Your Questions About Link Answered Link Light Rail Last year I asked readers for questions about Seattle streetcars and Rapid Ride, and with Link opening in just four short months, I imagine even the most regular reader of this blog still has some Link Light Rail questions. So if you do, leave them in the comments and I’ll get answers from Sound Transit. I’ll ask the questions Monday morning, so you have until Sunday night to put questions into the comments. From the Archives: SR 520 vs I-90The idea of sending Link over 520 has reared up in the comments again. Last year Ben addressed the technical problems with this idea in detail. University Link Groundbreaking TomorrowFor those of you who have the time or hang out near the University, Friday afternoon holds a special treat for you: University Link GroundbreakingMarch 06, 2009
 Sound Transit The importance of starting to actually turn some earth is difficult to overestimate. Once capital expenditures start being expended the logic of sunk costs makes it harder and harder for various public nuisances to stop the project. The ridership on U-Link will be astronomical, and the increase in quality-of-ride over buses will be especially large. University Link (and North Link after it) will also provide many opportunities for elimination, consolidation, truncation, or reduction in capacity of Metro bus routes, easing their long-term operating budget crisis. This is a big moment for the region. Clarification: Judy Clibborn’s Dirty FingerprintsClarification: The funds for R8A have been taken out of the 2009 budget and moved into a far future budget. Ben in this post is discussing the removal of the funds from the 2009 budget. R8A still does not have enough funding to be completed. This state project is necessary for light rail on the Eastside to open on schedule. Adding two-way HOV across I-90 will also immediately boost the speed of buses during rush hour. We implore Representatives Eddy and Clibborn to move money for I-90 Two-Way HOV Stages 2 and 3 back to the original funding time line. Original post: Let’s have a close look at that economic stimulus bill from the state legislature, shall we? Looks like it passed, great, that means money for all sorts of projects… Wait just a minute. What’s that amendment (PDF)? It’s from Representative Judy Clibborn (D-Mercer Island), whose constituents voted for light rail over the I-90 bridge? Oh, I see, it screws over light rail across I-90. Again. From section 304:
She doesn’t miss a beat. Apparently, for her, the interests of a few rich folks who have whispered in her ear overwhelms the interests of the majority of her district. That’s right, $2,825,359 suddenly gone from I-90 Two Way Transit and HOV improvements, or “R8A” – the one state project we’re dependent on to build East Link. In fact, we’re ending up with almost $700,000 less than we had before the federal stimulus money. Thanks, Judy! We appreciate that you’ve been bought and paid for by a few rich constituents – using the express lanes as single occupancy Mercedes lanes into the city is a great use of our infrastructure. Wouldn’t it be nice if you were replaced with a legislator who actually represented the district you’re supposed to represent, instead of taking money away from projects that help your constitutents? I wonder what, say, the Bellevue Downtown Association thinks of this? And people blame Seattle for not being able to get anything done. Whenever we do, the state kneecaps us. News Round-Up: VMT Down Ave train in train, photo by beco.
This is an open thread. Chart of the Day
I’m leaving out the District of Columbia, which tops out at over $350 per resident. The precise Washington figure is $4.65. I spent most of the first 21 years of my life living in Maryland (in the DC area!) and Massachusetts, which might explain why my expectations are so high. Sources: Funding data from APTA’s 2005 “Survey of State Funding for Public Transportation” (pdf) 2008 population data from Wikipedia. King Street Station Updates King Street Station, Photo by Fußgänger For those that don’t frequent the City of Seattle’s website, Seattle has been posting monthly updates on the progress of the King Street Station Renevation. On a visual level, they have installed the new glass clock faces all around the tower. It is much cleaner and you can see through the glass, visually a nice effect. The station track improvements are almost completed with power switch machines soon to be installed on tracks 4-7. Stimulus funding that would have accelerated the restoration project fell through, however it could be re-applied via the passenger rail investment stimulus (either the HSR or Amtrak portion). Interior work in the passenger section will start in Spring 2009. Passengers will be moved outside to a temporary portable “office” to purchase tickets and baggage. For more information on the station and its restoration, check out the website! Interview with Kevin DesmondMetro is continuing their media campaign to plead for some revenue help. In 2010, we could be looking at cuts of 800,000-1m annual service hours, or about 75,000 riders per day out of approximately 400,000. And the campaign’s going multimedia! Kevin Desmond doesn’t break a ton of new ground in the interview, but it’s good to hear it straight from the top. There’s reason to hope the PSRC allocation will at least plug the $29m hole in 2009 and prevent service cuts in September, but sales taxes aren’t supposed to recover to 2008 levels till 2013. It’s pretty clear that the current Metro business model is unsustainable, since its solvency depends on robust growth coupled with low fuel prices. Canada Line Opening in August Richmond-Brighouse station, photo by indyinsane The Vancouver area’s newest Sky Train addition, the Canada Line, will open a couple of months ahead of schedule: August instead of late November. The Canada Line was built in two parts, the first is a mostly cut-and-cover, partly deep-bored subway from Downtown Vancouver to almost the Fraser River, with seven new subway stations and one new subway platform at an existing station. The second part is a mostly elevated segment from the Fraser River toward the Vancouver Airport and Richmond, with