Sydney Street, photo by Flickr user Mark Sanderson
You can always learn a lot about where you’re from by travelling to somewhere else. Sometimes visiting a place where the way of life is very similar to the place you are from will let you learn more about where you’re from than would visiting somewhere very different (this will make sense shortly). I experienced this second phenomenon when visiting Australia recently.
While in Sydney I noticed there is significantly less on-street parking than there is in most America cities. In the CDB, there is nearly no on-street parking where a car can linger for more than an hour or two. Thinking about this made me realize that in Japan – where I have lived and visit at least once a year – for the most part on-street parking isn’t a thing that exists. There, if you want a place to put your car, you need to either build a spot for yourself on your property or pay some one to let you leave your car on their property.
Both of these are significantly different from the United States where the default situation is that the right-most portion of the public roadway is a fine place to leave your car for as long as you’d like unless otherwise noted. As an encouragement for driving, this is massive. In this study prepared for Transportation Alternatives looking at two similar neighborhoods in New York City, showed a marked increase in driving for residents who lived in the neighborhood that had more on-street parking.
As a data point, according to a parking “census” performed by the city last year, there are 525,000 on-street parking spots in Seattle. Of these, 490,000 are free, unrestricted spaces.
This week SDOT released its initial study on the new, demand-based on-street parking rates in several Seattle neighborhoods. These new rates target leaving one or two spaces available per blockface all day, so drivers spend less time searching in exchange for a bit of money. Key findings:
In the four neighborhoods where rates increased in early 2011 (Commercial Core, First Hill, Capitol Hill, and Pioneer Square), the June 2011 data showed parking occupancies came down within the target occupancy range, though occupancy varies with subareas of each neighborhood. Data generally showed improved availability of on-street parking, although use of disabled parking permits continues to be high in the Commercial Core and First hill (as well as Cherry Hill.)
For the eleven neighborhoods where rates were lowered, results were mixed. Parking occupancy actually dropped in six of the eleven neighborhoods compared to last November. The data showed that decreasing rates by $0.50 per hour did not consistently generate increased parking demand, and where occupancy increased, the amounts were relatively modest.
The seven neighborhoods where rates stayed the same also had mixed results, illustrating that parking pricing is likely not the prime driver for parking demand compared with other factors such as the quality of neighborhood attractions, hours of operation, and willingness to use alternative modes.
Of course, this is one month of data (from June), and this is going to be a continual, iterative process of fine tuning, as conditions change and more demand management techniques are brought to bear. If anything, the lessons the report is drawing from one month of data are too definitive. More after the jump.
When I wrote up all of the Transit Master Plan’s High Capacity Transit corridors, many of which the Council has killed for now, I tried to make the point that there is no one super-metric that is arbiter of which corridor is the most important one. On the other hand, I spilled many words explaining one metric, ANC/NR, that may have given people the impression that it was the truly important one.
ANC/NR is basically a measure of how much you’re spending to get another person to ride transit on one of their trips. While that’s a really important consideration, a simple thought experiment illustrates its limitations.
Imagine there are two lines. Both have only two stops, at each endpoint. One is 1 mile long and will attract 10,000 riders. Another is 2 miles long and will attract 16,000 riders.* As they are technically almost identical, line 2 costs the same per mile, or twice as much overall.
Congestion pricing has long been one of my pet subjects: with it we can simultaneous reduce wasted time for drivers and riders and raise much needed revenue for transportation projects. Win-win, really. The Evergreen Point Floating bridge is one of the most congested roads in the state, and also needs to be replaced soon. A new state study shows that congestion pricing works for this project:
Traffic next year would drop to 52,000 vehicles per day as drivers divert to Interstate 90, avoid trips or shift to transit, according to an “investment-grade” study by Wilbur Smith Associates, meant to assist in the future sale of construction bonds.
Vehicle trips wouldn’t rebound to the current levels of more than 100,000 a day until the year 2032, the study predicts.
While traffic would move faster, with fewer cars on the road, the state needs a certain level of traffic to generate enough tolls to help pay for a new six-lane bridge.
