April 22, 2008 at 7:01 pm
by Brian Bundridge
After re-reading what I wrote, I must have been on my last legs of sleep. I don’t even remember posting this last night!
Here are 3 pictures from April 21, 2008 test runs of Sound Transit 109 running on the test segment between Royal Brougham and the Operations and Maintenance Facility.
To clarify, from the prior grammar issue, ST 101 has a little over 4000 miles since it first started testing early last year. The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) requires a burn-in session of each vehicle, the first three of which are typically the test beds for adjustments. ST 101 needed 2500 miles, ST102 needed 1500 miles, ST 103 needed 1250 miles. Each vehicle after ST104 needs only 750 miles and can be broken in from any order or fashion (meaning they can be in multiple consist and the miles would still count as a burn-in as) as long as the controls, braking, etc all work as normal.
Hopefully that clears up the initial confusion and I apologize for the terrible and confusing post. Tiredness does that =P
First picture is the exhaust mod on the ST coach – Does anybody know what this is? It was much quieter that is for sure!
ST 109 stopped at Lander Station
ST 109 coming off the elevated
ST 109 crossing Lander Street
April 22, 2008 at 9:25 am
by Martin H. Duke
Matt Yglesias has been on a great pro-transit, pro-density kick recently, and today is no exception. Here, he’s quoting Virginia Postrel:
It’s infuriating how all three presidential candidates prattle on about the need to fight global warming while also complaining about the high price of gasoline. The candidates treat CO2 emissions as a social issue like gay marriage, with no economic ramifications. In the real world, barring a massive buildup of nuclear plants, reducing carbon dioxide emissions means consuming less energy and that means raising prices a lot, either directly with a tax or indirectly with a cap-and-trade permitting system.
She’s right, of course, that there’s more than a bit of cognitive dissonance involved in simultaneously thinking that Global Warming is a Serious Problem and that gas prices are too high. I often worry that it’s because people assume that the goals can be met by just doing a few things at the margins and soaking a couple of big producers, rather than making fundamental changes to their own way of life.
In other posts, Yglesias has pointed out that the action that often has to be taken is fundamentally deregulatory: by reducing parking and zoning restrictions, you get enough dense development to meet the demand. In that spirit, I think stuff like Seattle easing the review process for developers is a good thing.
April 22, 2008 at 12:33 am
by Andrew Smith
Today at 11, there will be a press conference at Union Station.
A coalition of environmental and labor groups, including the Sierra Club, wants to see a Sound Transit plan on the ballot this year — as long as the plan meets certain conditions.
In a press conference slated for Earth Day, April 22, the ad hoc coalition will issue “a strong call to the Sound Transit board saying ‘go to the ballot in 2008,’” said Shefali Ranganathan, director of education and outreach at the Transportation Choices Coalition, one of the members of the broader coalition.
…
In addition to the Sierra Club, the coalition includes the Transportation Choices Coalition, Cascade Bicycle Club, Tahoma Audubon, Roosevelt Neighborhood Association, Futurewise, Amalgamated Transit Union 587, Environment Washington, Bicycle Alliance of Washington, Tacoma Streetcar, Fuse and WashPIRG.
Roosevelt Neighborhood Association? A neighborhood that wants light rail? What is happening to to our city? Sierra Club pleading Sound Transit to go to the ballot?
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April 21, 2008 at 9:20 pm
by Martin H. Duke
Our next transit meet-up will be Friday, May 9 at 7:30pm. We’re doing something different and having it in Pioneer Square.
Collins Pub
526 2nd Ave
Seattle
We’ll be in the back of the pub, as always.
April 21, 2008 at 8:20 pm
by Brian Bundridge
Continuing onward with the ST gripes and such, I thought I’d give the people a comforting update.
Most of the rail is completed for Airport Link except along the roadway and at the final station. This is planned to be completed by this Summer. Wire installation of the entire route will be completed by the Summer of 2008. Beacon Hill Station building will start construction later this Summer with the structure being completed by the end of the year.
