On Harrison, en route to the barn plus my cool shadow!
Harrison and Terry where the last tracks are getting finished
Harrison and Terry view #2
On Westlake between SBRI and Group Health
The Maintenance barn, almost complete
Fairview and Harrison approaching the barn
This may be more of an important issue to me than others here cause I work in South Lake Union, however, the Streetcar is on track to be finished and operating by December. As I was on my bus the other morning my driver was telling me that they were asking for Metro drivers that wanted to drive the streetcar. I guess this is where the seniority rules. My driver has the seniority he says, but he’s holding out for Link. He also said the training for the light rail vehicles is over a week long, where as the training for Streetcars isn’t. I found that interesting. Westlake is literally transforming as we speak, as I write this in fact, they are working to install track beds on certain sections of the line. Westlake Avenue, of which I walk everyday, has been switched to a two way road now, two lanes each direction. This is has been short of a nightmare. I don’t think people quite understand the meaning of the double yellow line? I have seen cars heading southbound slamming on their brakes to avoid accidents, cause people aren’t looking both ways yet. Pedestrians have been dodging cars, meanwhile bikers are huge targets. I have seen near hits. My advice: avoid this area for a few days. I must say though pedestrians on foot have significantly increased and it is completely noticeable. This is different than when I started working in SLU, which was for the most part run down. Group Health is starting to take space in their new building, I imagine others will be on the way shortly. Now it is becoming a transit mecca which if you have ever had to wait for a 17, you are probably as giddy as I am for the streetcar. We were told via email that we could expect testing mid-October-November, and it is on time. I assume this will be after the maintenance barn is completed, which it looks like it is getting there. The streetcar will gain ridership and make the neighborhood much more transit friendly.
The local establishment reflexively scorns Eyman. It, too, reflexively endorses proposals opposed by Eyman. Keep Washington Rolling, the front organization backing the Proposition One ballot measure, has drawn big dollars from the contractors, subcontractors and others who eat at Sound Transit’s trough. But it also has gotten $200,000 from Microsoft, $75,000 from the Seattle Mariners, and $50,000 each from PEMCO Insurance Co. and the Washington Association of Realtors, among other donors.
I had to read that five times to make sure I was reading it correctly. Did he just say that Microsoft, Seattle Mariners, Pemco insurance and the Washington Association of Realtors, among others, reflexively donated more than $375,000 to Keep Washington Moving because Tim Eyman opposes it?
Really?
That man has become senile. Maybe they donated money because they think it’s a good ballot measure and that it’s passing will mean they will get more than $375,000 worth of benefit out of it. And that just happens to oppose Eyman’s any-progress-is-bad, let’s live like cavemen reality. Eyman just doesn’t want to pay for anything. And we all know a society gets no better than what it’s willing to pay for.
If you can’t see that, Van Dyk, it’s time to get out of the business of writing op-ed pieces.
I respect the Sierra Club guys. I don’t disagree with them on most of the facts, it’s their political judgment I question. Most of the people I talked to are convinced that if the Roads and Transit package fails, our elected officials will learn their lesson and give us a transit-only package in ‘08.
In an election year.
With Gov. Gregoire on the ballot.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
I find it much more likely that if this package fails, Gov. Gregoire will take care of business. Her business. And that’s SR-520, not Sound Transit. Olympia politicians don’t care about rail, only roads. They’re waiting for an excuse to enact “governance reform,” which will “reform” Sound Transit, alright.
Right out of existence, come next year, if this package goes down
Emphasis theirs.
Original post: I was writing a post about this article when I got a call from my friend at the Sierra club. Basically, she made the same point TroyJMorris made in his comment.
The Sierra Club really doesn’t want it’s name associated with the No on Prop1 campaign, because they agree on essentially nothing other than that neither supports this ballot. And they don’t support it for different reasons, No on Prop1 is a Tim Eyman-style anti-tax agency, especially anti-light rail, while the Sierra Club is actually very pro-light rail and anti-roads.