Despite a traffic drop-off, state Treasurer Jim McIntire is confident that tolling can support at least $1 billion in bonds for the $4.65 billion crossing, as the state Department of Transportation has assumed for years.
Tolls would exceed yearly debt payments by roughly $5 million, according to a new chart issued by McIntire’s office.
I don’t have much to add. Drawn out long enough, the tolls might support more than the $1 billion, and certainly if we were to toll I-90 as well we could raise double that. Of course no one wants to pay tolls, but no one wants to pay for anything. And certainly no one wants to sit in traffic. I wish congestion pricing were more popular.
Take a look at Spokane Transit’s new system map for the September 2011 service change. It prominently shows frequent service routes as thick red lines. Frequent service being defined as “every 15 minutes during Weekday peak and day times”, roughly from 5 AM to 6 PM on weekdays, and “Night and Weekend service every 30-60 minutes or better.” The branches of frequent lines are shown as thinner lines. Portions where “basic” lines combine to provide frequent service are also indicated. Even at the shrunken size of the image above you can tell where all the frequent service is.
Compare the new map to the previous map. The map is now schematic, which sacrifices geographic accuracy for clarity. Going schematic also allowed the elimination of insets for the outlying areas, making it easier to follow the lines. Despite individual routes no longer getting their own color, I find the new map much easier to read due to the simplified lines and elimination of clutter.
Spokane Transit is the second transit system in the state to highlight frequent service on its system map after Bellingham’s WTA.
H/T @ziggzagzac on Twitter. Also, Jarrett Walker’s take. Walker worked on restructuring Spokane’s bus network and notes that despite service cuts, STA maintained its frequent service loop.
UPDATE, 3:10 pm: Response to my inquiry from Chris Tohm, Communications Specialist, at Spokane Transit Authority. Items in brackets are my notes:
Thanks for the kind words about the new STA system map.
The layout was a collaborative effort with CHK after we met with Rick Wood [President & CEO of CHK America, a firm specializing in transit information solutions] to discuss the new changes to the system. We had committed to doing a more detailed series of maps for our individual route schedules and wanted to simplify the system map so it would give a better vision of the entire system.
Karl Otterstrom, STA’s Director of Planning [former planner at Metro who worked on the Rapid Trolley concept], had some ideas about showing frequency and combined frequency and CHK did a really good job turning those theoretical concepts into reality while creating a really user-friendly design.
… [omitted link to Human Transit article]
It’s been long tedious process working through the details but I’m glad to say it is one of the most rewarding projects I’ve worked on recently.
Winpower Strategies made a precinct map of the Referendum 1 results. I struggled for a while to figure out what narrative connects the (blue and purple) areas that voted no.
Then I found the map for McGinn’s mayoral victory in 2009. Aside from the University (influenced by a summer election?), by eyeball it seems to correlate pretty strongly.
The Streets for All Seattle Campaign, which is supporting a Yes vote on the $60 vehicle license fee, is having their official kickoff partyTuesday evening at Moe Bar on Capitol Hill, starting at 6.
It’s said that the VLF is too regressive. And it’s true that it’s less progressive than a motor vehicle excise tax. On the other hand, the poorest of the poor don’t own cars. Furthermore, it’s the only authority that the legislature has granted Seattle. If you think rejecting this measure is going to spur more funding authority, progressive or otherwise, out of Olympia, you have a radically different perception of that place than I do. To me, it’s really a question of whether you want these improvements to come soon or you don’t.
When I broke out the plan for transit spending, I was pretty grumpy about its composition. I still am. It’s not that the proposed buckets contain bad projects, it’s that my priorities would be a bit different. That said, I’m really excited about $40m for corridor improvements to make major bus routes run faster and more reliably, and $18m to engineer the 4th/5th and Aloha streetcar extensions to a place where the City can chase private or federal money.
And while I’m not a huge proponent of more trolley wire for its own sake, the $20m trolley account would pay for putting wire on Yesler, which creates important operational efficiencies, with quite a bit left over. I’m somewhat skeptical of the $22m for neighborhood connection and access projects, but will reserve judgment until we see what those projects are.
Of course, I haven’t even mentioned road maintenance, bicycle, and pedestrian projects — together about 50% of the package — which most transit advocates will find fairly uncontroversial.
