on the piece. Fredricksen asks if Facebook can propel the campaign to victory. Well, I guess that’s up to all of us, so add yourself to the “Mass Transit Now” group in Facebook if you have an account! Fredricksen also says “it’s not clear yet whether King County Executive Ron Sims, who opposes ST2, will be quiet or active in his criticisms.” I’ve heard Ron Sims say he won’t campaign against the proposal on what used to be the Robert Mak show, and is now the Dennis Bounds show. I guess I really was the only person watching that show.

Anyway, join the Facebook group and let’s get moving toward transit expansion!