There’s a lot to Sara’s post and you should go and read it, but to summarize the most crucial and strongest arguments are that (i) parking lots make the current environment worse; (ii) revenue from lots will make it harder for development to pencil out; and (iii) it’ll be hard to take away the parking once it becomes burdensome. Rebuttals after the jump.
This morning, state Senator Dan Swecker (R-20, Lewis County) dropped a very short bill that probably won’t go anywhere, but I want to bring up to point out just how out of touch some of our legislators are with regional priorities and, well, the future in general. Despite the passage of Proposition 1 and ongoing negotiations to get East Link light rail built, Swecker seems to feel it’s a good idea to waste time and public money in a tightly scheduled session to tilt at windmills. The meat of the bill is simple:
A light rail system or any other rail fixed guideway system may not be constructed or operated on the Interstate 90 floating bridge.
Given that most of the I-90 bridge was paid for by the feds under an agreement that the express lanes were for transit, and as that agreement was updated in 2004 to specify light rail, I have this question for the Senator:
If you’d like to break this agreement, how, exactly, do you plan to pay back the feds for the contribution they made? Inflation-adjusted, it would some $900 million. I suspect the cities involved, who only allowed the I-90 bridge to be built under this agreement, might have some mitigation requests as well.
A call into Senator Swecker’s office was not returned.
Update 2: Stevens’ office returned my call – saying the Senator declines to comment on why she signed on, and that I should talk to Swecker – who still hasn’t returned my call.
I ran into Bellevue Deputy Mayor Conrad Lee Sunday morning and took the opportunity to ask him some crucial questions about East Link. He was appointed to the position of Deputy Mayor just last week and replaces Claudia Balducci, who was recently appointed to the Sound Transit Board by Dow Constantine. With the new balance of power in the city council favoring more conservative councilmembers, Bellevue’s preferred alternative is likely to change quite drastically from the alignment chosen last year. Lee has supported PRT (personal rapid transit) and other issues that we’ve raised questions about in the past.
Below are some paraphrased quotes from notes I took of the interview. I have a breakdown of Lee’s responses along with an outline of some arguments we’ve made in regards to his proposals.
This must get fixed immediately: the cease-and-desist lifted, any fines refunded with interest, and the policy changed. We should be helping these lots get the word out, not shutting them down.
Yesterday, Mayor McGinn’s office responded and announced that it would suspend enforcement of the statue that outlaws all-day paid parking near stations. McGinn’s office sent a press release saying it would propose a new policy within 30 days.
“The current law has good intentions — to promote mixed-use development. But in today’s economic conditions it does not seem to make sense,” the press release quotes McGinn as saying. “We don’t want the primary land use around those stations to be parking, and we certainly don’t want businesses to be torn down for parking.” Even keeping these goals in mind, the press release continues, “it makes sense to consider allowing market-rate parking on existing lots near the Othello station and elsewhere in the city until the economy can support new mixed-use development.”
Color us impressed by the new Mayor’s swift response. We’ll have full analysis of McGinn’s new forthcoming policy proposal when it’s announced.
I repeat myself, but monthly ridership numbers are highly sensitive to small sample size issues, seasonal variations, and so on. Drawing conclusions from day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month comparisons is perilous, to say the least.
Yet commenters like to do just that, so I’m pleased to report that December’s weekday ridership numbers (pdf) increased from November’s 14,399 to 14,639, or less than 2%. Saturday (12,626, up 28%) and Sunday (9,853, up 26%) were much higher than November. All three numbers are well off the October all-time highs, generally a strong month for transit ridership.
If that’s not a small enough sample size for you, post-Airport Link the weekday mean was 16,684, which would be an all-time high if taken over a whole month. Of course, that mixes a heavy air travel week with a light working week, so making sense of all this will simply have to wait.
Comment from Ben: It’s worth noting that the week after Christmas saw much higher numbers. Excluding New Years Eve and New Years, the last week’s average was over 18,000. I suspect we’re looking at an 18,000 or higher daily average in January.
“They’re going to take their pants off on the train?” he said.
Oh yes, they did. They all did.
In the spirit of the Fremont Zombie Walk, and inspired by no-pants subway rides in New York City and 43 other cities around the globe, Seattle’s Link light-rail line was initiated Sunday with its first-ever No Pants! Light Rail Ride, organized by Emerald City Improv.