eight more stations. The total line length is 19 km (11.8 miles). All-in-all, it’s been pretty impressive how the line has gone from approval to near completion in just over four years, but obviously the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics have helped the project get quick approval. The $1.5 billion price tag for the line is mind-bogglingly cheap. For comparison, the University Link project has a $1.8 billion price tag. However, the line’s construction has not been without controversy, especially because the cut-and-cover construction for the subway line has much more invasive on the surface than the deep-bored solution that Sound Transit is using for our subway tunnels. The Canada line is also a lower-capacity system compared to both Link and to Sky Train’s Expo and Millenium Lines. Canada Line’s station platforms are only 40 m (131 ft) long, and can only accomodate one long car at a time. For comparison, Portland’s Max has platforms that are 60 m (200 ft) long, and Link’s platforms are 110 m (370 ft) long. Portland’s stations and trains feel short, I anticapate that the Canada line will run into capacity problems in the future. Even having said all of that, it’s remarkable that Translink, Vancouver and BC have been able to build a line that’s mostly underground and elevated with 16 stations with a price tag in the $100~$150 million per mile range. Shows that they are definitely doing something different up there than we are here. Comment Policy
With startlingly few exceptions, our commenters all bring something intelligent to say and tend to do it with class and erudition. Even our “trolls” like to give us a bit of a hard time, but at the same time offer smart critiques. That’s not something you can say about, for instance, Horse’s Ass, where the quality of the posts is not at all matched by what goes on in the threads. We’d like to keep the tone of our threads the way it’s been historically. PSRC Transit Projects ListThe PRSC has released the preliminary list of projects that will receive FTA grants from the stimulus bill in our area. Here’s a map of the projects, and here’s the pdf of the list. There’s a lot of money for new buses, $1 million for the monorail (!!!) and even $341,000 for preventative maintence on the SLU streetcar. There’s $4.6 million for North Link acceleration and $4.6 million for track and signals on the M street to Lakewood line that Sounder and Amtrak want to install as part of the Point Defiance Bypass. Funding by agency and project below the fold. Taxing Authority for Transportation Agencies Metro Buses Queued in the Tunnel, Photo by Oran One of the topics current King County Council Member Larry Phillips discussed in the Q&A that we had with him last week at our meet-up was the possibility of finding future funding sources for King County’s Metro. Metro, like many other state and local agencies, faces a massive budget crisis and may be forced to cut service in order to make up the future revenue deficit. Metro is without any way to raise new money: Metro, along with Snohomish’s Community Transit has currently reached its state-allowed limit on its taxing authority: nine-tenths of one percent sales tax collection. Even if the people of King County wanted to tax themselves to provide more bus service, state law wouldn’t allow them to. At first it seems bizarre that Olympia wouldn’t allow voters to tax themselves to provide more bus service, but it makes a little sense when you think about it. Until very recently, no transit agency had reached the nine-tenths of a percent allocation, and before I-695 passed in 1999, these agencies were allowed to collect the motor vehicle excise tax (MVET). And it’s only now that any transit agency has faced a potential service cut. Phillips mentioned two additional funding sources Metro could potentially go after if the state allowed. The first is the MVET that Ron Sims was pushing around the time the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel plan was announced. The second option would be to allow some or all of the taxing authority given to county ferry districts – a property tax of 75¢ per $1000 assessed value – to be used for transit by the voter’s approval. The MVET has been a wildly unpopular tax, and attempting to use that for transit might be a disaster, but the property tax seems reasonable. Currently the King County Ferry District collects 5.5¢ per $1000 assessed value, worth a little more more than $18 million a year for King County, and it looks like the Ferry District in King County couldn’t ever need the entire 75¢. There are counties where ferries are crucial transportation connections, such as Island County, where state Senate Transportation Chair Mary Margarett Haugen (D-Camano Island) lives, and they may use the whole allotment. But doesn’t it make sense for the state to allow counties to use that 75¢ taxing authority on any transportation project they need? King County may not want a lot of ferries, but the voters may decide they could use more roads, buses or rail. The ability to implement a levy to build a specific project or pass a permanent tax increase to fund transit service seems like something the voters should have the right to do. Fortunately there is a bill going through Olympia right now that would enable exactly this: letting the county use some of the ferry taxing authority for transit. The transportation leaders in Olympia, Rep. Judy Clibborn (D-Mercer Island) and Sen Haugen among others, have made it very clear that they expect the Greater Seattle area and it’s outlying communities to fund their own transportation improvements. The state relies nearly entirely on gas tax revenue to fund roads proejcts, and with people driving less, choosing more efficient cars and taking transit more, the revenues are far short of paying for all the needs across the state. That’s one of the main reasons why they pushed RTID, the now-defunct regional roads agency, so heavily and why they are fighting for “governance reform”, also known as stealing transit money to pay for roads. If Olympia expects Seattle and its neighbors to solve their own transportation problems, it needs to stop trying to push their preferred plans down onto us. I