The City Council has a lot of authority to modify the priorities as conditions change, but the Council in 2013 or 2015 is going to look a lot like the one today. I wouldn’t expect significant change without the emergence of important new facts.
Long overdue, with prototypes tested three years ago, Metro began implementing its new signage system on a route by route basis this year. The new system matches Metro’s current color scheme and presents more information than the old signs in a clear and consistent format. However, the possibility of significant service cuts put replacement of regular signs (type A in the graphic) on hold, since Metro would have to go back and “patch” the new signs with stickers. Even with the $20 CRC, “budget [for the new signs] will still be a challenge”, says Metro spokeswoman Linda Thielke. Metro continues to plan on replacing the large kiosk style signs at busy stops, since those signs feature interchangeable route tiles (types B and C). There’s no estimate on when all the regular signs will be replaced. Complete replacement of the large signs is estimated to take at least 5 years.
You can see the new large signs at 3rd & Pine northbound stop, a few stops on 3rd Ave in Belltown, the island stop at 4th & Jackson, and the 4th & Jackson stop beside Union Station. The regular signs have appeared in many places across King County.
The new system is a significant improvement, in both form and function, over the old signs, which haven’t changed in basic design for decades. It was designed by Portland based Mayer/Reed and Jon Bentz Design in Edmonds, the latter has also worked on Sound Transit’s graphic and signage design standards.
One drawback of DART service that I forgot to mention yesterday was that the vans aren’t equipped for onebusaway. A DART line is the only one that brings me to my employer’s front door but I’ve fallen out of the habit of using it.
A short-haul, infrequent line that is also unreliable and also has no real-time information is basically unusable if you have other options, in my case a carpool or bike. It’s enough to make me realize how awful it must have been to use most bus services in the 70s and 80s, especially in the suburbs.
When I was a kid in an East Coast suburb in the 1980s, the county bus was simply not something people took if they had an alternative. The frequent and reliable train, however, was just fine. I’d always presumed that was some sort of mode snobbery, but after experiencing those conditions, I think it made a certain amount of sense.
This is all a roundabout way of saying that onebusaway is awesome and transformative.
While much of the debate about the possible Queen Anne-Downtown-First Hill-Madrona restructure I presented last week centered on the long tail of the 4S, some commenters raised good questions about current ridership patterns on Queen Anne, and whether abolishing local service on the northern tail of the 2 in favor of more service on the 13 left too big of a gap in all-day service at the top of Queen Anne.
If you’re not already familiar with the details of Queen Anne service, I recommend opening this Google map and this Metro map in separate browser windows, and examining on each the alignments of the 2 and 13. The Metro map gives a better sense of context, but the Google map will allow you to zoom in and see the street grid in more detail.
Temporary, piddling construction mitigation funds for transit during DBT construction won’t even do that. State is thinking about dumping this state responsibility on Metro.
Very late SR520 contractor will get a break on fines.
Metro is converting the low-performing 149, 186, and 251 to DART (Dial-A-Ride-Transit) service in the February 2012 service change, as the first of 100,000 service hours to be eliminated and replaced with higher-performing trips.
These three routes alone will save $400,000 annually solely by switching to the vans. In general, a smaller bus is not much cheaper than a larger one because the main cost is the driver. However, DART service is contracted out, and spokeswoman Linda Thielke says that the savings arise because Metro doesn’t have to pay for deadhead time and because it doesn’t (directly) absorb vehicle acquisition and maintenance costs.
As DART routes, they will have somewhat flexible routing depending on phone calls and requests by passengers. Details of the changes below the jump.
Mark Hinshaw in Crosscut provides yet another entry in the exurbs-are-dying genre. A few years ago, I wrote twoposts reacting to previous articles in this thread. There have been others over the years, most notably this Freakonomics roundtable.
Rising gas prices and various other considerations have prompted this increased round of speculation on whether the suburbanization of America will reverse, but the right answer needs to take into account the fact that what policy choices we make will have a strong impact on the course of the future.