Sound Transit has put in an order for 20 additional LRV’s for University Link. This will be the third order and will be delivered in 2013. Sound Transit currently has 21 LRV’s on the property, leaving 14 of the initial order remaining which are all in Everett now for assembly.
Link operators are running 16 hour shifts, starting between 6am and going until at least midnight to get people accustomed to day and night operations. Metro staff will start training in February 2009.
Starting later this week or two, Metro and Sound Transit will begin bus and Light-Rail testing in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel. This will consist of 1 LRV and 6 buses. Next week will be 2 LRV’s and 12 buses. They will simulate a broken down bus, broken down LRV, emergency drills, etc, which will all be repeated in Feb-Mar for Metro operators.
Sound Transit is aiming for a JUNE 2009 opening though it may very well be July 2009. Either way, it will be a Summer launch.
The original concept was always at-grade and not elevated along MLK Way. It was the option that made the most sense and was least impact on the community.
Signaling along MLK Way will be timed with the train and traffic. At any given time, the E-W traffic will be delayed no more than 35 seconds, a typical light on MLK Way. Currently the grade crossing is timed for 23 seconds at Lander and Holgate Street. I timed both of these crossings today. This model is NOT the same as the South Lake Union Streetcar, the Streetcar does NOT have signal priority on any of it’s travel. It waits for it’s own light which is why it suffers being so slow. Central Link will have signal priority throughout the entire line and will travel at 40mph through the entire corridor. From Henderson Street Station, Link will travel at speeds up to 50mph and it’s maximum speed of 55mph on the elevated sections. Link also runs in a dedicated right-of-way and while it is paved over to Henderson, that does not mean vehicles will be on the tracks. Provisioning was left to allow a low yield fence along the right-of-way if pedestrian and vehicle incidents were to be expected.
Total travel time from Sea-Tac Airport to Westlake Mall is slated to be 39 minutes initially and as adjustments are made, will be down to as fast as 34 minutes.
Sound Transit is planning on operating 3 to 4 car trains during the baseball and football seasons, normal runs will be 1 and 2 car trains.
Sound Transit will be closing Pine Street next year to start boring on University Link. Two of the tunnel boring machines will start at Montlake to Capitol Hill, the third will start at Capitol Hill to the Pine Street Stub Tunnel. Sound Transit has most of the properly bought and will begin demolition early next year for construction staging.
Sound Transit will be installing CCTV cameras at all stations and Seattle Police along with security will be on-board trains. Fare inspectors will be present on-board Link at random times. Police will also start riding on buses at select times on the more vandalized bus routes, like the 554, 574, and 594. ST will also start ramping up inspections on Sounder Commuter Rail.
Sound Transit will have Mukilteo Station open in June 2008 with the Northbound platform starting after BNSF Railway finishes up construction for Boeing. Platform construction is scheduled to start in 2009 and open in June 2009.
I’m sure I left some stuff out but let’s just say that more goodness is going to be coming out much, much, sooner….
April 21, 2008 at 4:37 pm
by Ben Schiendelman
So, on this blog, sometimes, we disagree. This is a response to Martin’s post below. There are things about Sound Transit I gripe about (and who doesn’t have nitpicks about anything they’re interested in?), but what Martin wrote about are not gripes I have. Here’s why.
1) When an organization’s leadership is replaced, like an administration, there is no reason to continue to use the benchmarks set forth by an old administration, especially when we know they were faulty. It’s pointless to tell someone every day that they are late when there is no way they could ever have been on time, because they inherited someone else’s work. It is meaningful to measure them based on the job they were given. Sound Transit is not a person. There is no “they” who made a mistake in the original estimates for Link. The people who made those mistakes are no longer making decisions that will lead them into the same situations, so benchmarking the agency based on those mistakes, made more than a decade ago, does nothing but create an attitude of distrust rather and foul any recognition of progress made.
