Month: October 2010

UW College of the Built Environment students love transit as much as we do! If you see any transit inspired costumes please share. Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

Church and 30th St. San Francisco MUNI Construction from Ken Murphy on Vimeo.

From Gawker TV, via David Honan.

I think it’s unfortunate that a big picture argument about reorganizing Rainier Valley routes bogged down as to whether or not the 9 could replace the 7 for trips along Rainier. That’s my fault for not explicitly stating that I was open to adding stops to the 9, although it’s also clear that some people didn’t read carefully enough, because in my plan everyone has a one seat ride to downtown and a one seat ride to anywhere on Rainier, each with 15 minute frequency. There were lots of complaints about “forced transfers” that could be answered with a quick glance at the provided map. Such are the occupational hazards of writing on the internet.

What’s more, there’s a lot of misperception about how often the 9 stops. After checking onebusaway, by my count the southbound 7 stops 29 times between Jackson and Henderson, while the 9 stops 18 times. Thus, the average stop distance is only 50% higher, and 7 stops tend to the close side. However, 9 stops are much more frequent south of Othello, so I think it’s appropriate to add at least a few further north. In my opinion, the 7 stops too often, so if I were dictator I probably wouldn’t replace them all.

All that said, stop frequency on the 9 is a relatively minor point and I would gladly turn every 7 stop into a 9 stop if that was the price of implementing the other changes. According to the Metro schedule, the difference is about 5 minutes. From a marketing perspective, it may very well be that “7 rerouted to Broadway” is a better headline than “7 replaced with 9 local”, although they amount to the same thing.

Pierce Transit’s adult bus fare is going up from $1.75 to $2.00 on November 1st, with proportional increases in other adult fare products. Youth, senior, Olympia Express, and shuttle fares are unchanged. PT will also charge on Thanksgiving and Christmas for the first time.

The board approved the increase in September, the first one since January 2009. Vanpool fares are also changed.

We’ll be having more on this later but here are some excerpts from elsewhere.

Seattle PI: Gregoire: Viaduct tunnel bids at or below estimates

Bids for the tunnel replacement for the Alaskan Way Viaduct came in at or below estimates, Gov. Chris Gregoire announced Friday morning.

Two pre-qualified joint-venture contract teams dropped off their proposed bids by Thursday’s deadline. The exact figures in the bids will remain secret until December.

“I am proud to announce that the two bids to build the deep-bore tunnel are both at or below the price we set in our contract, not one dollar more,” Gregoire said during a news conference at the Port of Seattle offices at Pier 69.

The state estimated the cost of digging the 54-foot diameter tunnel — the largest deep-bore tunnel yet in the world — at about $1.1 billion. But due the risks involved in tunneling through Seattle’s glacial soils and the fact that this will be the largest highway tunnel yet in the world, many fear the project could cost more.

…

WSDOT already has offered about $210 million in allowances and incentives to the two contracting teams. The money will be shifted from the reserve fund, leaving $205 million.

About $110 million is to cover inflation, which wasn’t included in the original request for proposals. The reason is state officials wanted to wait until contractors had time to work with the design and have another six months to see where the market would go before signing the contract. Part of the reserve fund was intended to cover inflation, anyway.

Another $100 million was to account for higher costs than expected in obtaining insurance and bonding.

State leaders say the reserve still exceeds the 15 percent recommended by expert panels.

It includes $40 million in a pot of money to cover any settlement or damage to buildings caused by tunneling. The contractor is entitled to recover 75 percent of whatever is left over when the project is completed.

In addition, the contract offers cash incentives if the project is completed ahead of schedule — $100,000 for every day up to $25 million. If work finishes ahead of schedule, that most likely means the project avoided costly delays that would tap into reserves, said Ron Paananen, administrator for the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement program.

More after the jump. Continue reading “The Big Day: SR-99 Bids, SDEIS, and Cost Overruns”

In 2008 Congress roughly doubled* the ceiling for the amount of transit benefit that employees could take pre-tax from $120 a month to $230 a month. Not conincidentally, $230 a month is the amount employers can spend on free parking or parking subsidy for their employees without incurring tax penalties. The bill moved the status quo from the nonsensical position of net encouragement of driving to at least rough parity.

Unfortunately, the law that equalizes it sunsets on December 31st, and it appears unlikely that Congress will renew the tax subsidy in the current climate. Here in the Puget Sound, fares are generally low enough that only PugetPasses for fares of $3.50 and up will be affected: Community Transit intercounty, ferry, and some Sounder riders. But in systems where fares are much higher, it’s a big deal for transit riders.

* The numbers from the linked STB article and the Post article, are off by $5-10. I don’t know if the bill changed before passage or if there was some other sort of error.