Hundreds of participants paid for the round-trip fare, then shed their pants on the platform and rode the line to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport all afternoon wearing boxer briefs, swimming trunks and Speedo-style underwear.
And the P-I has a nice photo-journal and a fun video. This all begs the important question: Would anyone in their right mind take off their pants on a BRT line? I believe that is check, and mate.
Many people, like myself, now have ORCA cards issued by their employer in addition to the personal card they own. I carry both of them in my wallet. The problem is I can’t tap my wallet on the reader with two cards. The reader tells me “one card at a time please” and prevents double-charging, which is a good thing but it requires me to take the card out to tap. My solution to this is to wrap my personal card in aluminum foil, then keep the card separated from the other ORCA card with the other cards in my wallet. The first time I did this was with 10 layers of foil but I tried with just a single layer and it works. The metallic foil effectively shields the card from radio waves and prevents it from being read. The other cards keep the foil far enough from the card you want to be readable. This means only the side of the wallet that the unwrapped card is on can be read.
I’m aware that there are similar products for passports, enhanced drivers licenses, debit cards and other contactless cards but this is a quick and cheap solution you can do at home. This trick also appeals to people who don’t want strangers ‘sniffing’ their contactless cards for potentially malicious purposes.
We’ve acquired a few new commenters who seem intent on replaying the rail vs. BRT battles that were exhausted quite some time ago. Rather than continuing with scattershot comments here’s a post:
1. Getting dedicated right-of-way for buses on the freeway is cheap: you just repaint the thing and make new signs. Maybe you build some fancy stations. It is incredibly cost-effective. The cost is so low that it isn’t mutually exclusive with rail, but it is politically difficult because of SOV interests. Unfortunately, BRT “advocates” spend all their time arguing with rail advocates telling them how to do their project better instead of doing the actual, necessary work of building a coalition to make this lane conversion happen. I’ll take the liberty of speaking for the rail community to say that if there were a measure to turn any existing GP freeway or arterial lane into bus-only, HOV-6, or whatever, you would get overwhelming support from rail advocates. We are not the faction you have to win over.
To plug a $11 million budget gap, Community Transit is proposing a 25-cent fare increase along with service cuts and suspensions. The biggest blow to riders is a proposal that would effectively suspend Sunday and holiday service. For the past two years, the agency has been limiting budget cuts in non-service related areas with the exception of a 75-cent fare increase back during the summer of 2008 when fuel prices peaked. If approved by the CT Board, the changes will go in effect in June.
Nearly all of Community Transit’s 64 local and commuter bus routes would be affected in an effort to eliminate service that is duplicated by other providers, streamline routes and make existing service more efficient. The agency is also proposing to suspend all service on Sundays and major holidays, including DART paratransit service and Swift bus rapid transit. By closing its base on these lower ridership days, the agency achieves 47 percent of the proposal’s savings with only 35 percent of total service hours cut and an impact to fewer customers.
The proposed fare increase would raise local bus and DART fares by 25 cents for all fare categories: youth, adult and reduced fare (senior/disabled/Medicare). Even with the proposed fare increase, Community Transit’s local bus fares would be comparable with other local transit fares in the region. The proposed fare increase would raise about $250,000 in the second half of 2010 and $500,000 in 2011.
Community Transit has a page up for exact route-to-route cuts and suspensions as well as more information on the fare changes. The agency is also holding five public meetings over the course of January to keep its riders informed about the changes.
Jan. 12, 5:30-7 p.m.
Snohomish County South County PUD office, 21018 Highway 99, Edmonds
Jan. 14, 6:30-8 p.m.
Marysville Library, 6120 Grove St., Marysville
Jan. 19, 10 a.m.-noon
Everett Station Weyerhaeuser Room, 3201 Smith Ave., Everett, on the fourth floor
This meeting will focus on impacts to DART paratransit customers.
Jan. 20, 5:30-7 p.m.
Monroe School District Administration Building, 200 E. Fremont St., Monroe
The Stranger seems to have begun throwing its weight behind a 12th Ave couplet routing for the streetcar:
There’s also an opportunity for compromise: Seattle can split the line in two directions, as several neighborhood leaders have advocated, between Broadway and 12th Avenue, which would satisfy the hospitals near Broadway and provide a boon to the 12th Avenue neighborhood.