2) The choice was: Build the Rainier Valley at grade, or build nothing. Those were your options. And Portland’s MAX is on time, as is Tacoma Link. I do not see how Central Link should be any different, as it is built to higher standards than either of those for grade separation. Also, I’d be a lot more worried about the South Seattle crossings than the ones in the Valley – those are the ones with long trucks and heavier game traffic. I’m still not worried.
3) Signal timing can only happen in one direction without completely impeding the flow of cross-traffic. Unless you have a fantastic new theory that transportation managers the world over would love to see, this is simply impossible to implement. You’d end up with wildly varying signal lengths. Sure, with a long section and only a couple of crossings, you can time trains to avoid this. You cannot do that with a dozen or more crossings in a handful of miles.
4) Critics can’t kill U-Link. We’re not voting on it again. I do agree I’d like to see some obvious work so people have something to look forward to, but I’m not that worried about it.
April 21, 2008 at 3:10 pm
by Martin H. Duke
I believe the STB crew to be universal in its support of the general direction and competence of Sound Transit. Since we spend almost all of our time defending it against criticism, I thought I should, in the interests of fairness, level a few criticisms of my own.
1) Stop saying LINK is “on time and on budget.” Sure, the new management has righted the ship and met its new, internal benchmarks. As someone who’s been in a lot of large organizations, I know that that’s not nothing. But it doesn’t win over any skeptics when you promise one cost and timeline when you’re going into the vote, do a faceplant soon afterward, come up with a new timeline where you have every incentive to be conservative, and then trumpet your success as if the initial promises never existed. It just adds to people’s cynicism about the process, and has probably been counterproductive politically.
2) They really, really should have grade-separated the Rainier Valley segment. Ben S. has repeatedly told me that this only costs riders two or three minutes, and I have no doubt that it’s true. Nevertheless, the whole point of rail is reliability: by running at-grade you’ve introduced the possibility of idiot drivers and pedestrians gumming up the whole system. Inattentive drivers have already seriously disrupted the SLUT on some days, and I hate to think that they could do the same for a regional backbone.
Furthermore, speed is as much about perception as the stopwatch time. Even without a disruptive emergency, a train sitting at a stoplight tells the people riding it that the train is slow. A train whizzing by cars stuck at a stoplight tells them it’s faster than driving.
Looking forward, now that we’ve built the system there are ways to minimize these problems: pedestrian overpasses, arterial underpasses, crossing gates, fencing, etc. ST and the City of Seattle should energetically look into these solutions. As a bonus, this kind of stuff is substantially cheaper than elevating or burying the line in the first place.
3) Use signal acceleration in both directions. A corollary to the other point is something else Ben S. told me: that the signal acceleration will be only used in the peak direction through the Rainier Valley. I repeat my argument from the bullet above.
4) Start Digging, Dammit. Nothing ensures completion like facts on the ground. Transit projects have their near-death experiences when they mess around for years without turning a spade of Earth. For that reason, it would have been a great idea if they’d found the money to start in on U-link before the critics have a chance to kill it, even at the cost of a few months of extra delay in Central Link, which is now a fait accompli. *****
So that’s my wish list for what they would do/have done differently. However, like any political process, the actual ST program is a mix of various interests, so that the result is not perfect from any one person’s viewpoint.
Opposing a system because it uses the wrong kind of rail car, or because its initial segment doesn’t run from your house to your workplace, or because it’s bundled with some other stuff you don’t like, doesn’t get us any closer to having a decent rail system; those decisions were made for a reason, and you ignore those reasons at your peril.
It’s with hesitation that I open this post to comments, because it invites a scattershot of random gripes. I ask that you focus on what I’ve suggested, or look forward to tactical changes that could still be made, as I’ve done.
And if your gripe is “go to Ballard and West Seattle before anywhere else,” we’ve already had that thread, several times. I wield my “delete comments” button as necessary.
