On December 6th the King County Council formally “accepted” the Regional Transit Task Force (RTTF) recommendations in a unanimous vote. The recommendations are most notable for tying service allocations to certain transparent, numerical performance measures, rather than rigid subarea formulas combined with loosely defined productivity measures.
The Council’s action does not formally repeal 40/40/20 or enact any other immediate policy changes. The meaning of this measure is best summarized in the staff report, found on the measure webpage.
[A previous ordnance] directed the Executive to transmit updates to the transit comprehensive and strategic plans by February 28, 2011. The proposed motion provides guidance to the Executive that the RTTF’s report and recommendations are to be used to guide the development of these plans. This section does not bind the County or the Executive into the exact language of the task force, but rather suggests that their policy framework concept and package of recommendations are to be used to inform and shape the plans.
Executive Constantine proposed the RTTF in the first place, so there’s reason to be optimistic the recommendations will show up in the new strategic plan.
The comment periods for these projects close on Monday so get writing. One is exactly the kind of project we want, the other not so much.
Yesler Terrace
The Slog reports that the Yesler Terrace redevelopment project has received very few public comments (at least prior to the Slog posting). Being a density fanatic, option three caught my attention:
Option Three (the highest density choice): 5,000 housing units built, with 1.2 million square feet of office/hotel space, 88,000 square feet of commercial space, 50,000 for neighborhood services, new street grids, fireworks, etc. It would also include 6.9 acres of open space and add 6,300 parking spaces to the area.
That’s too much parking for such a transit-accessible location, but we must maximize the ability of people to live near excellent transit. In the long run, more units also equals affordable housing and a larger property tax base for social services. Go comment on this before Monday.
SR-99 Deep Bore Tunnel
The Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Study (SDEIS), which you can read here, is an update to previous EISs. Although Chapter 8 is the section that talks about the alternatives it is rather pointless because the analysis doesn’t include tolls, Chapter 9 on tolling is the chapter you want to read. Also focus in on tolling Scenario C, as it is the only scenario considered that raises enough revenue to meet funding goals, although A gets closes. Adam wrote about tolls previously here. Go to Chapter 3 to read about why WSDOT dropped the surface option.
Go here to comment, also before the end of the day on Monday.
Last Wednesday in Pioneer Square, officials from King County Metro took a test ride in one of Vancouver’s modern low-floor electric trolleybuses to see how it works on the wire and off the wire. Vancouver’s TransLink loaned the bus to Metro for examination as part of the Trolley Bus System Evaluation. Representatives from the bus and propulsion system manufacturer and Vancouver bus operator Coast Mountain Bus Company (CMBC) mingled with Metro staff to discuss operation and maintenance of the bus. Among the key people from Metro are their chief vehicle maintenance supervisor, trolley bus maintenance supervisor, and General Manager Kevin Desmond. They liked a lot of the amenities found on the bus. County Councilmember Larry Phillips, who sponsored the transit audit which led to this evaluation, was also present. Phillips is in favor of retaining the electric trolley system and modernizing the fleet.
Sound Transit is recruiting for their Citizen Oversight Panel (COP). The COP report is always one of the year’s more interesting reads, if you’re a nut like me. Non-cranks are encouraged to apply.
We now have the details for Wednesday’s meetup. We’ll start at 5pm at GGLO on the Harbor Steps:
1301 First Ave. Suite 301
Seattle, WA 98101
Our formal program will start up at 6pm. Our guest speaker is Jack Lattemann, lead transit service planner from Metro’s Service Development section. Jack will share his insights on the challenges of forging a coherent route system. Bring your route questions!
Please indicate if you intend to attend in the comments, so we can get a rough headcount for food.
There’s a battle in Luna Park developing over businesses that will lose parking to become transit lanes for RapidRide C.
“I’m really nervous right now,” the block’s major landowner, John Bennett, picked up from there. “We need to build up our defenses and get a plan going … That’s 80 percent of my parking.” He turned to the proprietors of Avalon, the new restaurant taking over the former Café Revo on the block. “You’ll be out of business before you even start,” Bennett warned them. Later, he and others pointed out the small business district already has barely enough spaces to deal with their needs: “If anything, we want MORE parking” (than currently exists)…
The business owners stressed they weren’t opposed to buses or even RapidRide. Said Bennett, “We all agree we need rapid transit – but if we’re going to do this, why don’t we do it right?” He went on to suggest that would mean above-grade or underground transit, rather than buses, and briefly lamented the loss of the once-planned monorail.