In fact, that compromise is not one worth supporting and is a bad idea, as we’ve argued in the past. Though a strong argument could be made for new bus service on 12th Ave, a streetcar couplet with three blocks of separation — and with one block up laying atop a steep hill — is unprecedented and would create significant access issues that could dampen ridership:
The first and most fundamental problem with the 12th Ave alignment is the couplet. While the couplet increases total coverage of the streetcar, it dramatically reduces the quality of that coverage. By separating the northbound and southbound travel by 3 blocks, the area that is close to both a northbound and southbound station is reduced significantly.
12th Ave couplet has a significantly worse walkshed.
We also tackled development arguments in that previous post. ECB, the former Stranger transportation geek, recently editorialized on Publicola supporting our conclusions. The Stranger, often a strong and smart ally on transportation issues, made the wrong call here and should re-evaluate its position.
UPDATE: Andrew Smith (founder of STB) made a comment that rings so true I wanted to add it to the main post.
Here’s the problem with this “12th ave couplet is great because it spurs development on 12th and provides access to the hospitals” argument: you can’t say 1) three blocks isn’t too far to walk and 2) it has to go to 12th ave to drive development.
If three blocks isn’t too far, it doesn’t need to go to 12th. Walk three blocks, no big deal. If three blocks is too far, then the couplet is a bad idea because any destination is always three blocks from the train.
Dow Constantine, as King County Executive, appoints 10 of the Sound Transit Governing Board’s 18 members. Today he nominated three new members to the board: Bellevue City Councilmember Claudia Balducci, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, and new King County Councilmember Jan Drago. These three replace outgoing members Seattle’s Greg Nickels, Kirkland’s Mary Alice-Burleigh, and former Exec Kurt Triplett. All have solid pro-rail credentials.
Constantine also reappointed Issaquah’s Fred Butler and County Councilmembers Julia Patterson and Pete von Reichbauer. Of these, von Reichbauer is probably the shakiest from a “build as much rail as possible now” point of view, as he was one of only two board members (with Ron Sims) to vote against ST2 going to the ballot in 2008.
Constantine, Seattle’s Richard Conlin, Councilmember Larry Phillips, and Redmond Mayor John Marchione are continuing their terms on the Board.
All six of these appointments are subject to County Council approval, which should happen on January 11th in time for the next board meeting on the 14th. It certainly casts new light on the Larry Phillips maneuvers that got Jan Drago on the Council and broke the 4-4 partisan deadlock there.
And let’s spare a moment to think who the appointees might have been had Susan Hutchison won. There is certainly a crop of not-so-progressive Bellevue officials to choose from.
4. The city has issued a cease-and-desist order against the Grocery Outlet at MLK Jr. Way S. and S. Rainier Ave. for illegally operating a park-and-ride for light rail users. According to the order, issued by the Department of Planning and Development in September, park-and-rides are illegal in areas near rail stations. The violation carries a fine of up to $500 per day.
I’m hardly a tool of the auto-and-pavement lobby but this is insane. The reason to oppose park and rides is that they cost a lot of public money ($40k a space in some cases) for a not a lot of riders, and because they take up valuable space that could be used for more vibrant development. In some cases, people who park might otherwise have walked, taken the bus, or biked to the station.
Here we have private lots that aren’t costing a dime of tax money, and are in fact generating parking tax revenue; an abundance of empty gravel pits around all Rainier Valley stations, so that there’s no shortage of TOD locations; and of course, a small parking fee to limit users to those who have really bad bus transfers, live too far to walk, and are strongly disinclined to bike. It’s a perfect situation. My anecdotal experience, unfortunately, has been that the lots haven’t been all that well used, probably mostly because of the media-wide message that there’s no parking around light rail stations.
This must get fixed immediately: the cease-and-desist lifted, any fines refunded with interest, and the policy changed. We should be helping these lots get the word out, not shutting them down.
I have an email in to the Mayor’s office on what his position is on all this.
[UPDATE: This RVP comment thread indicates the lot has already gone to 4-hour max parking due to city zoning. That is beyond useless because most four-hour uses of Link occur during times when Residential Parking Zones are not in effect, so there is abundant free street parking.]
In Chad Newton’s provocative stop spacing post last week, I decided to omit his graph of ridership per mile vs. center city density. The comments made it clear that that was a mistake. So here it is:
I thought it was pretty self-evident that dense cities support transit use more, but share whatever you learn from this in the comments.
Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn has nominated a replacement to head the city’s Department of Transportation. Peter Hahn, currently deputy public works administrator for the city of Renton, faces confirmation by the city council.