So the Sierra Club wants to split the ballot up into two proposals, one roads, one transit, so they can endorse the one they actually support, and then there’s a chance that the rail ballot could pass while the roads wouldn’t.
Even if the ballot does get split, I very much doubt that will happen. The roads ballot is almost a sure thing, and splitting them up only weakens rail’s chance.
These guys love the line “largest local project in American history” but, it’s pretty easy to see that it isn’t. Someone sent me this link showing what the typical family already pays in transportation taxes.
A Seattle Times review of major transportation taxes estimates that agencies collected an average of $843 per adult in urban areas of King County, including Seattle, last year. The figure for Seattle residents is $881. Roughly half the money went to transit, and half to roads.
Look at the graphic, of the $843 per household, $385 was for transit. Adjust that for transit now (increased property taxes), but eliminate the $30 sound transit car-tab fee has been retired, we stay at $385. So we get about 45% of the average county resident’s transportation tax spent on transit. With Roads and Transit, it would add $250 to each family for transit, and $150 for roads. I kow these are a bit “back-of-the-envelope” because I can’t know the exact number, but that still keeps transit under 50% of transportation spending, not the 90% the gas and concrete crowd crows about.
Things are really bad in terms of transportation here. Commutes just keep getting longer an there’s no reason to waste time will they get worse and our local economy is slowed because of it. That’s what Kemper Freeman doesn’t understand: who’s going to pay for his over-priced downtown Bellevue condos if no one can get anywhere?
Thirty-five years worth of change in the skyline for Tokyo’s Shinjuku district (not really a neighborhood, what other word is there) boiled down into ten seconds:
Sorry, I as I site in my windowless office for as yet another beautiful summer day goes by, I read this.
King 5′s Robert Mak, whose show “Upfront with Robert Mak” is one of the most (unfairly) unintentionally hilarious programs on television because of Mak’s resemblence to Kermit the Frog, discussed the issue and sums up the anti-transit side of the story though in a little bit simplistic way.
“When you find out how little it does, and how much it costs, it’s the largest public works project ever proposed in America,” said Kemper. (STB – What? It’s the largest project works project because of how little it does?)
Some opponents are now running radio ads claiming the extra license tab and sales tax would add up to $157 billion by the time the last bonds are paid off in 50 years.
But transit supporters say the estimates are wrong, because after the year 2027, Sound Transit may choose to reduce taxes if it doesn’t need them.
Anyway now I finally figured out where the $157 billion number comes from, they assume that all taxes that are being collected will be collected for the 60 years that started in 1996 and will end in 2057 without building any more than is in the plan today. If prop 1 passes, the taxes will start to decrease after 2027 – when final construction finishes – unless new construction is approved by another vote.
The other thing, is the $157 billion number is mentioned in year-of-expenditure dollar amounts, which are inflation-adjusted. That means that the 2057 dollar amount is listed along side the 2007 dollar amount even though nothing in 2057 will cost the same as it does in 2007. Confusing right?
We’ve gone over and over again why using inflation-adjusted number make no sense (short recap: 1) All inflation numbers are estimates, so we don’t know the actual number anyway, 2) inflation adjusted numbers over huge time spans vastly over emphasizes later expenditures because inflation has increased those numbers, and 3) population growth increases the number of people who are paying the taxes, so per-person numbers are mis-estimated). By including money that is not being taxed (full taxes instead of debt-servicing from 2027 to 2057) 30 years from now, they are adding the largest possibly number because inflation will make costs 50 years from now so much higher than today. They are also dividing by current population numbers, to come up with a $94,000 per household figure.
Liars and crooks with deep pockets trying to confuse voters because of an ideological opposition to mass transit. Wow.
I can’t say who took this photos because I don’t actually know. Whoever took these, could you send me a mail from a real address? I don’t work for Sound Transit, and I promise I only want to talk about transit, nothing more.
Seriously, I read every news article about these issues I can find and I am still confused by what these folks are talking about. But I guess that’s the point.