would have hoped in light of Prop. 1 first failing by a large margin with roads and transit and then passing by an even larger margin with just transit, Olympia would realize the voters here don’t agree with their vision of what our region’s transportation system should look like. Instead, they ought to provide tools to the local governments here, and allow the voters to approve the transportation plans that they want in their own communities. The 75¢ per $1000 property tax set aside for ferries seems like great tool for this purpose. Crosscut: Trolleybuses, not Streetcars crosscut.com Matt Fiske’s proposal in Crosscut to replace the City of Seattle’s streetcar proposals with expanded and improved trolley bus service is pretty good fodder for armchair planners out there. I understand our own Adam Parast is working on a characteristically well-informed post on this subject, but I wanted to make a few quick, less-well-informed points: (1) When a region finally makes a decision and starts getting momentum behind a project, beware of poorly developed alternate proposals that suddenly materialize. As we’ve seen with constant battles between Link, other technologies (BRT! Eastside Commuter Rail!), and other alignments (rail over 520 first!), a lot of the support for these ideas comes from people more interested in killing whatever is on the table rather than seeing through an actual transit solution. Regardless of Mr. Fiske’s intentions, expect a lot of his support, such as it is, to evaporate once the streetcar project dies. All that said, I see no reason to assume he isn’t operating in good faith here. (2) As back-of-the-envelope proposals go, it’s as good as most others. You won’t find this blog suggesting that massive increases in bus service are a bad thing. However, there are no cost estimates associated with this proposal. While it’s true that the per-mile capital costs for buses tend to be lower, the system Fiske proposes is far more extensive than the streetcar plan, and the operating costs promise to be much, much higher. (3) Even with all the improvements Fiske proposes (which aren’t cheap), you’ll still have less ridership per mile than a streetcar because the ride will be rougher, payment will be on-board, and because of the general stigma that buses carry for a portion of the population. This is not to disqualify his proposal outright, but to require some idea on how ridership of the two proposals compares. As it is, the Fiske proposal is much more ambitious in terms of service, with no reckoning whatsoever of both up-front and recurring costs. In the absence of those basic facts, it’s not really productive to debate the costs and benefits of this versus other city transit projects. I’d be on board with Fiske if he said “this is a good idea,” but his thesis is that this is superior to some other project, and for that he needs a lot more evidence than he has. And furthermore, why no Route 7? The Voters Must Be WrongThat’s what Doug MacDonald and John Stanton, along with the Washington Policy Center, want you to believe. You’re wrong. You make poor decisions. You can’t govern yourself. You need “governance reform”. That’s why they want to ask the region to build more highways, even after we said no. We said very clearly that we don’t want more roads *and* transit, we just want more transit. The difference between the yes votes in these two elections was in the double digits – crystal, I’d call it. Then why do I see SB 6064, “Transportation Accountability”? Oh, I see, it would create a “balance” in our transportation dollars, to “prioritize” transportation projects – meaning take money from somewhere and, you know, spend it on something “higher priority” (like expanding I-405). Which money? From committee testimony last week: “the bill does subsume the roles, powers and duties of Sound Transit.” Oh, money we voted for to fund specific transit projects. What’s going on here is simple. RTID is gone and dead. The state’s plan to ask local voters for a bigger share of highway money failed; we’d rather build more transit than build ourselves into gridlock. The state has put themselves in a poor position by expanding roads before they figure out how to maintain them – and now, Doug MacDonald is admitting his abject failure as transportation secretary by trying to steal money from transit. Sure, ten years ago, we thought Sound Transit might actually need reform – but it turns out it just needed new leadership, and now it’s kicking ass. These guys are manufacturing a crisis. So, who’s sponsoring this garbage? It looks like nearly the same crew. Mary Margaret Haugen of Camano Island, who apparently still believes that her constitutents are in the Sound Transit district, and Fred Jarrett of Mercer Island, Bellevue, and Newcastle, who as usual wants his constitutents to be able to drive to work alone in his fancy I-90 express lanes. There are some other choice names – have a look at the bill information (linked above). I love how towns like Eureka and Country Home are really interested in state projects being paid for by Seattle. I wonder if they realize they don’t pay enough taxes to cover their own highways anyway? The icing on the cake is the wording in the bill digest (PDF). A plan to take money from electric rail transit and put it into highway expansion is apparently “for the benefit of … the environment by reducing fossil fuel use and carbon emissions.” No, really. It’s that insulting. Do you live in the 41st? Please help me out and call Fred Jarrett - remind him that his constituents voted for Mass Transit Now, not “Expand 405 Now”. The 10th? Mary Margaret Haugen is lost in the tulips, please tell her as much. And Ed Murray? Really? Why are we talking about this again? And next time you hear these guys talk about ‘bus rapid transit’, please remember that they aren’t pro-bus. They’re just pro-asphalt. My favorite quote from John Stanton, completely separated from reality: “we don’t have enough money for roads.” Maybe we would if we weren’t trying to tunnel under the waterfront. High Speed Rail News Round-Up ICE line (with a non-express intercity train) near Dusseldorf, photo by davipt
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