The schedules at Link stations show the frequency of service and times for the first and last trains. Some people find that inadequate for planning a trip and want a detailed timetable. Here is my answer to your call, a stem-and-leaf format schedule showing all train departures from a station in a particular direction. I designed it for individual platforms. The size of this exactly matches the existing schedules found at Link stations and can function as a drop in replacement. It can accommodate 24 hour service and up to 10 trains per hour. The tradeoff is loss of first/last train times for the opposite direction and a more cluttered look with no summary of the frequencies. I would keep the existing schedules for mezzanine areas. Or why not have both detailed and summary schedules? That would require redesigning the information panels.

By the way, many schedules at Link stations have not been updated or are missing altogether. Some still list times for the first/last train to Tukwila International Boulevard! I don’t know what the people in charge of this at Sound Transit do all day but it took me about 2 hours to design the mockup from scratch. I could make one for every station, print them out, and go install them at stations in a single work day. Of course I’m bragging a bit; it’ll take more work to make such a major change. However, the missing and outdated schedules are simply inexcusable.

This afternoon, the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 587, which represents King County Metro workers, agreed to a three-year contract that would waive the COLA (cost-of-living adjustment) increase for the first of the three years. According to Slog, this will save about $7.8 million next year.  This is a very surprising turn of events, given the union’s recent position on wage concessions.  Nonetheless, wage increases for the second and third years have not yet been finalized.

Thoughts from PubliCola, which seem to trend toward the view that a one-year freeze is just about as far as the ATU is willing to go:

It’s hard to say who the winner and loser is here. On one hand, the fact that the union (whose president, Paul Bachtel, was saying as recently as last month that he’d rather cut bus service than give up pay increases) has accepted any concession at all is major news. On the other, the fact that the one-year COLA freeze is all Constantine is announcing seems to indicate that the terms of the agreement are favorable to the union.

You can read the full press release here. And previous thoughts from Martin on the subject.

What we’ve missed:

• Metro’s Regional Transit Task Force has recommended scrapping 40/40/20 — a policy that allocates new bus service disproportionately away from Seattle toward generally less efficient suburban service — reports PubliCola.
• Seattle car tabs will cost $20 more beginning next May. The funds will be dedicated to transportation projects.
• The Obama administration has released more funds for high-speed rail. $27 million will go to King Street and Tukwila Stations. Will future money be appropriated under a GOP Congress?
• Have you noticed that Verizon is sponsoring some ads on our site? This weekend’s Verizon Urban Challenge is a real life puzzle/explorer game — sort of like The Amazing Race. Apparently, a few of the elements in the game acknowledge Seattle’s public transit system. A two-person team can win up to $3,000 and some new phones.
• “Some unfortunate soul peed and pooped on the train, and it was not a little accident.”
• The ATU (bus operators union) and county likely to end up in arbitration — a process that’ll likely favor union interests compared to a process without arbitration. The ATU is one of two county labor groups who has so far refused to give up a raise for next year.
• Sound Transit CEO Joni Earl gave money to Patty Murray’s re-election campaign. Have you mailed in your ballot yet?
• Buy a used Metro bus for less than $10k. (h/t cookieguru.)
• The New York Times has an excellent photo gallery that covers the last century of New York City subways.
• A Ferris wheel is planned for the waterfront.
• The Market Urbanism blog is worth subscribing to.

This is an open thread.

In (slightly) less flame-worthy East Link-related news from Bellevue, the city council is undergoing discussions on the new NE 15/16th street in the Bel-Red corridor, which will require construction of a new right-of-way for Link.  The street will become the centerpiece corridor for the city’s Bel-Red TOD plan, which has even garnered some recognition from Senator Murray.  From the Bellevue Reporter:

[Council] discussion included the type and size of features to be included on the roughly 1.5-mile long roadway, such as the number of vehicle lanes, on-street parking, whether to have bike lanes or a bike-pedestrian pathway, and landscaping options. These decisions will determine how the various elements fit together and the width of the new street.

The greatest fear I have out of this project is Bellevue’s reputation for street improvements that are notoriously car-centric— leaving the potential that this new 15/16th Street could become nothing but a major thoroughfare.  Slides from the city council’s presentation (PDF) show the various ROW cross-sections, with some designs ranging up to 170+ feet wide.

As the current NE 16th Street is only a back-road for industrial vehicles, the natural assumption is that the new street will provide capacity for drivers frequenting the corridor– completely new demand that is really unnecessary.  The development slated there is supposedly being drawn in by Link as the primary transport mode, making the purposes of a new street counterintuitive.  If new lanes are inevitable, however, I’d rather pedestrians not have to walk more than 130′ just to get to the other side of the street.

The city is hosting an open house (PDF) on the project November 9th from 4:30-7pm at Bellevue City Hall.