As a rail guy I’m really tempted to see an ally here, but that’s a mirage. If we build light rail to West Seattle in my lifetime, it’s very likely to be at-grade at this spot, which means the road will be either very expensively widened, or more likely, the city takes away the parking.
Metro planner Jack Lattemann was at the meeting at visualized an alternative future:
“I disagree about blight. We’re heading into a future where we simply have to rely less on cars. This [RapidRide] is the biggest transit improvement that West Seattle is going to see this generation. There’s no money for light rail [etc.] …” Lattemann suggested that ultimately, RapidRide would be a boon for Luna Park businesses: “This area will be known as one of the areas that’s easy to get to by bus.”
I don’t mean to demonize Mr. Bennett and his allies; if I were a business owner I’d probably be pretty conservative about changes to my situation as well. However, demands for unlimited free parking are something we simply have to overcome if we’re going to achieve the densities that make high-capacity transit worthwhile. There are still many, many places in West Seattle that are entirely car-oriented, but there ought to be at least a few patches where another future is possible.
The article has much, much more about mitigations that King County is offering to the merchants, none of which are apparently satisfactory. KCDOT invites interested parties, particularly those in West Seattle, to comment to Victor.Obeso@kingcounty.gov.
In other West Seattle news, some parcels near the Admiral District are likely to be upzoned from NC1-30 to NC2-40.
On Monday evening, the Bellevue City Council voted yet again along partisan lines, to award a $670,723 contract to Arup North America (the same firm that did Wallace’s Vision Line) to study the B7 revised alignment, which would include the new Enatai Park & Ride, a mere 0.5 miles from the current South Bellevue P&R. The move was not unexpected, as the four-member pro-B7 council quorum has been desperately trying to catch up with Sound Transit in pursuing a study that would purportedly better compare B7 to B2, ST’s preferred alignment.
The study has a 6-7 month time frame, which by that time, the FTA will likely already have issued its record of decision for Sound Transit’s final preferred route. Arup, fully aware of the timeline discrepancies, did insert a “tipping point” condition– a check-in after about 4 months and $504,000 to either proceed or cut the rest of the study depending on council action.
As always, the pro-B2 councilmembers asked tough questions about the wisdom of this kind of budgeting, particularly John Chelminiak, who has since returned to the council after a vicious bear attack. The city has $6.2 million set aside for all work related to East Link over the next two years– only $650K of which is specifically appropriated for consultant work each year. While the Arup study will use $270K of 2010 funds, the remaining amount would drain 60% of that $650k, money which could better used for things like impacts mitigation.
I think I’ve made it pretty clear where I stand on this issue. A minimum of $504k for a couple pieces of paper that may never see the light of day isn’t exactly pocket change. You can find the council’s study session materials for the contract here (PDF).
Metro’s website has a new tool to find the nearest bus stop to any point. The results page gives you a bunch of nearby stops, with links to more information about the stop and walking directions.
This won’t solve any huge problems, but I’m encouraged by the culture of continual innovation and improvement that a widget like this suggests.
Minor gripe: I’m able to generate some results where the walking directions turn up as “#11080–Walking distance exceeds one mile or is not safe”. If so, why is it coming up at all?
2. I claimed that the Deep Bore Tunnel is being funded by $1.8 billion in gas tax and $600m in other state and local funds. In fact, Mike Lindblom kindly sent me a note that the $1.8 billion comes only from the 2003 and 2005 gas tax measures; the other $600m consists mainly of other state and federal gas taxes, in addition to vehicle license tab fees.
Light Rail Flyover Ramps at the I-25/I-225 Interchange – newraleigh.com
Pending the results of a required Alternatives Analysis, over the next couple of years Sound Transit will select a technology and an alignment for High Capacity Transit from Northgate to Lynnwood. ST recently released its Early Scoping Information Report, and Adam wrote a nice piece discussing the relative merits of the 3 corridors under consideration (Aurora, I-5 and 15th Ave NE). The most likely alignment remains I-5, which is the cheapest, quickest, and shortest. Having lived in Denver for 2 years (2007-2008), I am well-acquainted with interstate light rail alignments, and I think there is much we can learn from Denver’s alignment choices.