This blog previously editorialized that the new Mayor should keep Grace Crunican, who has done an excellent job moving the city’s transportation department toward a sustainable, urbanist agency. She was a hot potato during the Mayoral election for her department’s troubles in responding to the 2008 snowstorms and announced her decision to resign last week. She will stay on board for three weeks after Hahn begins work at SDOT on January 19th to help transition the agency to its new leadership. Hahn is expected to actually head the agency beginning February 5th.
The scale of Snohomish County’s public works department — which Hahn used to administer — isn’t much less than SDOT, The Stranger reports. While SDOT has 750 employees and a $310 million budget, Hahn’s current group has about 650 employees and a budget of $200 million. Still, we don’t know much about Hahn’s views on public transit, complete streets, and other policy positions that are important to us. We for now safely assume that he will take his policy direction from the Mayor, who is no slouch on sustainable transportation.
A good sign is Hahn’s taste in women. The P-I reports that Hahn’s wife, Mary McCumber, is a board member of Futurewise — a progressive group focused on TOD and sustainable growth — supported the Surface/Transit Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement option when she was a stakeholder on that project and was executive director of PSRC for 12 years.
The Bellevue City Council has now elected its mayor and deputy mayor (they choose from council members) – Don Davidson and Conrad Lee, respectively. Both received money from Kemper Freeman Jr. during the election, and both have questionable opinions on transit.
The Seattle Times has an interesting interview up with Mayor Davidson. I call it interesting not because it offers anything new, but because it contains what I consider to be dog whistle phrases as they relate to building light rail through Bellevue. These are the ones I really noticed, from his interview responses:
“I kind of represent a more conservative element.”
Great news! A conservative won’t want to spend extra money, which means he’s saying “I’ll support a surface alignment through downtown Bellevue that saves hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, reduces risk, and keeps East Link on schedule.” (If you detect sarcasm here, you’re on the money.)
“You’re going to find people a little more aware of the taxpayers’ burden.”
This says to me: “I’m not going to ask Bellevue constituents for any tunnel funding.”
“I’m not after light rail, but I am after how it affects Bellevue.”
Uh-oh. This could be adding up to mean “I don’t want surface – I want a tunnel and I want Sound Transit to pay for it.” What’s more, that would really mean “Because the eastside will be paying for this tunnel anyway, many of the same taxpayers will be footing the bill – but this saves me the political cost of asking for it.”
“They haven’t figured out how to get across Lake Washington.”
Mayor Davidson is perfectly aware of how East Link will get across Lake Washington. He’s playing to the element who refuses to accept independent engineering study showing light rail over the I-90 bridge is feasible using existing technology. We could be hearing: “I don’t like the R8A project and won’t raise a finger to support it.”
(last one) “It’s going to be quite a bit of time before we see light rail being laid here.“
If you live or work on the eastside, this is a little concerning. The mayor of Bellevue should be supporting the schedule as it stands, not making remarks disparaging to a project his constituents support.
So, Mayor Davidson: You claim to be conservative. If I’m reading this right, you probably don’t want Bellevue to pay for a tunnel. If that’s the case, the conservative choice is an affordable surface alternative.
Update: As I was writing this, the Times’ Bellevue Blog has more, and it seems to back up this read. He definitely doesn’t want Bellevue to pay for a tunnel, and he points out Beacon Hill being funded by Sound Transit. It’s interesting that he doesn’t make the distinction between Sound Transit and North King, though – Bellevue didn’t pay for any of the Beacon Hill tunnel. Almost all of North King is Seattle – so essentially, Seattle taxpayers paid for Beacon Hill. Keep that in mind as this discussion moves forward.
Update 2: Davidson also claims: “we maybe could get to Redmond if we used a surface system.” As he almost definitely means downtown Redmond, that’s factually incorrect. The money in ST2 only gets us to Overlake.
Human Transit, a very technical and theory focused transit blog by Australia based Jarrett Walker, this weekend posted and article about the unique benefits that Seattle enjoys when it comes to transit. He uses Seattle as an example of how chokepoints, in Seattle’s case geographically created chokepoints, creates very valuable opportunities for transit to becomes more competitive with cars, compared to cities that have few chokepoints. Jarrett writes:
If you want a real focus for sustainable transport improvements, however, look for chokepoints.
A chokepoint is anywhere in the transport network where many different trip paths have to go through the same point to get past a geographic barrier. Bridges and tunnels are chokepoints. So are mountain passes. Wherever a steep hill is right next to a body of water, the little ledge in between them is a chokepoint, as it often only has room for one road, or a road plus a single track of rail.
