I’d spend more time criticizing the Times editorial page if I hadn’t stopped paying much attention to it. Still, I have to applaud them for continuing to carry Neal Peirce on their op-ed page. He’s a nationally syndicated columnist who continues to churn out forward thinking pieces on transit and land use.
In yesterday’s column, Peirce tells us that USDOT and HUD are going to work together to consolidate transportation and land use policies. As someone who’s been in several large organization, I’ll say that kind of cross-agency coordination almost never happens, and these are two subjects that deserve to go together. We’ll see what comes of it, but it’s a very promising sign. Check out the whole column.
I’m told that part of the reason for a two-week delay, besides a margin of error, was to avoid the added demand from both July 4 festivities and the Mariners home game on Saturday, July 11. That gives them a couple of days to handle all the for-fun riders and work out the kinks before a Monday morning commute.
Given all that padding we’d consider this date extremely unlikely to slip.
Riders won’t have to pay a fare to try out Link during the inaugural weekend.
[NOTE: This post has been revised as more information came in. Some of the comments below refer to earlier versions of the post, which erroneously referred to July 3 as a previously announced opening date; in fact, it was the project completion date.]
These are the steps you have to take between getting off the airplane and leaving the airport for international arrivals in Sea-Tac (or at least all the arrivals I can remember at Sea-Tac):
1) go through immigration
2) get your luggage off the carousel
3) go through customs
4) put the luggage back on a conveyor belt
5) take the people mover
6) go back up and wait for your bags again
Is there any other airport that makes you do steps 4 and 6? It’s crazy.
And why do you have to get your luggage, go upstairs, walk on the sky-bridge and take an elevator down again to get a cab? It’s like 500 meters and a dozens signs to find your way (I don’t take taxis often) while in most airports you can get surface transportation by just walking outside. And what’s up with $4 for a luggage cart? Those are free in virtually every other airport, and would be really nice for the cases you have to walk 500 meters with all your bags from the second baggage claim…
As mentioned briefly Friday, and covered extensively in the past, Metro is extensively revising bus service in Southeast Seattle in response to the arrival of Link Light Rail. The main rounds of public comment are finished; the final staff proposal will be presented Tuesday, April 28, at 6:30pm in Room 1001 of the King County Courthouse to two King County Committees. The citizen sounding board for this project will also present their recommendation, and of course the hearing will be open for public comments as well. You can see the staff recommendation online, and the meeting will be on King County TV. There are absentee ways to comment as well.
There will be two rounds of changes: the first, in September 2009, will eliminate several routes, scale back others, and use the savings to fund other improvements and help Metro assume responsibility for the South Lake Union Streetcar. In February 2010, the completion of Airport Link will allow elimination of Route 194; half of these service hours “belong” to the Seattle subarea and will be repurposed to improve service there, as listed on the chart.
The Southwest King County proposals, on which I have much less to say, are available here.
Here are some reasons for the more interesting changes, both from current service and some of the earlier proposals.
Publicola reported this week about potential fundamental shifts in thinking about our state’s revenue system. Towards the end Josh Feit quotes grumbling from Sen. Ed Murray (D-Capitol Hill, Wallingford) and a collection of environmental and transportation organizations about the State Constitution‘s Section 40, which says that gas tax funds can only be used for roads. In Feit’s words:
Consider: The current working transportation budget for 2009-11 puts only 4.4 percent of the $5.9 billion total into transit. And even if legislators were more-transit friendly, the rules governing transportation funding — Constitutionally, the gas tax cannot be used on transit— would have only permitted them to put about 7.3 percent of the money into transit.
Given that 10 percent of all work trips in the Puget Sound region are transit (and 57 percent of all trips are non-single occupancy vehicle—60 percent in Seattle during morning rush hour); and given that vehicle miles traveled has remained flat in the last few years while transit ridership across the state has spiked by 15 to 20 percent, the fact that transit spending is in a straight jacket doesn’t fit our state’s changing profile.
Combine these transit numbers with the new state mandates and goals about reducing global warming (particularly by reducing vehicle miles traveled), and the transit funding equation seems as unsustainable are the general fund.
Of course, I would be ecstatic if applications of the gas tax were broadened through a constitutional amendment. At the same time, I understand that amending the constitution is hard. Meanwhile, I think there are two important points to make:
As Feit points out, the budget’s transit funding is $171m below what is Constitutionally allowed, so the attitude of legislators is currently more relevant than Constitutional restrictions.
If there was sufficient interest in boosting transit funding but not enough to change the Constitution, there are pretty simple maneuvers available. For instance, the Legislature could lift the sales tax exemption on gasoline and reduce the gasoline tax by an equivalent amount, and sales tax revenue has fewer strings attached.