As usual the mainstream media (I’m so temped to say “lamestream media”, you’ll see why in a second) has shown its negligence when it reports on pedestrian and bicyclist related stories. TV channels are particularly horrible, but this story takes the cake. Oddly the Times is nowhere to be seen.
Enters Linda Brill from King 5 news “Business owner wanted snow plows, got umbrellas“. That business owner, Phil Bevis, seen here gushing about Sarah Palin, says that the umbrellas are a waste of money and would rather see the city spend that on plowing the road so people can get to his store, never mind that it’s located at the bottom of Madison St, one of the steepest streets downtown. Knute Berger over at Crosscut then jumped on the bandwagon, adding some basic information that Linda conveniently glosses over, but still totally misses the point. Erica at Publicola has a great takedown after the jump: (more…)
I’ve watched the TSA Body Scanner/Pat Down fiasco with the usual mix of outrage and dark humor. In our collective apoplexy we have made the TSA into caricatured goons to be contrasted with grandmothers and toddlers undeserving of security scrutiny. While my own politics agrees with these sentiments, I think a couple angles on this story have been missed, one of which relates to transit and the other to ethics.
First, in this new paradigm cars win. If you care about privacy and freedom of movement, it’s a good time to drive a car. While air, rail, and ferries will likely face ever-tightening security in the coming years, private vehicles will remain largely free of restriction or inspection, despite the massive precedent of car bombings. Traveling on any major public conveyance will submit you to inconvenience, forced data collection, and surveillance. Not so for cars.
Second, we are partly to blame. Our expectations of government reveal a fundamental contradiction. We tend to judge as utilitarians and argue as deontologists. Put differently, we tend to argue the merits of a policy via principles (ethics, rights, justice) until something bad happens, at which point our moral calculus swiftly switches to results-based judgment. If there is a successful terrorist attack by whatever means, we fallaciously blame the government post hoc for failing to foresee and prevent the means of attack. This tendency also works well in reverse; when there is an extended period without an attack we reward politicians without any evidence that their actions provided any meaningful deterrence. How many times have you heard, “Bush may have been a bad President, but his actions kept us safe”? As a result – despite our protestations – as a society we reward governmental hyperactivity and will not tolerate inaction. This establishes overwhelming incentives for our government to enact ridiculously cautious and intrusive security policies.
If we want to win a social argument against the “surveillance society” on the basis of rights and justice, we must relax the utilitarian standards to which we hold our governments. As difficult as it is for our litigious society, we must accept risk, period. We must recognize that beyond a certain point risk-avoidance diminishes the quality of that which it seeks to protect, namely a free and mobile life. Attacks will happen, and I may die, but I would rather face that infinitesimal particular risk than assent to a general loss of liberty. The best formulation I have seen comes from Swedish philosopher Sven Ove Hansson in his article Ethical Criteria of Risk Acceptance,
“Exposure of a person to risk is acceptable if and only if this exposure is part of an equitable social system of risk-taking that works to her advantage.”
If only President Obama had meant what he said on Inauguration Day,
“We reject as false the choice between our liberty and our ideals…those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake.”
Yesterday, King County Executive Dow Constantine appointed former *State Senator Joe McDermott to the Sound Transit Board, replacing outgoing county councilmember Jan Drago. McDermott was elected to the King County council’s 8th District seat in November, beating out Diane Toledo.
“It is critically important that we continue to have strong south King County representation on the Sound Transit Board, and Councilmember McDermott’s extensive legislative experience will serve all of our customers well,” said Executive Constantine. “The 8th District includes the cities of Burien, SeaTac and Tukwila, and these are all emerging residential and job centers for our region that need good transportation alternatives.”
“We need to connect communities within south King County to each other, recognizing that people live, work and play outside downtown Seattle,” said Councilmember McDermott. “Working together and thinking creatively, we can produce a transit system that meets the needs of the entire region. I am honored to be a South County representative on the Board.”
McDermott’s appointment still has to be confirmed by the county council. We congratulate him and look forward to seeing him on the ST Board.
