Month: September 2011

King County Metro’s 2010-2011 budget (p. 28) set aside $5.5 million to implement ORCA card readers at all doors to speed up boarding but the project has been cancelled due to issues with implementation under Metro’s complicated fare structure. The readers would have saved about a hundred daily service hours. The funds from the cancelled project will be available for projects in the 2012-2013 budget that weren’t previously funded or which require additional funds.

Metro’s explanation:

Determination has been made that rear door ORCA readers are not feasible at this time given Metro’s varied zone and special fare structure which require operator interaction with ORCA equipment to provide exceptions and correct fare categories for different riders. This continues to be an area of interest, but there is no solution currently identified and funded. Metro also continues to look for ways to increase the number of ORCA card users and off-board fare purchase.

Metro’s problem lies with the zone system and how one would pay the correct fare without driver assistance. Metro will have to face the same problem when the RapidRide E Line (Route 358) begins service in 2013. It is the only RapidRide line to cross a zone boundary. Metro has not decided on how off-board payment on that line will work but it is being discussed.

There are a few technical and policy solutions to this elaborated after the jump.

Continue reading “Rear Door ORCA Readers Cancelled”

Aron Levy makes a case against using passenger-miles travelled as a measure of a transportation projects’ values:

Passenger-miles don’t vote. They’re not a unit of deservedness of subsidy. They’re one unit of transportation consumption. They’re like tons of staple as a unit of food production, or calories as a unit of consumption. We don’t subsidize food based on cents per calorie.

Even as a unit of consumption, there are flaws in passenger-miles as a concept, when it comes to intermodal comparisons. The reason: at equal de facto mobility, transit riders travel shorter distances than drivers. It’s very obvious when comparing total passenger-miles in transit cities and car cities (see e.g. page 36 here). Transit is slower than driving on uncongested roads, but has higher capacity than any road. In addition, transit is at its best at high frequency, which requires high intensity of uses, whereas cars are the opposite. The result is that transit cities are denser than car cities – in other words, need less passenger-miles.

This is true, using passenger-miles to compare transportation projects will make transit and walking projects compare less favourably to driving. It’s not true just that passenger-miles should not be the goal of a transportation project, something I’ll call but that passenger-miles are actually undesirable!

Of course freedom of mobility is good and allowing people to live where they want and work where they want is great, but most people would rather not spend large amounts of time travelling. And with motorized transportation, most other people sharing the mode with you do not want everyone else travelling as long a distance as possible. That’s how congestion comes about, or how you get to the video above.

Now obviously, the goal of a transportation system shouldn’t be to simply reduce travel, but a policy that included transportation and land use that worked toward a goal of people spending less time in vehicles would be a good thing.

Via.

Within the transit world, there seem to be two types of transit advocates — there are those who are strong believers in efficient grid-based networks meant to emphasize anywhere-to-anywhere geographic coverage, and then there are those who favor implementing high-capacity transit between urban centers to spur dense growth and land use in these corridors (let’s call them Group A B and Group B A, respectively).  There’s a lot of grey area where these two camps mix, but ultimately it shouldn’t be forgotten that both are on the same side.

Often, there gets to be a pretty weird dichotomy that plays out between both factions. All of a sudden, you start characterizing the latter, Group A, as the pro-density pro-rail long-term visionaries in contrast to the former, Group B– pro-bus pro-efficiency short-term pragmatists.  For a slightly clearer example, Human Transit highlights a good quote demonstrating this split in the context of Tampa’s Tallahassee’s recent bus network restructure (emphasis mine):

This quote from Scheib was interesting:

“If you talk to a land-use planner, typically they would want you to keep … service focused more on the downtown because they want more people to live downtown, in that dense environment. I’m all for that, I’m all for urbanization, I’m all for denser places,” Scheib said. “But the reality is that people need to get to work. And you’ve got to go where the jobs are.”

I can assure you that this change won’t damage downtown.  I was hanging around Portland’s TriMet in 1982 (in the indispensible role of teenage transit geek) when they totally restructured the inner city bus system, creating a grid pattern with many crosstowns that don’t go downtown at all.  Several of those crosstowns are now among Portland’s most productive lines.  But downtown Portland survived, to say the least.

The bottom line is this: if we focus on efficiently structuring our network that tends to follow land use instead of shaping it, does it hurt our ability to promote high-density growth using transit as a catalyst?

Continue reading “Transit synergy, land use, and the glue that holds us together”

Bellevue’s Transportation Commission, which advises the Council, has a vacancy for the term expiring next May, and possible appointment to the subsequent four-year term.

The Transportation Commission advises the council about transportation issues in Bellevue. The seven-member commission meets the second Thursday of each month at 6:30 p.m. in City Hall.

Candidates must be Bellevue residents. Residents in newly annexed areas are particularly encouraged to apply.

Residents can apply online or pick up an application from the City Clerk’s Office or the Service First desk in City Hall, as well as in the Bellevue Regional Library, the Lake Hills Library or Mini City Hall at Crossroads Bellevue. You can request an application be faxed to you by calling 452-6466.