Even if the tax revenue were “blown” on schools or something, Metro and ST would capture about 20% of the revenue in their respective districts thanks to their sales tax authority.
The biggest criticism here is that sales tax per gallon varies wildly with the gas price, making for a volatile revenue stream. However, gas prices are probably near bottom, so it’s unlikely that programs funded with these streams will be left high and dry. Furthermore, the sales tax is roughly indexed to inflation, whereas the fixed gasoline tax often faces declining purchasing power.
For select cities, including Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, in Google Maps you can now click on any transit stop and see an overlay of all transit routes in the system, with the routes accessible from that stop highlighted.
It’s a nice tool for everyday people and visitors to visualize the system.
UPDATE: Yes, onebusaway has had this forever. That’s not the point, because no everyone knows about OBA, and if they did OBA couldn’t handle the bandwidth.
With Google maps, you pick up visitors and people just checking how to get from point A to point B.
I’ll venture that most of our readers are up to speed on the basics of the ORCA card. If not, you can read our past coverage here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. If you don’t like to click that much, you can read the ORCA press kit (pdf, via the Rainier Valley Post) that consolidates most of the basic information into one place.
At any rate, what’s really new is the timetable above. The bottom line is that other fare media will be good for most of the rest of the year, when you get ORCA depends on how you get your pass, and compulsive early adopters can get it from your local agency customer service office, starting Monday. The full list of vendors will be released Monday.
“Full rollout” doesn’t begin till June, if you’d prefer to wait till the biggest bugs are squashed.
A busy Friday afternoon, as a couple of long-awaited updates occur:
ORCA rollout begins Monday, although it’ll be a slow rollout over the rest of the year. No need to panic, because passes, tickets, etc. will continue to be honored for quite some time. Don’t bother going to the the orcacard.com website, because it won’t be up till Monday. The active project page is here, but is useless for new information.
Final Metro staff recommendations to the King County Council will be presented April 28 for Link-related bus service changes in Southeast Seattle and Southwest King County.
This is an unofficial poll I am conducting to see if people would be interested in a user fee to support a second and third Amtrak Cascades train to Vancouver BC. This fee would be used to pay for the train and the Canadian border patrol services. The fee would not be valid for those traveling between Seattle and Bellingham. Only passengers going to Canada would be required to pay the extra fee.
Please, vote and forward this off to anyone whom you know and would be interested in taking the Amtrak Cascades to Vancouver BC.
Happiness is a fast train (clang, clang, zoom, zoom). 700 Nozomi Shinkansen, photo by Not Quite a Photographer.
Yesterday morning I woke up in Tamami’s grandparent’s place in suburban Hiroshima (like Wallingford density) took a train into the city, bought a Shinkansen ticket and was cross-country to Tokyo before noon. That’s real freedom: just waking up and deciding I want to go all the way across the country today, instead of tomorrow, and getting there between breakfast and lunch. Not being trapped in a car or in an airport security line. Even by American standards that’s like waking up in suburban Seattle and being in downtown San Francisco by 2 pm, and there was wi-fi most of the way.
It’s not nearly as depressing coming back this time, knowing we’ll have a rail transit system for a good portion our city and region, and some sort of high speed rail for our greater region. Back in the States on Monday.
by GREG NICKELS, Mayor of Seattle and Chair of the Sound Transit Board
With about three months to go before it opens, this is the second installment of my recollections on the long road travelled to build our Sound Transit Light Rail line.
After the November 1988 Advisory Ballot victory, it became clear that the public (at least 70% of them) were far ahead of the politicians in envisioning light rail mass transit. The issue was taken up in the Metro Council (in its Planning Committee). Metro, then known as “Seattle Metro”, was a separate government until 1993. Its federated Council included a variety of local elected and appointed officials who oversaw the bus and wastewater treatment systems in King County.
Initially the issue was popular with Democrats and Republicans on the Metro Council. Republicans like Bruce Laing, Lois North and Paul Barden (along with local officials like Seattle Councilman Paul Kraabel and Mercer Island Mayor Fred Jarrett) joined Democrats Cynthia Sullivan and me in advocating for mass transit (some Eastside elected officials were reluctant to use the words “Light” and “Rail” in the same sentence even after the vote). About this time the idea of using Burlington Northern tracks for commuter rail was gaining traction as well.
It became clear fairly early that the planning needed to expand beyond just King County.