No North American city has more chokepoints than Seattle. The city itself consists of three peninsulas with narrow water barriers between them. Further barriers are created by steep hills in most parts of the city. Nowhere in Seattle can you travel in a straight line for more than a few miles without going into the water or over a cliff.
Seattle’s geographical isolation from its suburbs, of course, means it is also surrounded by chokepoints. There are only two bridges across Lake Washington to the east, and to take your car across Puget Sound on the west you have to use a car ferry, which means your trip will be no faster or more frequent than that of a transit passenger.
Transit planning is frustrating in such a place, but road planning is even more so. Ultimately, Seattle’s chokepoints have the effect of reducing much of the complex problem of mode share to a critical decision about a strategic spot. If you give transit an advantage through a chokepoint, you’ve given it a big advantage over a large area.
He continues:
The lesson of Seattle is that successful transit infrastructure responds to demand, and what drives transit demand is high overall travel demand plus serious barriers to driving. In Seattle, a lot of the barriers to driving take the form of hassle and delay, due to limited capacity through chokepoints.
In other words chokepoints act as an equalizers between transit and cars. Give priority to transit at the chokepoint and you improve its relative attractiveness over cars to a large area. The westbound 3+ HOV lane on SR-520 is a great example.
The relative attractiveness between cars and transit is most commonly model using a logitmodel. As the attractiveness of transit and cars begin to equalize something interesting happens. Each time transit becomes more attractive, through a reduced travel time of 2 minutes for example, the marginal mode share increases even more than it did for the last 2 minutes of travel time savings. Simply put a travel time savings of 2 minutes is more important when the travel time of car and transit are already close or getting closer. If a car takes 30 minutes but transit takes 50 minutes a 2 minute improvement doesn’t mean much. But if a car takes 30 minutes and transit takes 34 minutes a 2 minute improvement does much more to gain new riders.
This is why Chokepoints like SR-520 eastbound, where transit can travel as fast or faster than cars, especially during peak periods, are places where transit is so competitive with cars. And as Jarrett points out chokepoints are where this confluence of events naturally occur. Read his full post here. There are some good things in it!
UPDATE 1:15 – Jarrett has posted a follow-up piece here.
If you’ve got nothing better to do this Sunday, here’s another excuse to take Link. New York-based Improv Everywhere is having its 8th annual ‘No Pants! Subway Ride’ and invites cities around the world to pantslessly jump on board. With light rail now up and running in Seattle, Emerald City Improv is snagging the chance for locals to participate in the global event. The ‘No Pants’ ride, which was conceived in 2002, attracted 1200 participants in New York City alone last year plus 1000 more in other cities. Here is some information about this year’s Seattle event (RSVP on the Facebook page):
Every January, Improv Everywhere in New York stages their annual “No Pants! Subway Ride.” Cities around the globe participate. This year, Emerald City Improv in Seattle invites you to participate in our first annual “No Pants! Light Rail Ride.”
This event will occur SUNDAY, JANUARY 10th, from 12:00- 3:00
REQUIREMENTS FOR PARTICIPATION:
1) Willing to take pants off on light rail
2) Able to keep a straight face about it
WHERE TO MEET:
Meet at the plaza at 4th Ave and Pine St, across from Westlake Center, at noon.
For the sake of decency, though, you’ll probably need to wear underpants. Assuming ST police and security manage not to throw any fits, we should hope to avoid what happened in New York during their 5th annual ‘No Pants!’ ride:
The fifth annual No Pants ride was abruptly halted by a cop. All passengers, including those not participating, were forced to exit the train as it was taken out of service. 8 people were handcuffed in their underwear and taken into custody. A month later a judge dismissed all of the charges. It is not illegal to wear your underwear in public in New York City. Just ask the Naked Cowboy. The incident was reported by news agencies around the world. David Letterman made two monologue jokes, about it and staged a No Pants Cab Ride as a parody. Keith Olbermann interviewed Agent Todd about the legality of No Pants. Around 150 people participated in the ride.
The last two days the Times has had storiesabout turning Paine Field into a real airport. Airports aren’t really our gig but I thought there were some interesting interfaces with stuff we usually talk about. In no particular order:
Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn has nominated a replacement to head the city’s Department of Transportation. Peter Hahn, currently deputy public works administrator for the city of Renton, faces confirmation by the city council.
