1939 NYC Subway Expansion MapVia Transport Politic, I find this ambitious 1939 NYC Subway Expansion Plan Map.  1939 NYC Subway Expansion Map Here’s what the system looks like today and here’s a timeline of the system maps. Its interesting to see that basically nothing has changed from 1954, and that even New York has had ambitious transit expansion plans that have gone basically no where. Alaska Railroad DMU Alaska 751 by Brian Bundridge The final car built by Colorado Railcar is Alaska Railroad DMU 751 shown above at BNSF’s Stacy Street Yard. The U.S. Forest Service and Alaska Railroad have teamed up for a new whistle stop service (pdf) that will allow the DMU to be used for recreation and transportation opportunities for users of the Chugach National Forest. It is a very interesting and forward thinking concept to take on and should be interesting to see the outcome of the project. The DMU is scheduled to be moved from Stacy Street Yard today for Harbor Island where it will be loaded onto a barge to Alaska. It is scheduled to depart sometime Wednesday or Thursday morning. Check out the video of the Alaska Railroad DMU (Quicktime Video). Not bad acceleration for something so big and tall! There is good news though. Value Recovery Group e-mailed us stating they are in the process in talks to purchase Colorado Railcar and continue development of the program. I am not sure if this also includes the Ultra-Dome cars that are very popular in Alaska as well. This could mean that agencies, such as Portland’s Tri-Met, could expand their fleet, if the company is returned. I’ll be watching this very closely. Metro Cuts UpdateMeanwhile in Oregon…While our state legislature fights over whether to uphold their commitment to HOV lanes required to build Eastside Light Rail, the Oregon state legislature is giving $250 million to a light rail expansion from Portland to Milwaukie. Maybe some in Olympia (obviously not all) want the Northwest’s future growth and employment to happen south of the Columbia? Cats Love Trains Too Cat on MTA Vintage Subway Car I wonder what other animals like trains? Some Good News From OlympiaThanks in part to all your phone calls and email, Representative Simpson’s first amendment (PDF) to the budget bill passed will almost definitely pass Monday! This amendment will strike Representative Clibborn’s requirement that the joint transportation committee assess the value of the I-90 express lanes before WSDOT can sign off on an EIS. Please check out the amendment and be sure to thank your reps – there’s a list of those who signed on at the top. He’s followed it up with a second amendment we also like, which will also move Monday. Jarrett’s senate amendment would have required an asset assessment as well, but it was an unfunded mandate – he included no money. This new Simpson amendment funds an assessment, and ensures it’s conducted by ST and WSDOT, not the joint transportation committee. He also makes sure Sound Transit’s CEO has a say in who the consultant will be, and specifically calls out that it must account for the previous agreements made regarding I-90. The best part? It has to be done by December 1st, meaning none of this mess would affect the East Link schedule. It essentially ties up all the loose ends that the Clibborn and Jarrett amendments created. The next part makes me cautiously optimistic. All this attention may have made an impact across the board. There’s another amendment from Judy Clibborn, and it seems pretty simple – it adds $10.6 million to the R8A project in this biennium. She’s been saying this in constituent email for a couple of days, but I wanted to hold off on writing anything about it until I had a reference. The catch (notice how there’s always a catch?) is that it’s specifically restricted to funding preliminary engineering. I don’t know whether that meshes with Sound Transit’s funding for the project, or if there’s even $10 million of preliminary engineering to be done, so we’ll see whether this is entirely positive - but it is a small step in the right direction. I’m not sure if either of these new amendments have had a vote yet, and as they’re both House-only, we’ll have to follow up with our legislators to ensure that they make it through the conference committee into the final bill. So, to round up on the three big Sound Transit-related legislative issues:
Overall, there’s been some great progress here! If you have time, I urge you to take a moment to thank Representative Simpson for pulling transit out of the fire here, and your own legislators if they helped him out. Whoops: The amendments are going to a vote on Monday, the first one hasn’t actually passed yet – but it has enough cosigners to do so. It looks like both of Simpson’s amendments strike Clibborn’s section 17, so the first one will probably be replaced with the new one. New Amtrak Cascades websiteI am a bit late on this but WSDOT has launched a rather nice and revamped Amtrak Cascades website in conjuction with its 10th anniversity of service. Very nicely done! Alaskan Way Crosswalk on StreetfilmsStreetfilms has another great Seattle video, this time of a crosswalk on Alaskan Way that automatically lights up when pedestrians step on the yellow crosswalk indicator. We’re on TwitterIf you’re a user of Twitter, be sure to follow @seatransitblog. Each new post on the blog sends out a tweet and we’ll be twittering about whatever transit-related nonsense is on our minds.
