Once 520 is replaced the travel times should be much more reliable for buses to UW.

1) Sounder is used for anyone going north from Pierce County or South King County, not just those going to Seattle. Eventually there will be lakewood, and South Tacoma to downtown Tacoma commuters on Sounder. There are Puyallup-Kent Sounder commuters today. A little over a quarter of north-bound Sounder riders get off somewhere other than King Street, and that’s without a South Tacoma or Lakewood station, and doesn’t count the Tacoma-bound “reverse-commute” run.

Even if you made the assumption that everyone got off at King Street station, something we know is wrong, Sounder South would still have riders who get off at King Street station and have final destinations that are outside of Seattle. Brian used to make a Kent-Seattle-Bellevue that commute on Sounder.

R8A on the other hand is only used to go to the Eastside. No one will drive across I-90 to go to Tukwila or Everett. It’s purely an Eastside benefit.

2) I-90 is not a commute-only device, improved traffic at six in the evening Westbound has benefits to Mariners/Seahawks/Sounders game going Eastsiders. This isn’t a small number of people, and there isn’t a similar analog for Sounder South.

These of course, are playing the framework you’ve setup. No one would be contemplating R8A if it wasn’t for Eastlink, so that’s a false starting point.

The best comparison is not to north-bound sounder, but the south-bound Sounder run, which, of course, is paid for by South King County and Pierce County. Funny how that works.

That is not at all my point. I’m very willing to debate legitimate policy questions. But the options before us are a false choice – this is a logical fallacy, and one cannot build a intelligent debate based on a logical fallacy. The question put before the board was clearly slanted by at least an order of magnitude. This is like asking if the board would choose to kill one puppy or ten, without giving the option of killing no puppies. Of course the board chose to only kill one puppy, and of course you agree. I’m just saying that this narrow form of debate isn’t terribly interesting or useful, and the result is a needlessly dead puppy. (though maybe I should go back to my more pleasant ice cream and pony analogies)

project map

I shouldn’t link to that map, though, because I ride this stretch every day and I know the map is wrong. Before they fixed this last year you could ride all the way to the first exit on MI before getting into GP lanes.

I’ll contemplate the rest of your comment for a while, but I honestly don’t see how R8A (again, excluding the train) is any different from, say, South Sounder.

I think that’s what you’re missing in this entire thing, every trip is about some sort of commerce, and with each of those comes some sales tax revenue. Even the guy who brings his lunch every day and doesn’t spend a penny is generating sales tax revenues (his employer bought him a desk, some paper and a pen).

Once sounder riders get into Seattle they transfer to North King projects (Link, first hill streetcar, etc). They are paying for those because they are going to use them. If you live in Tacoma and work downtown your commute will be Sounder (which you paid for in Tacoma) and Link (which you and your employer paid for in Seattle). If you live in Seattle and work in Bellevue your commute would be North Link/Central Link (which you paid for in Seattle) and East Link (which you and your employer on your behalf paid for) in Bellevue.

And you’re wrong about R8A, phase 1 was to get lanes to Mercer Island. Phase two and three are what Ben has been posting about.

The narrow argument we were having was which of those two proposed options is best. We could get into an endless argument about the proper way to devise a fare structure, but we already did that when the two proposals came out. We’ll never get anywhere, though, because we have nothing like a consensus on what we’re trying to optimize. Your body of work suggests you’re focused on making sure things pencil out for extremely short-hop trips. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s waaay down my list of priorities.

I reject your implication that the choice clearly in the public good is to maintain the RFZ and that therefore the other plan is “playing politics” in service of some shadowy, anti-social goal. There are complicated tradeoffs here and what ST decides to do depends on how they weigh those equally valid objectives. One man’s “playing politics” is, in other eyes, respect for another man’s legitimate interests.

Your turning this choice – which is a logical false choice – into a RFZ vs. increasing taxes for the poor is playing into this politics.

They set themselves a 52% farebox recovery goal for whatever reason. With the $1.75/No RFZ system they came up with some number. You and I have no idea if it was 55%, 53%, or 52.0001%.

Then you put in an RFZ, which we agree has a bunch of costs I have no idea how to quantify. It doesn’t strike me as absurd that doing it with a $1.75 base fare might bring it below 52%. Taking 5c/mile as a given, you have no choice but to up the base fare, and no smaller increment to do so than a quarter.

As to this blog’s position on ice cream, pony rides, and the RFZ, we don’t actually have one. If you want to put me on the spot, I personally that all modes in the tunnel should have the same policy, which for now means keeping the RFZ. But it isn’t crazy to think otherwise (the point of my post), and it isn’t necessarily a “false choice” between higher fares and an RFZ (the point of my comment to you).

Your third point has a far larger assumption than mine, and a whole lot of trust in the person that came up with the quarter bump. Or do you have a reference that tells us they were just under the $1.75 limit before adding the RFA?

My math is meant simply to point out how ridiculous the choice of a quarter increase vs. RFA is. ST might as well say that we can either have the RFA or free ice cream and pony rides. And this blog would simply follow along, telling us how important free ice cream and pony rides are, without showing any relevance to the RFA.

If there’s an RFA you wouldn’t charge people for distance in the tunnel, which in some cases will cost ST a quarter. Otherwise, coming in from the south you’d want to get off at the ID station, tap off, and then board again. What sense does that make?

Then, you have people who would ride it in the tunnel regardless because they have a pass. With the pass revenue distribution formulas, that may very well cost you some $ as well.

Then, you have ST’s commitment to round off (up) to nearest quarter. You don’t have to lose a whole quarter’s worth of revenue for a one quarter fare increase – only a few cents would knock it up to the next quantum.

So your numbers are built on a ton of assumptions that are completely irrelevant to the problem.

“The downside is that everyone else has to pay a quarter just so 2.6k people can get a free ride”

I just don’t believe that. It has to be spin meant to create a false choice that led to this decision. Let’s run the numbers:

If 2,600/day is less than 10% of ridership, then the rest of the ridership is at least 23,400 people. Take a quarter and multiply it by two trips a day per person, and that’s $42,700,000 a year. What Greg Walker and yourself are claiming is that letting 10% of the riders ride a short trip in the tunnel costs an extra $42.7M a year in janitorial costs? Even at $50,000 a year, that’s a full-time staff of 85 janitors for this 10% alone. That means the entire janitorial staff is 850 people! I had no idea Seattlites were so messy.

I honestly don’t understand your sub-area logic. South Sounder is only used by Pierce and South King residents that commute to Seattle, who inevitably spend some taxes there; so should that be a North King project?

R8A (again, leaving aside the train) provides some benefit to Seattle residents and approximately zero to the Eastside.