Bad Reliability Metrics "Link from Mt. Baker Station", by Zargoman A few months ago there was some anecdotal evidence that Central Link wasn’t very reliable with respect to its schedule and scheduled headways for various reasons. My subjective impression is that this has improved somewhat, but there’s no way you’d be able to tell from Sound Transit’s publicly available data. More after the jump. (more…) Tunnel Equity The Beacon Hill tunnel (Photo by litlnemo's husband Jason) [UPDATE (Adam here): I did a few calculations to put the debate about whether a tunnel through Beacon Hill was necessary to rest. Beacon Hill station is very roughly ~280 ft above sea level, and SODO is ~20 ft. Using ST's design specs of 4% this means that an elevated structure of ~6,500 ft would be needed to climb from SODO up over the hill. Another one of equal length would be needed on the other side as well. Pretty unrealistic isn't it?] Although I’d obviously like to see Bellevue pay for a Link tunnel under Downtown Bellevue, as someone who isn’t going to pay the very large costs I’m leery of taking a really strong position on it. A common argument, however, is that Seattle is getting a very long tunnel from its downtown to Roosevelt on Sound Transit’s dime, so why not Bellevue? It’s a natural question to ask, but betrays a pretty shallow understanding of the underlying concerns. More after the jump. Editorial: Site ‘Future Downtown’ Bellevue’s Station Right 'Lining up for the north bus' at the Bellevue Transit Center by Oran In my interview last month with Bellevue councilmember Conrad Lee, hearing Lee’s emphasis on the unimportance of rail station placement struck a nerve with me because that kind of thinking is exactly why rail alignments are often fouled up. After Kevin Wallace introduced his “Vision Line” proposal, it was evident that the plan was conceived on two main premises (aside from impacts mitigation) of cost and planning. While the argument for reducing East Link’s capital costs is relatively straightforward, the one for planning treads into rather muddy grounds, which pretty much renders the cost-benefit factor questionable. The bulk of this planning argument is often grounded in the belief that the “future downtown” of Bellevue will be much closer to or centered around the east side of I-405. And to be frank, I wasn’t aware that downtown districts could jump 8-lane freeways. We editorialized last November about the importance of siting rail stations correctly. I want to follow up on the growth of Downtown Bellevue specifically, and why a “Vision Line” station cannot serve the city center as effectively as proponents make it sound, now and in the future. Back in 2008, we had a roundtable discussion on the use of the old BNSF corridor for passenger rail, and Andrew Smith touched upon this counterargument:
There are three main points I want to break down that highlight the argument against building a station serving this theoretical “future city center.” More below the jump. HOV 3+ And Transit Later, With Two CaveatsI really don’t care whether we have HOV 3+, HOV 5+, or transit only lanes on the 520 bridge replacement. Even 3+ will keep transit flowing, and if it turns out there’s a problem, we can change it to 5+ later. I especially don’t care about putting rail on the bridge. There is no plan to connect it to anything. Whatever we build now will almost definitely turn out in the long run to be in the wrong place, or installed the wrong way. That’s a great way to kill future transit ballot measures – opponents can just point and laugh. There are two things I care about in the 520 debate. We will eventually add rail transit to 520. My best guess is that we’ll build from Ballard to the UW, and eventually extend it to Redmond. That’s a good idea, and I think we all agree we should make sure the bridge can handle rail later. The big problem is going to be whether the later transit investment will require buying a bunch of the bridge from WSDOT again, like Sound Transit is having to do with I-90. We can prevent that. So, point one: Specifically call out that design features and capacity for transit are paid for with non-18th Amendment funds (such as tolling), and are dedicated to transit. This should, at the very least, cover the HOV lanes, so they can, if necessary, be turned into real BRT, or even light rail. Point two: We should keep the Montlake flyer stop. That said, if we have to lose it, the midday and nighttime service that people currently use there needs to be replaced. We need UW-Redmond, UW-Kirkland, and UW-Bellevue service to keep us from screwing UW students, faculty, and staff – not to mention patients and game-fans. That means Sound Transit’s new route 542 would need to run from 5am to 11pm seven days a week. The 540 would have to run on weekends and late at night. If the legislature is choosing to remove the flyer stop, they need to mitigate the loss with dedicated