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Paper Mills Get $8bn in Federal Transpo MoneyThis should help give you an idea of just how broken the way we fund transportation in this country is: Paper Mills are looking to get about $8 billion in Federal transportation cash in 2009, according to the Nation, and the FTA will get $10.23 billion. International Paper alone will get close to $1 billion, twice as much Federal funding as Central Link’s total full funding grant award ($500 mn awarded over years) and a significant amount more than University Link’s full funding grant award ($813 million, also awarded over years). The money is technically a tax credit for using alternative fuels, but in this case the paper industry is adding fossil fuels to their natural bio-fuels but it’s still cash, and the cash did come from SAFETEA-LU, the last Federal Transportation bill. We have a surprisingly low-quality government. A Fix for Bad Roads: Don’t Make MoreMatt Yglesias linked to this Streetsblog interview with John Norquist (this is a great one, read the whole thing if you can) about efforts on the Federal level to improve road planning. Both pieces are very interesting, Norquist knows what good roads are and Matt Yglesias understands what good policy is. They also both include this graphic, from here.  Street comparison, from Congress for New Urbanism It’s clear that in the first image, you can’t cheaply build effective bus service for all residents of the culs-de-sac: no one bus stop can serve all culs-de-sac, and if you build many bus stops, the service slows and the bus becomes a poor alternative to driving. What may not be as obvious at first glance is the hidden costs of the roads pictured in the for image for local governments. Those culs-de-sac roads go no where, and therefore dump all drivers and pedestrians onto major arterials. Short trips like the one above can no longer be easily made on foot, and then even more cars are pushed onto the arterials. Those arterials become more congested and require more maintenance, more traffic mitigation infrastructure and the occasional widening project. Other hidden costs are the problems ambulances would have getting out of the culs-de-sac, and the costs of salting and paving these semi-private roads.So that second image is better not just for pedestrians, it’s also better for cars and much better for taxpayers. Yglesias rightly points out that the place to make changes in the rules that allow for the creation of these “bad” roads is in the state or local level. Well, Virginia has made a huge move here, stating that it will only provide maintenance services for roads in new sub-divisions that meet new guidelines for narrower roads and more connections to the larger road grid. For the state of Virginia, it has become too expensive to continue widening and the maintaining the major arterials and has developed a “connectivity index” framework for judging whether a new development will get maintenance help from the state or not. Virginia will not only refuse to fix pot holes on new roads that don’t fit within their system, they will refuse to plow those roads for snow. The Greater Great Washington post linked to has details on the specifics. Personally, I’d be happy if no new exurban developments whatsoever were started in Washington State, but I know that’s not realistic. We need to find a similar street-design framework for Washington State that encourages or requires new subdivision developers to build roads that connect commuters and are accessible by bicycle and pedestrian traffic as well as cars. Of course NIMBYs and developers will complain, but that’s their job, and we’ve done it their way long enough. If a relatively conservative state such as Virginia can pass legislation like this, we can do it in Washington, too. It wont be easy, considering that even the Democratic leadership in Olympia is beholden to the irrational subdivision developer group the BIAW, but with the state look at an ever widening deficit, the time may be right to pass progressive transportation legislation that saves the taxpayers, and their local governments, money. Second Amtrak Cascades to Vancouver Approved… Photo by mrbula But only during the Olympics… The fate of this train all comes down to money now. I suppose I’d be in support of a minor fee added to the tickets for the border crossing fee, but still, the hostility is nothing but greed. I still don’t see airlines getting charged for passengers going to/from YVR, why should Amtrak? This is all greed and makes me very sour to even think about having to pay extra, when I would easily spend hundreds of dollars up there, like many other travelers do. A $10 surcharge would be needed to cover the expense using the 2008 ridership numbers with a bit of cushion. That surcharge should only apply to those passengers going to Canada. This will raise the low price from $30 one way to $40 one way and a high of $50 to $60. Even with the current high fares, most of the weekend trains to Vancouver BC or to Seattle are sold out. Regardless of that fact, it does appear that the second train will bring an expected benefit of nearly $14 million dollars of revenue to the Canadians. Vancouver Sun story on April 1, 2009 - Vancouver Sun story on March 31, 2009 – H/T Ken Storey via Trainorders.com Representative Simpson Defends East Link!Rep Geoff Simpson, D-47th Publicola reports that Geoff Simpson, (D-47th), is stepping up to the plate! He’s got an amendment with over thirty signatures to counter Clibborn’s attack. I’m told that we need calls to your representatives right now to convince them to sign on, as they have until about 5pm to get on board the quickly lengthening train and join the majority of the region to support East Link! Please take a moment and make a call to each of your two representatives – ask them to sign Simpson’s amendment to protect light rail. You can find them with this handy district finder. We Still Need to Take Action!Have you contacted your legislators yet? Without a small, $30 million change in the coming state budget, light rail to Bellevue will be delayed for years. Don’t let the state thwart the will of the voters — tell them to fund HOV lanes across I-90 like they promised to. (Comments are disabled for this post. You can comment in the linked entry.)