*Okay sorry low-blow. But people who lie to the community so much deserve some lying back about them.
I need to stop reading crosscut, because everytime I go there I find some article written by one ancient geezer or another arguing, despite all evidence to the contrary, how things should stay exactly the same at whatever cost. In the latest in this series, Emory Bundy, the 90-year-old board member of the anti-rail Coalition for Effective Transportation Alternatives, writes “Why fix dangerous bridges when you can build new pet projects?” (His last piece, “The carbon cost of building and operating light rail”, was so unintentionally hilarious I laughed so loud my roommates thought I was losing my mind).
A … point, but one aimed at the Minneapolis story, was made by Joel Kotkin in an Aug. 28 Wall Street Journal essay: “Government officials in Minneapolis spent mightily on a light-rail system that last year averaged barely 30,000 boardings daily. It did not focus nearly as much on overstressed highway bridges, or the bus systems serving the bulk of its mostly poor and minority transit riders. Most other light-rail systems, built in cities with highly dispersed employment, also have minuscule ridership, but consume a disproportionate share of transit funds that might go to more cost-efficient systems, including bus-based rapid transit.”
Anytime anti-transit folks want to argue against a mass transit project, they always either bring up “person rapid transit” an idea so ridiculous to be laughable or bus rapid transit because they somehow think that’s cheaper. And bus transit money would have to go to improving roads, which is all they care about anyway.
But this 30,000 number is quite salient in this case (even though the number I have seen is 37,000 daily riders, which is different than boardings). Ironically, that is exactly the number of daily drivers the old I-35 bridge that collasped had. How much did the Hiawatha line cost to build? $715 million with significant delays and cost-over runs. Replacing just the 1,900 foot collasped span of the I-35W bridge is expected to cost at least $300~$350 million.
And this is why politicians want rail. It’s way cheaper to build and maintain than roads projects are. Just replacing our current batch of crumbling roads is going to nearly bankrupt our public coffers. Why do we want to have to go through that again in another 30 or 40 years? Roads were only cheap when the feds matched dollar-for-dollar the costs of building them back in the 1950s, which Emory himself points out in the piece.
Anyway, Emory continues with another scarecrow comparison of Forward Thrust, the defeated 1968 light rail proposal that was shot down.
Those who defeated Forward Thrust Rail in 1968 and 1970 similarly spared the region, in my view. It is an urban legend that central Puget Sound traffic woes would have been alleviated if only Forward Thrust Rail had been built. Instead, “our money” — a generous federal grant — went to Atlanta, for MARTA, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority. The message is that Seattle’s loss was Atlanta’s gain. The opposite is the case.
With the aid of that federal money, Atlanta developed rail lines running north, south, east, west, and northeast. Yet today congestion in Atlanta is worse than Seattle’s, and Atlanta’s urban sprawl is worse. MARTA’s ridership is far lower than predicted, and falling. Its operating costs are markedly higher than predicted. Atlanta’s transit market share is inferior to Seattle’s. Its more-costly rail transit absorbs funds that could support more efficient bus transit, or vanpools. Because of misrepresented ridership and operating costs, MARTA’s fares and tax subsidies haven’t generated a robust capital replacement fund, as they were supposed to. So now, with the aging system in its fourth decade, with a new round of major capital investments required, the bank is empty, and red ink is accumulating. Supporters think the best way out is to give MARTA to the State of Georgia, with deeper pockets than Atlanta has, but Georgia is unwilling to take on such an unattractive liability.
Apples and Oranges! (Or Atlantas and Seattles) Atlanta is about 40% as dense as Seattle, has loads of major interstates converging in the city (I-285, I-75, I-85 and I-20, I-575, I-675, I-985), and has no geographical constraints to it’s growth to speak of, being in the center of the Chattahoochee River valley. For every Atlanta, which is nothing like Seattle, there is a San Francisco (a lot more like Seattle) whose BART system is massive success, or a Portland (getting closer!) whose MAX system is one of the most cost effective people movers in the last 25 years.