April 21, 2008 at 8:18 am
by Martin H. Duke
Yesterday’s New York Times has a piece by Steven Dubner and Steven Leavitt (of Freakonomics fame) about the external costs of driving:
Which of these externalities is the most costly to U.S. society? According to current estimates, carbon emissions from driving impose a societal cost of about $20 billion a year. That sounds like an awful lot until you consider congestion: a Texas Transportation Institute study found that wasted fuel and lost productivity due to congestion cost us $78 billion a year. The damage to people and property from auto accidents, meanwhile, is by far the worst. In a 2006 paper, the economists Aaron Edlin and Pinar Karaca-Mandic argued that accidents impose a true unpaid cost of about $220 billion a year. (And that’s even though the accident rate has fallen significantly over the past 10 years, from 2.72 accidents per million miles driven to 1.98 per million; overall miles driven, however, keep rising.) So, with roughly three trillion miles driven each year producing more than $300 billion in externality costs, drivers should probably be taxed at least an extra 10 cents per mile if we want them to pay the full societal cost of their driving.
The piece goes on to argue for pay-as-you-drive auto insurance, which is a good idea. Had I worked on that study, I might have tried to quantify the foreign policy and defense costs of securing oil supplies, but I can imagine the methodological problems there.
At any rate, although I’ve learned to be skeptical of “cost to the economy” figures, it’s clear that there are very large implicit subsidies to driving. The difference for public transit is that the subsidies are explicit.
Via Ezra Klein.
April 21, 2008 at 7:01 am
by Brian Bundridge
Only in Prague where you can lease a tram (Streetcar for us U.S. folks) wire it up with lights, DJ’s and 2 wet bars with some music… Call it TRAMix…
What are the chances of something like this happening in the States – Slim to none but talk about a fun way of getting around town.
Note:: I posted this to aim at the younger gen readers that are on this blog and may read it. Myself probably being the youngest on this blog would love to see something like this. Sure we have the Party bus but really, it’s just a bus =P
April 21, 2008 at 4:56 am
by Brian Bundridge
The City of Stanwood has started construction on the new Stanwood station platform which is slated to open in June 2009. This platform will serve North and South bound passengers to Vancouver, BC, Everett, Wa and Seattle, Wa.
The platform was originally scheduled to open in the Summer of 2008 but due to issues with platform height and extending the siding at Stanwood to allow freight trains to pass trains that are doing station stops and a slight relocation of a grade crossing.
More information is available from the Everett Herald and WSDOT.
April 20, 2008 at 3:15 am
by Andrew Smith
The Times today talks about TOD in the Rainier valley caused by anticipation of Central Link opening next year. There’s a little widget to show what exactly is going in.
Mike Hlastala has seen the future. And it runs on rails.
His year-old company plans to build more than 700 apartments and 40,000 square feet of shops a few steps from Sound Transit’s Othello Street light-rail station on Martin Luther King Jr. Way.
A trip from Othello to Pioneer Square should take just 17 minutes when trains start running next year. Hlastala figures lots of downtown workers — tired of traffic, $4 gas and $300-a-month parking — will be interested in apartments like his.
Exactly. The number of units is astounding, “more than 1,500 condo and apartment units within a 10-minute walk of a rail station” by private developers and a large number more places like New Holly built with Housing Authority funds and right next to Othello Station. The image above is a rendering of one of two private developments built on the other side of MLK from New Holly.
There is a risk that the new residents will push out the current, diverse, relatively low-income residents of the valley. Though I guess this is a problem throughout the city from South Park to Jackson Park.
April 19, 2008 at 1:24 am
by Andrew Smith
This Seattle PI talks about what Rossi wants to do with the Sound Transit dollars. Rossi wants to spend $690 million of Eastside Sound Transit dollars on HOV lanes for 405. The article fails to emphasize a key point. Sure, Sound Transit currently has a $560 million dollar or so surplus in the bank that has been saved for Eastside rail, but it’s unconstitutional for the state to repurpose that money. Article XI, section 12 of the state constitution reads as follows has been interpretted that the state can’t redirect local taxes without a vote. The vote would have to pass in the entire Sound Transit district, not just the Eastside, and the vote could only be brought on by the Sound Transt board. Why the board would want to spend the money on HOV lanes I’m not sure.