Fortunately there also were champions in the legislature like House Transportation Chair Ruth Fisher (and later Representative Ed Murray). State funding was secured to study the concept (I’m not kidding, State funding). In 1990 a body called the Joint Regional Policy Committee (I was a member of the JRPC) was established to expand the work from King County to Pierce and Snohomish and the legislation included local taxing options to pay for building a system. Between August of 1990 and July of 1993, a $13.2 billion Regional Transit Plan was developed and legislation authorizing creation of a Regional Transit Authority was passed in Olympia. In July of 1993, the three County Councils voted to join the Central Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority to advance the plan. And thus Sound Transit was born.
Weekend before last, I went on a road trip* from where I’m staying in suburban Tokyo to a resort in the mountains. I got a decent impression of the Japanese highway system, and I’ll share some thoughts. (more…)
President Obama has listed Eugene-Portland-Seattle-Vancouver (aka Amtrak Cascades) as one of the corridors for his high speed rail plan. That’s great news, and means that Cascades will likely get some of the $8 billion in HSR stimulus money, and maybe some of the $1 billion in the annual high speed rail the feds are going to give out. I’m pretty happy about the choice of lines in general, though I think Dallas-Houston would be a better route than San Antonio-Dallas-Tulsa. Expect more news on this to come, in the mean time the Transport Politic is on top of it.
Matt Yglesias points to a bus rapid transit (BRT) plan for Washington DC, which looks pretty awesome. Ygelsias says he hopes that these one day become streetcars, but I don’t know. While I don’t know DC that well, I’m not so sure that streetcars are necessarily suited to replace BRT in all cases.
Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, a very libertarian economics blog, asks why people like streetcars. I don’t agree with much of what he says, I’ve found streetcars to be at least as if not more comfortable than buses, and I don’t like to “affiliate myself with the past”. The comments are quite good, though.
We’re more than a little bit late on this, but the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog has great coverage of a recent city council meeting that covered moving the opening of the First Hill Streetcar up by up to four years earlier than the planned 2016 opening date. The city says it can build the line for cheaper than expected if built earlier, which may encourage the Sound Transit Board to approve funding. The First Hill Streetcar will be funded by Sound Transit, but constructed and operated by the Seattle Department of Transportation.
The First Hill Streetcar was approved by voted last November in the ST2 plan. Once built, it will connect Capitol Hill, First Hill, and the International District via Broadway and Jackson. It would terminate near the International District Link light rail station, extending the reach of Link into the jobs-heavy First Hill neighborhood and the dense Capitol Hill area.
In an interview with Seattle Transit Blog, the city said that even though ST isn’t planning to fund operating costs before 2016, efficiencies learned from operating the South Lake Union Streetcar could allow ST to pay for the operations earlier than budgeted.
And why do we want a streetcar linking Capitol Hill, First Hill, and the International District? Check out 10 Reasons to Love a Streetcar in the Austin Chronicle.
No, I’m not drunk blogging or April Fool’s day blogging or anything. I have a point! Stick with me.
Many people say the way to solve congestion is to build more roads. I assure you this is not the case, and I can try to illustrate it by comparing roads to p-patches. If you aren’t familiar with them, p-patches are little neighborhood community gardens, where gardeners can rent a plot of land on an annual basis for a small fee and grow crops or flowers or whatever they like. There are dozens of sites spread across the city currently, and the fees for the gardens are fairly low, between $34 and $67 per year for between 100 and 400 square feet of gardening space.
A lot of people want to use P-Patches, but the supply is fairly low. The fee is far below the “market clearing” price for that amount of gardening space: the price would need to be much higher for the number of people willing to pay the fee to be equal to the amount of p-patch places available. Because of this, the wait for p-patches can be several years, especially in dense neighborhoods like Belltown or Capitol Hill. If a private business or individual were running p-patches, the price of a plot of land might be several hundred or even thousand dollars per year (rent for a 400 sq ft apartment is several hundred dollars a month), or there might be strict restrictions on what sort of gardening can be done by whom. A quick glance at the community gardens available in San Francisco shows that private gardens have often short waiting lists but very high fees ($3000 a year), have strict residency requirements (you must live in Alice Griffith Housing Development), or other restrictions. San Francisco’s public gardens generally have extraordinary wait times (2-3 years) or are located far away from population centers (Fort Mason). Basically, if something’s price is much lower than the demand, there are still ways to make you pay, in the case of Seattle’s p-patches you pay with your time.