I have no idea who is on the commission now or what they believe, but it’s always good to find people who won’t veto anything that could possibly inconvenience a car. Moreover, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in Bellevue, as they’re only now getting a proper frequent bus service network that deserves real investment in priority treatments. See especially my piece on improving bus travel through Bellevue College.

The impending end of the Ride Free Area, by October next year, should end the debate on the much maligned back door use policy. Seattle will finally operate like all the other big city transit agencies in this country where there’s almost no question on which doors can be used to exit. But old habits are hard to change and passengers will need to be encouraged to use the back door to exit whenever possible to speed up everyone’s trip.

Metro updated the decals inside buses to reflect current door use policy. The decal above the back door now reads “In Ride Free Area, Use Front Door Only, 7 PM – 6 AM”. This is to cut down on fare evasion caused by people unaware of or ignoring the RFA’s 6 am to 7 pm hours. From my observations, many people are already using the back door to exit after 7 pm, following the natural desire to use the fastest way out.

There are many ways to inform. Some Sound Transit buses have a big “EXIT DOOR” sign above the back door. TriMet buses have a giant sticker on the ceiling pointing towards the back. Muni buses automatically announce “Please exit through the rear doors” everytime a stop is requested. That may be annoying to hear but it works. How about one of Metro’s APTA award winning signs with tips for a faster ride?

I’m sure that when Metro figures out the specifics on phasing out the Ride Free Area, there will be a strong public awareness campaign backed up with strong enforcement.

Background on the policy change below the jump. Continue reading “Getting People to Use the Back Door”

A new documentary on urban design.  The Seattle screening is this Wednesday, so grab your tickets before they sell out.

There are certainly voters in Seattle who don’t see road conditions as particularly dire, and don’t really care about better transit and bike and pedestrian safety. There are  others who simply prioritize low taxes over all other infrastructure and public services. Those people simply have different values than most Seattle voters, and I wouldn’t expect them to support a $60 VLF under any circumstances.

What I find bizarre, though, is the assertion that this plan is bad because it doesn’t buy any bus hours. This seems like the wrong way to look at things. This isn’t Bridging the Gap, where Metro was offering matching funds. For instance, Seattle could write a $1m check to Metro to buy about 10,000 bus hours. That’s about a 30 bus hours a day, somewhere in the city, for a year. At the end of the year, you cough up another $1m or you’re back to square one.

Or, Seattle could do a corridor improvement project like the Delridge TMP improvements. For that same $1m you could save an average 1.7 minutes on each and every peak period trip. There are dozens of trips per day that realize those savings, hundreds more off-peak, and they realize them forever. In some cases this “merely” improves speed, reliability, and the overall experience of riders, and trips are perceived as faster because they are given priority. It’s hard to say for sure without access to Metro’s scheduling software, but on some of these corridors, a few minutes of time savings may be enough to take a single bus off the road, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings every year.

Bellevue has a creative way of getting bicyclist input: bike rides with planners through areas of focus to gather their input. The next round starts tomorrow:

Saturday’s ride, geared toward Bellevue residents, will be 9 to 11 a.m. Traveling at a leisurely pace, participants will follow a three-mile route, starting at Top Pot Doughnuts, 10600 NE Ninth Pl., and visiting Bellevue Downtown Park, the Regional King County Library, Old Bellevue and City Hall.

The second ride, intended for bicycle commuters to downtown Bellevue, will be 5:30 to 7 p.m. on Sept. 28.

Riders will meet at Compass Plaza at Bellevue Galleria (106th Avenue Northeast, between Northeast Fourth and Eighth streets) and break up into three groups. One group will head northwest toward the SR 520 bridge, one will ride northeast toward the SR 520 Trail, while the other heads south toward the I-90 trail. Each will loop back and finish at Compass Plaza.

All rides are free, and all abilities are welcome. Helmets and lights are required and the ride will be cancelled in the event of heavy rain. Please RSVP to hayley@bellevuedowntown.org.

One idea that arose from the discussion of the possible Queen Anne-Downtown-First Hill-Madrona restructure that I blogged about a few weeks ago has been mentioned before in other threads, namely the possibility of extending the Queen Anne trolleybus routes up to Fremont. The case for making this change is evident just from looking at a map: the terminus of the 13 is about half a mile from the Fremont Bridge, a gap which is currently filled only by the infrequent daytime-only route 31. This short extension seems to offer the possibility of tying together two city neighborhoods with frequent service.

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Such a route entails negotiating the Fremont Bridge — the most frequently-raised drawbridge in Seattle — along with the traffic around the bridge, which can be terrible (especially on the north side). To me, the cost in terms of schedule time and reliability outweigh that advantage, so I’ve always argued against it. Fortunately, you don’t have to take my word for this any more, because I have obtained timepoint data make the situation clear, after the jump.

Continue reading “The Center of the Universe”