The piece also calls the Coalition for Effective Transportation and the Eastside Transportation Association, both of which love the Rossi plan, “pro-bus organizations”. That’s barely true, a much more appropriate name would be “anti-rail”, a quick look at either organizations site proves this.
“The general idea of spending Sound Transit’s transit money on cross-lake infrastructure (for) making buses work better across the lake is a good one,” said John Niles, the coalition’s technical chairman.
I’m not too worried about Rossi getting elected and moving the money toward roads.
Eastsiders, of which Rossi is clearly one, feel that a widened 405 was promised to them by the state in the mid-nineties.
April 18, 2008 at 12:54 pm
by Brian Bundridge
Another DMU corridor that is being closely looked at for lightly used or abandoned railroads is SMART – Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit, which in a interesting twist will be a joint rail/trail for the entire 70 mile, 14 station corridor. It’s last cost estimate in 2006 was $385 million dollars and around $6.8 million per mile with an annual operating cost of $14 million
The system itself will look at the Siemens Desiro Classic, same vehicle which is used on the Sprinter however will seek to have the FRA look at the vehicle to allow it to go it’s full potential speed of 90mph though the corridor will only be good for 79mph but it will open up a vast market of cheap, easy to maintain, rail transport instead of just seeking Bombardier coaches, cab cars, and expensive, loud, huge diesel locomotives.
What does that have to do with the Pacific Northwest? Well, we have an lightly used rail corridor – the BNSF Woodinville Subdivision which runs from Renton to Snohomish which is also very similar to the Sonoma corridor.
The Sonoma corridor will rehab all of the track with 136lb rail and concrete ties with connections to multiple transit agencies, including the Larkspur Ferry which would shuttle people to Downtown San Francisco, build 14 key stations, add a few additional sidings, and service will run every 30 minutes each direction.
As for the trail, it is expected to host 7,000 to 10,000 walkers, bicyclist, joggers, and others every day.
This should be very interesting to see what happens regarding this…
April 18, 2008 at 1:04 am
by Andrew Smith
On a per capita basis, Washington, Oregon and Idaho residents are using less gas than at any time since 1966, according to this Sightline study. We are using more in total, mostly just because there are so many more of us now. Of course, transit plays a part, as do more efficient cars:
Public transit ridership is up, Williams-Derry said. There’s a continual growth in compact urban developments or villages that discourage driving. And more people are opting for fuel-efficient cars. The Prius was the second best-selling new car in King, Snohomish, Kitsap and Pierce counties last year, according to Experian Automotive’s AutoCount Reports.
Are you driving less than before?
April 18, 2008 at 12:41 am
by Andrew Smith
Erica C Barnett at the Stranger wrote a piece lauding the Sierra Club for fighting against Prop. 1, and then turning around to lobby Sound Transit into put “station access funds” in place of park-and-rides for suburban stations. Station access funds could be spent on anything, including parking, but the use is decided by the local government and not prescribed by Sound Transit.
Nice idea, but I find this piece extremely self-congratulatory and completely off-mark, Erica wrote the piece as if Sound Transit 2 had passed already:
Environment Washington program director Bill LaBorde, who appeared alongside TCC’s regional policy director Rob Johnson at last week’s Sound Transit board meeting to praise the agency’s change of heart, agrees that “the Sierra Club has definitely been the most vocal” in pushing for improvements to Sound Transit’s plan.
Mike O’Brien, chairman of the Sierra Club’s Cascade Chapter, says the Club is “very encouraged” by Sound Transit’s statements at last week’s board meeting and is leaning toward getting behind a 2008 ballot measure, pending the actual release of a plan. Sometimes, it would seem, standing your ground is a better option than capitulating to the forces of “compromise”—even when your entire movement is lined up against you.