Roads work much the same way. The SR 520 bridge is free to drive across, but a lot of people would like to drive across it at 8 in the morning. Because the supply of road capacity is lower than the demand for the road capacity, commuters are made to pay with their time to drive across the bridge. Now, you could decide to add more bridge-lanes, much like you’d want to add more P-Patches. But often if you add a new p-patch, new people might decide they want one. There are no patches at all on First Hill; if you put a p-patch there, some people living in that neighborhood would likely decide they want to use it. If you put a new patch next to an existing one in another neighborhood, new people would want to use it, possibly because they think the new waits are shorter or because they are shorter (‘I might not live here in three years, but I will live here next year’) and possibly just because it’s there. This is called “induced demand”. If you built a new bridge across Lake Washington, new people would drive across it in addition to the people driving cross the existing 520 bridge. Partly because wait times seem or are in fact lower, and partly because now you can’t live where you want to or work where you want to (‘I’d never have taken that job at the UW but now there’s an easy way to get there from Juanita so…’). You’d really need a lot of p-patches before wait times went away, maybe several times what is currently available. Similarly you’d need a lot of highway capacity before you’d have no congestion on the bridge, at least several times what is currently there.
There are, of course, obvious differences between p-patches and roads. You need transportation of some sort to get to work and make money. You don’t need p-patches at all, really. Few people move to be near p-patches, but a lot of people might move to be near transportation options. But ultimately, the two are alike in the fact that neither has a price that matches what people are actually willing to pay, and so users are charged with their time. Also, there’s no money to expand either enough to make wait times go away by increasing supply. And so we wait.
Boarding 2nd and Washington in Phoenix, photo by simax105
As you may have heard, a Link train in testing collided with a cartoday or yesterday (the car was making an illegal turn, of course). The media might treat this as a huge deal – I won’t know, I’m still in Japan – but new light rail lines having accidents with cars isn’t just common, it’s absolutely universal: every single rail system with grade crossings has had an accident with a car at least once. In this, the third post in my series about Phoenix’s Light Rail opening (you can read the first here, and the second here), I discuss the things that went wrong with their opening (like collisions with cars) and how Phoenix has dealt with them. From this we should be able to guess what we can expect to go wrong with Link, and how Sound Transit and Seattle can deal with those. I’m going to divide the problems into three groups: trouble with cars, trouble with people and trouble with the system.
This recent paper from the Brookings Institute’s Elizabeth Kneebone on so-called “Jobs Sprawl” is both interesting and slightly maddening. The “Jobs Sprawl” analysis is an attempt to measure the percentage of jobs in an employment area located near downtown (within three miles of the “center city”, defined arbirtrarily), sort of near downtown (three to ten miles away) and not at all near downtown (ten or more miles away). The paper notes that since the last study, in 2001, more jobs are being located outside of downtowns nationwide.
Seattle ranks as the tenth most “decentralized” major employment center, that is, the major employment with the tenth highest percentage of jobs located ten miles or more from the city center. In 2006, the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area had approximately 1,461,291 jobs, and 19.1% were within three miles of the center of the city, 24.8% were between three and ten miles away, and 56.0% were more than ten miles away. Seattle is also “rapidly decentralizing”, since the number of jobs being created more than ten miles away from the “center city” has grown much faster than the number of jobs within three miles of the heart of the city.
While that’s interesting, I have a serious problem with this analysis in that the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area has more than one downtown. Any job downtown Tacoma or Downtown Bellevue, since both are more than ten miles away from Third and Seneca or whatever is the center of Downtown Seattle, are “decentralized”, which means “job sprawl” according to Kneebone. And similarly any job in the University District is more than miles away from that point and is thus not centralized or decentralized. Having many centers may mean Seattle is “decentralized” – in fact that may be the very definition of “decentralized” – but that’s a pretty crummy definition of “jobs sprawl”. A job in North Bend is sprawled-out, a job in Downtown Tacoma or Downtown Bellevue certainly is not.
The Austin Contrarian has some other problems with the study, including a problem with the three and ten mile ‘polls’ used.
Sometimes we hear about Seattle and King County getting all of the transportation money from the rest of the state. Of course this sort of politics of resentment we might expect from the rest of the state, but is it a fair criticism? No:
By the most comprehensive measure, for every $1 King County residents contribute in taxes they’ll get a buck back through investments by the state, county and cities in the county between 2004-2017.
Pew, that’s a relief! I’m sure Rep. Roach is over it by now.
The Associated Press reports that Amtrak is spending $50 million on projects in the Pacific Northwest. The majority, $35 million, will go to a new maintenance facility and a new storage and employee building near King Street Station. You can see the full list nationwide list, totaling $1.3 billion here at Amtrak’s website.
The bulk of the money nationwide, 57%, is going to the Northeast Corridor Acela line. The most expensive project on the list is a $100 million bridge over the Niantac river in Connecticut. The current bridge is not aging well, and replacing it is the only way Amtrak can maintain its current 100 mph speed there. $40 million is going to a new commuter rail tunnel between New Jersey and New York.
Later this month, the Federal Railroad Administration will release a plan documenting how they plan to spend the $8 billion in high speed rail cash from the stimulus package. A couple preview videos below the fold:
