I wonder if there are any opportunities for neighborhood feeders to take the load off some of the P&R lots?

Maybe for some of the major close in lots like Eastgate, South Kirkland, Mercer Island. But the ongoing cost of running the bus service (~$6 per boarding would be my guess) gets you pretty close to the cost of funding a bigger garage. At some point I’d hope that there would be a fee for parking. Charging a reduced fee (or free) for carpools would help free up spaces.

It’s the “far out” locations for new P&R lots I was thinking of. Mini lots of a couple hundered cars would support Eastside routes into Bellevue for transfers or perhaps direct to Seattle. The advantage is you intercept traffic before it gets to the most congested points. Several small lots along say SR-522, SR-203 or SR-202 would be sort of like local service rather than requiring a drive into Woodinville, Mill Creek or Redmond. I think it’s also easier to locate small scale developments. And land always seems to be a good capital investment. Maybe some of lots along the BNSF Woodinville Subdivision could someday become train stations.

As for Aurora/99, I suspect there is enough demand to justify going straight to rail. Besides rebuilding it along the same lines as MLK was rebuilt (though with more through lanes and possibly with an elevated guideway and stations) would do a lot to make the street much more pedestrian and bike friendly. On top of that due to all of the auto oriented businesses Aurora is relatively low hanging fruit for TOD.

The next quantum leap in ridership is going to come from quality (RR, rail, whatever) and better land use.

The PSRC alternatives assume minimal transit improvements beyond baseline (ST2), and may not accurate model changes in land use, and that is why they don’t deliver the mode share.

Some ideas:
- Buses running at 10 minute intervals on all arterials in the UGA
- A frequent, two-way Sounder network for longer distance travel (incl. Eastside rail)
- An extensive light rail network (i.e. more than a single 60 mile spine) that goes to most sections of the city and most suburbs, for medium-length trips.
- Supportive land use and street connectivity

Expensive, yes. But expensive compared building highway infrastructure for all of these trips throughout an ever sprawling metro area?

With an integrated system like this it becomes convenient for many throughout the metro area to use transit (or to walk, bike or unicycle) for everyday errands. And no, a clean, well-lit low-floor bus that runs every 5 minutes and goes exactly where you need to go is not intrinsically less attractive than a car.

Peak-hour transit to work sites is essential, and it increasingly attracts suburbanites who are willing to ride to work but not to use transit otherwise. Though after time they’ll start using transit for a few other things, especially going downtown, or when their car breaks.

Off-peak transit is important, not just for shift workers and carless households, but so that people can use transit for multi-trip chains. If the bus goes everywhere I want to go today and tonight, I might ride it. If it stops at 9pm or doesn’t go where my evening activity is, I’ll drive all day, even though I could take the bus to work and back and then get out the car. Or maybe I can get a bus to the activity at 7pm but not back home at 10pm, so I’ll have to drive both ways.

London’s tube was built primarily to get working-class workers to jobs, but it was consciously extended to 18 hours a day to make carless living feasable. (Of course, motor cars didn’t exist when it was originally built.) Likewise, the PATH trains from NYC to New Jersey are called “commuter trains” but they run 24 hours every 5-15 minutes, making a carless life feasable. The Caltrain in SF runs one an hour till 10:30pm, and every two hours on Sundays. Not so good for carless living. And Sounder runs only peak hours: forget it unless you’re going to work in those hours.

I don’t know of anywhere that has more than one HOV lane on the same road. That would be a big social change to limit SOV traffic to one or two lanes. Maybe someday. (Unless Tim Eyeman passes an initiative to prohibit it.)

There’s an argument that HOV lanes don’t exactly do what they intended to. A carpool is when multiple people who would otherwise drive separately, drive together. But a family outing is not a carpool because the kids can’t drive and ma and pa want to travel together (that’s the purpose of the trip). And UW students pick up people next to campus so that they can qualify for the cheap HOV parking spaces. In most cases people don’t have a choice whether to take one person or multiple people on the trip; that depends on outside factors. You can find somebody to carpool to Microsoft with, but you can’t find somebody who wants to go to the store at the same time you do. HOV lanes are great for providing a speedy lane for transit, and they discourage SOV driving in the abstract (although that hasn’t cut the number of SOVs on the road!), but their ability to increase carpooling has been less effective.

So the effect of this split is ambiguous. Overall it helps people by making the buses more on time. But it inconveniences those whose trip was suddenly split. But if Metro funding depends on more trips, it’s good. But if Metro funding depends on more one-seat rides, it’s bad. Counting by passenger-miles benefits those who take long trips but disadvantages those who take short trips (by shifting money away from routes that are predominantly short trips; e.g., the 2 vs the 358).

Transit relieves congestion, for the person using the transit. Regional society, which is paying the bill, does not experience this relief- road usage rises to congestion levels that act as an informal tax, and stays there. Congestion is just a characteristic of road vehicles, and should more properly be treated as a turbulent flow condition.

If you were to read the history, you would find that the cities with dense networks did not build dense networks- they simply built one line at a time, over and over again. Naturally, there will be a few exceptions to this rule, but that is generally the case.

It’s important to remember that your ability to make all your trips by transit is largely the result of destinations being built where the transit goes, rather than transit going to the destinations. The instances of a tram stop being built for the Opera House are vastly outweighed by the housing and commerce built near the tram line.

Finally, the ability to ride transit to work makes or breaks the deal for most of us. If you need a car to get to work, you’re probably going to own a car. If you don’t, it becomes a dispensable luxury.

The move to an electronic measure of radio listening has led to a huge revamp in the radio ratings biz. May I suggest a similar move in the world of trip data collection?

But again it will ALWAYS favor the car, because the car only requires the gentle push of an accelerator.

Even a paraplegic can travel solo by car. They’re not likely to ever travel as much or as far in an unpowered wheelchair!

but the notion that commute trips are more important than non-work trips, or that battling congestion is more important than other transit objectives doesn’t sit well with me. That’s a car-oriented approach. You can’t just put that out as a truism.

What you put forth is altruism. It’s the commute based trips that make transit economically feasible. The reason a tourist can go to London and take the tube anywhere in the city is because that system gets millions of people to work everyday in a density where cars simply can not work. Of course high capacity transit also benefits from consistent demand so enhancing off peak trips where ever possible through routing or TOD is synergistic.

When I think of great rail cities I’ve lived in or visited, the most important advantage that rail has provided is to be able to make *all* my trips on transit rather than only my work trip. It’s a no-brainer to use transit (whatever mode) to get to work. It’s another thing entirely to tour a city by transit (needs a network and stops wherever pedestrians want to be concentrated), or to use transit to visit friends across town or take your kids to school. For those trips, the visibility, frequency and simplicity of rail give it an advantage that isn’t as important in the decision to use transit to work – the same trip at the same time every day.

I don’t particularly care, living mostly in cities or metropolitan areas, whether rail extends 40 miles out – it doesn’t add a lot of value over buses. The place where rail adds value, in my experience, is for transforming the way I can make all the other trips in life – the non-work trips that make up the vast majority of trips, tours, whatever. And the cities that have done that particularly well have adopted a dense urban network rather than a model of getting to cities 40 miles away.