And, seriously, just how confused is Emory? He talks about the outrageous burden of MARTA for Atlanta when we in this city are looking around at our ridiculously expensive road projects: $4.6 billion for 520, $120 million for South Park Bridge, $800 million for half of the Tacoma Narrows, $4~6 billion for Alaskan Way, $1.3 billion to add just one lane to I-405 when roads projects get diminishing returns anyway. Compared to roads, transit is cheap.
The article highlights just how important transportation choices are to our economy:
It’s one example of the company’s effort to appease employees weary of the Seattle region’s transportation crunch. The stakes are high as Microsoft tries to recruit and retain employees amid intense competition for talent against big rivals such as Google and smaller startup companies.
“They’ve got to figure out how to keep people off those bridges if they want to keep them,” said Seattle commercial real estate veteran Gary Carpenter, executive vice president at Bentall Capital.
It will be interesting to see what sort of effect this has on the 545 service and ridership numbers. Right now 545 gets about 5,300 riders a day, making it one of Sound Transits most popular routes. I ride the 545 almost every day (the others I work from home) and sometimes it can be very very crowded, especially on morning buses that are not-articulated. Most of the riders who get on at the last Seattle stop at Mountlake have to stand, and often bike riders have to wait a bus or two to find rack space to hold their bikes.
I don’t think many Capitol Hill Microsofties will take the company bus if only because it will not come often enough (545 comes every ten minutes), but I am sure this is going to move a lot of Queen Anne/Belltown commuters out of their cars.
It’s hard to find a political leader in love with the nearly $18 billion roads-and-transit tax package on the November ballot.
Among the complaints: The plan spreads projects too thinly, doesn’t fully address some of the region’s most pressing traffic problems and imposes the wrong set of taxes.
Yet most of the leaders want voters in King, Snohomish and Pierce counties to pass the biggest tax package ever placed on the ballot in this state, arguing it does enough good to warrant support.
“I don’t think we’ll get anything better,” House Transportation Committee Chairwoman Judy Clibborn, D-Mercer Island, said. “Everybody wants us to have a plan. This is the plan.”
That’s right. We won’t get much better than this. Most people want either roads or transit, and it’s very difficult to please both sides of this debate. Studies have shown that most new roads projects are far more expensive than light rail (for example, increasing I-5 by one lane each way just within Seattle would cost more than $25 billion, which is enough to build an entire subway network), and even widening 405 will cost nearly $4 billion. Building new highways would be even more expensive, and when looking at the cost of replacing the viaduct (cost between $4 and $6 billion) and the 520 bridge (around $5 billion), $10.8 billion for 50 miles of light rail, four miles of street cars, and improve Sounder access make the project seem cheap by comparison.
The big problem for the pro-environmentalist side is that if the package fails, it’s likely that the state legistlature, who’s 100% pro-highway, will push through a roads package and we won’t get another rail package for years:
Horn, with the Eastside Transportation Association, says roads would emerge as a winner if the measure fails. “If it’s not passed this year, the Legislature will have to step up and address it in some way,” he said.
Legislators aren’t sure what would happen.
It’s possible light rail would reappear on the ballot fairly quickly, but fixing the region’s highways is another matter. Legislative leaders predict few people would want to touch the issue in 2008 because it’s an election year.
That would push any highway proposal off until 2009, and by then the debate over replacing the Highway 520 bridge and the Alaskan Way Viaduct — both in danger of collapse during an earthquake — could suck up all the attention and money for years to come.
If you care about mass transit, which I certainly do, you want to support this bill. It’s likely to show how little you get from billions of dollars in highway spending, and just how much can be done to change people’s minds when looking at rail projects.
On Harrison, en route to the barn plus my cool shadow! 
Harrison and Terry where the last tracks are getting finished
Harrison and Terry view #2
On Westlake between SBRI and Group Health
The Maintenance barn, almost complete
Fairview and Harrison approaching the barn