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Senator Jarrett Peddles A Contrived StorySenator Fred Jarrett On the Senate Democrats’ blog, and presumably on the Seattle Times shortly, Fred Jarrett offers an attempt to blame someone else, somewhere else, a long time ago, for the active attack on Sound Transit we’re seeing today. It’s barely worth picking apart. He tries to build transit credentials by claiming he helped develop Sound Move. Actually, amusingly, he says Sound Move created Sound Transit in 1996 – he talks about all this ‘hard work’ he did, but missed that Sound Transit was created in 1993, and they put Sound Move on the ballot. So, let me set the record straight. All this nonsense about RTID and Roads and Transit is a way to distract from the fact that there isn’t money in either the House or Senate budget for R8A, despite the state committing to funding it the year after Roads and Transit failed. If money in transportation is in “short supply”, where’d the increase in viaduct funding from $2.4 billion to $3.14 billion come from? How about the $1.5 billion for Tacoma HOV lanes? Nobody wants to explain why $70 million of the federal stimulus package went to I-405, but the same bill took money out of R8A – when the region voted against funding 405 expansion, and for funding light rail. He writes: “Sound Transit and the WSDOT have a plan to resolve these issues and meet all of the East Link project milestones.” Is that so? Where is this plan? Or is saying this just a delaying tactic? And RTID would have funded $33 million? Doesn’t Sound Transit’s new increase in funding of $45 million more than cover those lost funds? I’d imagine it does. And this BRT comment from the Senator? The 1976 memorandum of agreement says ‘fixed guideway’, and that’s not BRT. And as for the Senator’s gas tax comments? He says “How do we deal with the constitutional prohibition on using gas tax funds to construct I-90 for transit?” HOV lanes are a highway project. Stage 1, as the Senator notes, was paid for partially by the state – with gas tax money. HOV projects around the state are routinely paid for with gas taxes. This is nothing new, and the Senator should know that. Then he asks “How do we negotiate waivers with the Federal Highway Administration for the federal funds used to build an interstate for transit purposes?” The federal government funded these lanes with the requirement that they be used for transit purposes. The state has no stake in the I-90 express lanes past R8A. They were over 90% paid for by the federal government, and there is no legal avenue that justifies the state ‘negotiating’ for any money before giving them up. There are agreements in place that govern these transactions already, as I’ve mentioned before. I’ll be following up on this specifically soon. It’s not hard to understand these issues – but it is hard to understand how this can be so clear to Larry Phillips and Dow Constantine, and so confusing to Senator Jarrett. The voters came through with a decision and backed it up with funding, and the state thinks this is a bargaining chip. I think all of our readers can see through this op-ed. A Review of Route 25For April Fools’ Day, the Seattle Times arts critic rode the 25 and wrote a review:
It goes on like that for a while. How would you review your bus route? ST2 Sales Tax Hike Takes EffectToday marks the day that Sound Transit begins collecting revenues on the sales tax increase that most of us approved last November. Nope, not an April Fool joke! Sound Transit’s previous sales tax take of 0.4% is now 0.9%. Totally worth it. BREAKING: Senate Moves a LittleSenator Fred Jarrett (D-Mercer Island), candidate for King County executive, has inserted the following amendment into the Senate Transportation Bill, SB 5352.
This is in direct conflict with the House’s provision to effectively block WSDOT negotiations with Sound Transit over the center roadway. Assuming the Senate version wins out over the House’s, this would remove the procedural obstacle to East Link and leave only the funding one. My source says the vote on the amendment was approximately 29-19; when they arrive, we’ll watch with interest the Yeas and Nays on this pretty straight up-or-down vote on East Link. There are still two other serious problems with the treatment of Sound Transit in the proposed budgets, to say nothing of the gutting of funding for intercity rail. Take Action: Mail Legislators About Light Rail to Bellevue Washington State Capitol Building. Picture by swishphotos. We’ve talked about about R8A and other legislature inference plenty over the last few days. It’s time for us to take action. We need to contact leaders in Olympia and tell them what we think:
Here’s a list of important transportation legislators:
The email address for your legislators can be found on the state legislature website, or you can use this form to automatically email your legislators based on your address. You can email Governor Gregoire on her website. After the jump is the letter we’re sending out which reflects the above talking points. Feel free to change the text as you see fit and forward it to the above legislators as well as your own — let them know you’re paying attention. Today is Drive to Work Day Traffic on I-5, Courtesy of WSDOT April 1st is Drive to Work Day, an event created to raise awareness of car driving among pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders. The Seattle Transit Blog is joining with other local groups and a world-wide-movement to promote Drive to Work Day in order to increase gas tax revenues for the Washington State Department of Transportation so that new roads projects can be started in our area. Our state transportation budget is severely in the red and more driving is the only means to more revenue for our state. Each day millions of car drivers are put in danger, forced to drive more quickly in less traffic or otherwise inconvenienced by those on foot, on the bus or on bike. The millions of Americans who take transit, ride their bike or walk to work each day are not taking part in the American Dream of driving a single-occupancy-vehicle to work, and are causing millions of acres of land in United States to go unpaved every year. Do your part and make roads safe for single-occupancy vehicles: Drive To Work Today! H/T to Bernie. |
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