transit funding. I think the other debates about transit on the bridge are distracting us from these two immediate issues. New CT Board of Directors "Community Transit 'Double-Tall' bus", by Oran Thursday will be the first meeting of the new CT Board of Directors. Unlike Metro, which is directly run by the King County Council, Community Transit is overseen by a group of Snohomish County elected officials selected by the County Council for 2 year terms. Press release with details after the jump. Ridership Error In Your FavorWhen calculating Link ridership, Sound Transit staff record the data provided by infrared electric eyes over the doors on some cars. Reading that data is something of an art – the sensors take some tuning and the data isn’t always perfect. It’s not just a “one” or a “zero”, we’re told – children register differently, for instance. Sound Transit controls for all this when calculating ridership – and sends out manual counters to be sure they’re getting accurate numbers. As a result, though, sometimes ridership numbers are wrong. Sound Transit found two small errors in their counting methods – one for Tukwila station in the summer and one for Airport station (affecting late December data), and in both cases were throwing out good data that looked bad in the first pass. It turns out (Excel), in fact, that December weekdays averaged just over 14,900 (300 higher than previously reported), with a peak day on December 28th with over 19,950. Weekdays after Airport Link opened were averaging 17,350. I’ve seen anti-transit activists claim as few as 12,000 weekday riders – don’t let them. With ridership off by 15% in Portland, this looks pretty good. We’ll have to wait to know how far off Metro ridership is, but I’m willing to bet that without a recession, Link would be beating projections. SR-520 News Roundup SR-520 Alternative A+ Well none of us were able to make it to the press conference this morning but here are some news clippings. [Update from Sherwin 5:34pm: The Seattle Channel has full video coverage of the event here.] From what I have gathered it was an interesting showing of elected officials from all level of government, something very unusual. It appears that there are divergent opinions among those advocating for something besides the A+, i.e. better transit connections for some, narrower footprint for others, less traffic for others, but the fact that House Speaker Chopp, Senator Murray, Rep. Pedersen, Mayor McGinn and City Council members Licata and O’Brien were all in attendance is interesting never-the-less. Stay tuned. Coverage from those that actually get paid to report below the jump. Editorial: Plan New Light Rail Carefully West Seattle from the air (wikimedia) I think a lot of the Ballard-to-West Seattle light rail speculation is getting bogged down in routing arguments. It’s fun but ultimately colored by our experience of those neighborhoods, and really needs some study data to capture the tradeoffs. One line of opposition is that some sort of grade decision (e.g., at-grade through downtown) is grounds for opposing the package. As I’ve mentioned before, despite loose talk of 2012 or 2016 ST3 votes, ST3 is not necessarily close at hand and a regional package faces much higher barriers to passage. Moreover, no matter how soon ST3 comes, the more the city gets done in the meantime the larger the system will be at any particular point in the future. Indeed, there is no concrete idea of how big the funding package for ST3 will be, so it’s unclear that it would unlock huge amounts of funding to allow more tunneling. Lastly, the political takeaway from the defeat of a measure will not be “the package was not massive enough” but instead “even Seattle isn’t willing to support more light rail in the current climate.” All that said, I’m not really worried about the measure passing in Seattle. I’m not a magnificent political prognosticator but there’s a solid record that suggests that whether this measure goes to the ballot in 2010 or 2011 or 2015 it’s going to pass. The real danger is that this plan, due to insufficient preparation, will overpromise and under-deliver. As project engineering progresses, costs (mitigation and otherwise) go up. That sets up the traditional Puget Sound funding crisis (see: Sound Transit circa 2000, Monorail circa 2004) where the entire enterprise has a near-death experience or worse. That’s the real political risk. It may very well be that the city can put together a reasonably high-fidelity plan for the 2010 ballot. And of course, at some point before 100% engineering you have to take the planning you’ve got and go to the voters. However, I hope the McGinn administration heavily weights the maturity of the plan. For the comments: can anyone articulate what the benefit of going to the ballot in 2010 vice 2011 is, beyond everything potentially opening a year earlier? |
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