*McDermott can only be appointed to the ST Board as an elected official in King County, not in state office. [Update 10:37pm: At any rate, Joe is on longer a State Senator, as his replacement, Sharon Nelson, has already been sworn in.]
We’re still working on the venue, but our next meetup will be December 15th and somewhere in downtown Seattle. We’ll probably start about 5 and there will be at least one guest speaker.
For several years King County Metro has been trying to develop it’s P&Rs into something more, using land as leverage to build TOD in addition to more parking.
Renton and Overlake are two older examples wile Redmond is a more recent example. While Renton and Overlake left a lot to be desired from an architectural and urban design standpoint the Redmond project comes a lot close to the mark. From what I see it looks like Metro has learned a good amount since they started doing these projects.
The image above is a plan view of a concept design, which looks to be promising. I like that it includes over 12,000 sf of commercial space along NE 38th Pl, but it would be nice to see some commercial space in the area facing the transit center as well. This work is being done as part of the Lakeview neighborhood comprehensive plan update. From the project fact sheet:
The Planning Department is now ready to move forward with amendments to the Kirkland Zoning Code, included as an implementation task on the adopted 2010-2012 Planning Work Program. The current zoning does not permit residential and has a height limit of 30’. The processing of the amendments will occur either as part of the Lakeview Neighborhood Plan and Zoning Code update, or through a process independent from the remainder of the code amendments associated with the plan update.
The Daily of the UWreports that implementation of a universal U-PASS program will be a quarter behind its original Winter 2010 target (January 2010). A survey completed last spring showed 79% of students, staff, and faculty supporting a universal U-PASS. The pass would be a mandatory fee priced around $60 to $80 with a target of $75. The current pass costs $99 per quarter, almost a twofold increase over 2008 prices. Participation dropped from 85% to 72% in 2009 as a result. The U-PASS needs a new funding model as the existing model, in which students can opt-out by returning the pass, is unsustainable with budget shortfalls and increasing costs from the transit agencies.
Meanwhile, the process of converting U-PASS stickers over to ORCA-embedded Husky Cards is now anticipated to begin sometime in the middle of 2011. The University’s Transportation Services originally had a target of June 2010 and later pushed it back towards late 2010. The delay in implementation comes from the “transit side”, in other words, the agencies implementing ORCA and the system vendor. The process, called “re-carding”, involves replacing every student’s, staff’s, and faculty’s identification card (known as Husky Card) with a new card embedded with an ORCA chip. The new cards will feature a new design and would retain the magnetic strip for its existing functions. Dubs, the Husky mascot, will lead the transition.
According to the University Transportation Committee’s (UTC advises the UW administration on transportation issues) meeting minutes, the e-purse function will be disabled on the ORCA powered U-PASS. The University did not want to deal with customer service issues like refunding e-purse value. Privacy concerns were also raised in a UTC meeting where a loophole in the law allowed media to file a public information request for card user’s personally identifiable information. However, the Legislature enacted Senate Bill 5295 into law earlier this year, closing the loophole. With U-PASS moving to a universal model, a system for students to opt-out of the ORCA powered U-PASS would be unnecessary.
Sound Transit's most recent preferred alternative on the left, and Bellevue's on the right
Tuesday night’s open house and public hearing for Sound Transit’s East Link’s SDEIS was nothing more than the perennial ST bashing exercise. The public hearing was laden with several comments on why ST is a bad government bureaucracy yet there was the sole proviso that the agency could be magically forgiven for its sins if it were to choose B7 instead. The meeting was very negative from the standpoint of a B2/B3 supporter but likely a party for B7 supporters, who criticized Sound Transit on everything from Central Link’s delayed opening to Bellevue councilmember Grant Degginger’s “conflict of interest.”
Things got heated early as one B7 supporter began dropping expletives and loudly accosting Sound Transit employees during the open house, claiming that no one would stay in the Bellevue Club’s hotel if a train would be screeching by all evening. His rampage was stopped only by a fellow Bellevue resident, who calmly reprimanded him for his foul mouth. Aside from the isolated commotion, the rest of the open house maintained composure and went on unscathed, sporting the usual set up of various stations staffed by ST employees.