Most vocal of whom? Improvements? This could end up a complete waste of time, since it’s looking ever less certain we’ll get a ballot measure this year. In fact, I think the odds are slipping past even as I write this, if they haven’t already. I’ll congratulate the Sierra Club when they actually endorse a plan that passes.
April 18, 2008 at 12:32 am
by Andrew Smith
We have a new logo, thanks to Liz Andrade.
April 17, 2008 at 12:10 pm
by Martin H. Duke
This is just me guessing, but some of our readers may be energized about rail to Ballard and West Seattle.
One thing that’s come up in comment threads is that the adding that sort of demand through downtown is going to end up requiring another right of way. The money-is-no-object desire is probably a Second Avenue tunnel, a mere block away from the DSTT to facilitate easy transfers between the two lines.
Unfortunately, I have an engineering estimate in my possession that tells me running the tunnel boring machine from the stadium to, oh, Queen Anne will cost infinity jillion dollars. So, what’s a rail fan to do?
The analysis I’ve done in this amounts to crayons on a map, but it occurs to me that we’re already going to be digging up the waterfront to replace the Viaduct and seawall with, uh, something. Nickels’ highway tunnel died a quick but painful death, but it’d be somewhat less ambitious to replace that with a rail tunnel, possibly emerging to run under the viaduct through Sodo.
Now, Sound Transit isn’t anywhere near ready to take on running light rail through there, but Mayor Streetcar could certainly figure out a way to make it a “streetcar tunnel” for a decade or two, and then switch it over to light rail in 20 years when they’re ready for it.
North of Stewart St.? South of Sodo? That’s a problem for route planners and taxpayers down the road. But the critical and expensive downtown segment would be locked in.
So we leverage the state’s expenditures for viaduct replacement, lock in construction costs now, and set ourselves up for the future (assuming we make the station platforms long enough to accommodate four cars). We’d be screwed today if they hadn’t excavated the bus tunnel in the 1980s, and perhaps it’s time to make a similar long term investment in our future.
Discuss.
April 16, 2008 at 9:04 pm
by Andrew Smith
The Federal Way City Council unanimously voted that they want light rail to Tacoma from Seattle, and not the scaled-back proposal the council is considering for ST2. In the scaled-back proposal, light rail would stop at South 200th street in Des Moines,, while in the proposal that was part of Prop 1 last November it would continue all the way to Tacoma.
This is a touchy subject, as many Seattle-based environmentists did not support light-rail south from Tacoma. The Stranger’s Erica Barnett, for example, thought building rail in “rural” areas (her word, Federal Way is far far from rural, but whatever) would encourage sprawl. Of course, I disagree.
I’d prefer a package with more light rail, but I would prefer over that a package that would pass. I do think that light rail south makes more sense than North, and it might not be a bad idea to put .5% with rail South, East and North to Shoreline, and express bus service for Snohomish.
April 16, 2008 at 1:17 pm
by Andrew Smith
Here’s a cute story of a couple who met on the 308 route, and eventually the guy proposed on the bus. This kind of thing happens a lot, and in Japan they even made a serial drama out of one such true stories. I’ve met girlfriends on public transit in Japan and San Francisco but never here.
April 16, 2008 at 9:38 am
by Martin H. Duke
 The photos above were posted by oranviri in the seatrans Flickr pool. I hadn’t seen these before. From a graphic design perspective, they’re certainly nicer, but I’d settle for consistently posting schedule information at stops, something that’s especially rare in the Rainier Valley.
As oranviri also points out, the “Stop No.” depicted is some sort of useless internal Metro code, rather than the mybus stop code. Bureaucracies being what they are, one hopes that the mybus people can modify their software to accept these codes, which would make bus riding a far more pleasant experience for those in the know.
In the long run, I wish Metro would post a paragraph or two at each time point explaining how to use the website and SMS service, but then again I’m not paying for the bandwidth at the mybus server.
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