This Article from Philladelphia talks about how streetcars are coming back to cities across the country including Seattle:

“Trolleys are taking back the streets,” says Harry Donahue, a founding member of the Friends of Philadelphia Trolleys.
Once-endangered, trolleys are experiencing a resurgence across North America.

“There was definitely a perception in the ’40s that anything dated before 1940 was old and streetcars fell in that category,” Dean said.

By the 1970s, only seven cities in the nation – including Philadelphia – were running trolleys, according to the Light Rail Now Web site.

There’s more to than that, but I won’t bore you with conspiracy theories. Unless you want me to.

There’s room for streetcars in transportation systems. They serve a similar function to a bus, but they create a more permanent presense, and are more comfortable to ride. People see them as more reliable, and that sense is a huge reason why places like South Lake Union and Portland’s Pearl District look to them during redevelopment.

On the City’s website there’s a report that was commissioned to study possible streetcar routes in Seattle. We are definitely getting on in South Lake Union that may eventually stretch all the way to the U-District. We’re also likely getting one from Chinatown, through Little Saigon up to First Hill and eventually to Aloha and Broadway. The report discusses other possible routes, including extending the Waterfront line to the Interlake area and one down through the Central District. It’s a good read, and discusses a lot of the benefits of streetcars and when building them is appropriate. Some of the advantages of Streetcars over buses:

• Streetcars attract permanent investment because they are not easily re-routed.
• Streetcars operate better in pedestrian environments because they are more easily accessed, especially by the disabled.
• Streetcars attract more tourists and occasional riders than buses.

The report goes on to mention what seems to make a successful streetcar and what doesn’t:

• They travel through high density corridors with a
  rich mixture of land uses.
• Walking to, from and between streetcar stops is
  convenient and comfortable.
• The mixture of land uses along the corridor
  encourages many short, convenience trips.
• Street grades are 6% or less.
• Travel lanes are 11 feet wide and intersection
  geometry is simple.
• Overhead clearances are at least 14 feet.

We’ll see more streetcars in the next 20 years as the city completes it’s density drive.

Seattle isn’t the only city struggling with growth and transportation neglect. Carlotte NC, is a rapidly-growing city, 3rd in the nation in finance after New York and Chicago and they are having growing pains similar to Seattle. And some want light rail (called CATS), and others who really don’t. They have their own half-cent tax (hey, that sounds familiar!), and their own transit vote this fall. That last piece talks about other issues involved in CATS and I won’t bore you with the details but it’s nice to see that we aren’t the only ones participating in this sort of struggle. Well, nice and not-so-nice, since we are competing with them for federal transit dollars.

Will at Horse’s Ass puts the Stranger’s Josh Feit in his place like this:

No matter how much Josh Feit protests, young families are not going to buy “in-fill density” in Seattle. Maybe some will, but they are the exception that proves the rule. You can’t force young families into condos. Not when they can buy a house in Algona for the same price.

You can, however, give people options. Let’s build transit- lots more- in the city and elsewhere. Let’s expand HOV lanes. Let’s spend a little less time telling people what they should want and more time giving them options.

I think they might by townhomes or San Francisco-style non detached houses, but we’ll see.

Meanwhile, James Vesely the Times’ editorial page editor (say that three times fast) wrote this about the “Roads and transit package. It’s a pretty long read (about 1500 words) but it has a few good points in it, like this “The asking price in November is currently set at $18.9 billion, with $14.6 billion of that from renewal of existing taxes now being collected.” If that’s true, and it really is just an exstension of existing taxes then this would be the first time I’ve heard this from our local media.

The piece also has some weird parts:

In a region looking for answers, we are getting more questions. Each piece of the $18 billion-plus bill seems to be necessary for the rest to fit. Those in favor of the plan point to a 30-year delay in building almost anything that carries wheels, the declining road stock and lack of rolling stock, and the growth of a region spilling over in good jobs and brimming with promise.

Huh?

A private poll conducted by Moore Information and EMC Research concludes:

“… A strong majority (61 percent) support the current Roads and Transit package … which includes the cost of $16.5 billion [now $18.9 billion] but not household costs.

“Support drops (to 49 percent) after voters hear the typical household costs early in the survey. Support returns to a strong majority (63 percent) after voters hear a description of the major components of the package.”

I wish I had that study. I wonder where I can get it. I suggest reading the whole thing.

I thought it was a joke, but it totally wasn’t.

In this CNN article about the U.S. Census Bureau’s “American Community Survey” it says that 17% of Seattlites commuted to work on the bus in 2005. That’s about half as high a percentage of commuters on transit as San Francisco or Boston, and less than a third as much as New York where 54.6% of workers ride transit.

Probably more commuters who don’t work ride the bus. Those would be students, the unemployed and senior citizens, but let’s hope we can get the number up when LRT is built, because we are barely higher than Boston’s walk to work percentage (13%).

Update: NL asked, so I decided to go deeper in to the numbers, but lots of the links keep breaking. Sorry if they do for you.

This is about transportation for workers just in the city. It only is for workers, so it doesn’t count students. The data was collected by mailed survey (I filled one out down in San Francisco), and they have some wildly detailed information about sample size, response rate, etc.

I’m mildly surprised that its only 17% for the city, seems low. But the big news is actually this statistic: 7.6% of people in the urban area commute by transit! Look at the map to see the area. 3% statistic is completely wrong. Even including Monroe, Issaquah, Federal Way, Spanaway and the far outlying suburbs and we still get better than 2.5 times that misquoted statistic.

Here’s a breakdown of the data for the sub-regions with in the area. This includes rural areas!

I delved deeper into into this statistic.

During peak rush hour, 6-9 am, fully twenty percent (20.2%) of Seattle commuted by transit in 2005, and nine percent of the region.

Anti-transit folks will not stop using the 3% statistic, but we know for commuters, especially during peak rush hour, it’s not the right number. In 2005, their number was already way off, and just wait until central link is finished, and let’s revisit these statistics. I bet it has already crossed 25% for the city by now, and 12% for the region by 2008.

I was actually waiting to post on this because I wanted to get more information about wi-fi on ferries, but Seattlest beat me to it, with an awesome photo to boot! The gist is that it’s harder to get wi-fi on the 55-minute run from Bremerton to the city because of the narronw “Rich Passage” between Bainbridge Island and the mainland. Anyway, Seattlest has a nice summary.

At Slog, there is an awesome put down on Kemper Freeman’s Truth About Traffic via links to sources that disprove Freeman’s factual errors. It has a wealth of great links, and if your a transit fan, it’s definitely worth a read.

Oh, and she has the video I mentioned in my previous KF post.

I want to add my two cents to this. Even the linked document’s stats ECB put in response to the 3% trip statistic are misleading, because they are measured in Vehicle Miles Travelled, which is not the same as trips. Someone driving from Spanaway to Redmond counts the same as a fifteen people riding the bus from Ballard downtown or five people riding from the city to Redmond. Plus, all other commute options (biking, walking, skateboarding, etc.) are left out.

Finally, if all you care about is congestion (as Kemper Freeman alleges to), trips taken at midnight don’t effect congestion, so why consider the 3% statistic when talking about congestion? We care about number of commute trips during rush hour, that’s what congestion is. Not the number of miles travelled by people. I can drive from LA to Seattle and that won’t cause congestion, but driving across 520 during the middle of rush hour will.