Here’s the money graf:
It’s totally plausible that we’ll respond to high energy prices by keeping our transportation spending priorities similar, while incumbent homeowners in-or-near walkable places respond to increased demand by enacting tight development restrictions in order to maintain artificial scarcity of housing stock and maximize the value of their homes. A similar overall proportion of the population would live in the suburbs, but the urban/suburban socioeconomic mix would continue shifting (“demographic inversion”) and overall quality of life will be hampered. Alternatively, we could alter our land use rules to facilitate the construction of denser areas and shift transportation spending priorities. That would slow sprawl, encourage inner suburbs to become less “suburban,” and a shift of the population base toward the cities. That would also be the more prosperity-friendly solution (not because cities are awesome, but because it’s more economically efficient to allocate resources in a manner less constrained by arbitrary regulatory barriers) and I hope it’s the solution we adopt, but whether or not we do it is totally uncertain.
The only thing I have to add is that the population of most metro areas will continue to grow. So in his first scenario, where we keep the statutory status quo, you might see demographic inversion, but over an increasingly sprawling area. Homes in Seattle and Bellevue become more unaffordable than they already are. As you get to current outer suburbs and exurbs, incomes steadily decline, until you reach towns that currently haven’t been absorbed into the metropolis yet. These towns would grow up to be sprawling exurbs, with the added problem of being of a lower socioeconomic stratum than that currently associated with exurbs.
In the second scenario, increased density moderates prices in the core, creating a mix of housing prices throughout the metro region. Furthermore, since growth is directed inward, the geographic metro region has roughly the same limits it has today.
King County Metro’s Route 48, running from Mount Baker to Loyal Heights via the U-District is the highest-ridership route in the county; it’s also one of the longest routes in Metro’s network that exists entirely within the densely urbanized and heavily-trafficked urban core of Seattle. Both the north and south segments could stand alone as high-performing frequent-service routes: they would be the 8th and 16th highest-ridership routes in the county respectively. It is also, anecdotally, one of the most pathologically unreliable routes in Metro’s network, earning the sobriquet “forty-late” from its riders.
Talk of splitting the 48 in the U-District probably began when the route was created, and has yet to stop. In general, there tends to be much more transit ridership from residential areas to urban centers, or between urban centers, rather than between residential areas. While reasonably good bidirectional demand exists throughout the route, much of the 48′s ridership is going to or from the U-District, and in that circumstance, splitting the route there has the potential to improve reliability for all riders, while forcing only a minority to make a transfer. (more…)
Soylent Density: Density is people! (photo by author)
Last week I wrote about how limiting housing supply in the urban core forces demand for transit into the suburbs, increasing the costs of supplying that demand. Sunday’s New York times has an important article that more or less bulids on the points I made last week: density also makes economic sense.
But elected leaders in cities like Seattle continue to play rhetorical and political games with land use, caving to the single-family lobby out to keep the status quo. Think I’m ranting? Here’s what Ryan Avent, the author of the article in the Times says about the single-family status quo crowd:
[They] fight development, aiming to protect old buildings and precious views, limit crime and traffic, and maintain high-quality schools. But what makes a city a city and a not-city a not-city is the fact that a city is dense and a not-city isn’t. The idea of it may chill a homeowner’s heart, but the wealth supported by urban density is what gives urban homes their great value in the first place.
What many single-family advocates forget is their home is more valuable because of the great stuff just a few blocks away, in dense commercial and residential urban villages. How about density it’s effect on housing supply? When housing gets cheap in sprawling areas because supply gets attenuated in the urban core, many people follow the lower prices.
Factors like taste and taxes account for some of the migration, but the biggest reason for the shift is housing costs. The average Phoenix home is worth about 30 percent of the price of a house in San Jose. The difference in prices is mostly due to differences in building. In every year from 1992 to 2009, Phoenix granted permits for two to three times as many new homes as did the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas combined. Around the San Francisco Bay, neighborhoods dead set against change successfully squeezed the housing supply, just as OPEC limits the supply of oil when it wishes to raise its price.
Exactly. When the Seattle City Council dithers on big land use decisions, or tries to split the baby by supporting 65 feet when developers ask for 85, they do for housing supply what OPEC does for oil supply: reduce it. Less housing with increasing demand ensures higher prices. Higher prices for owner or renter occupied multifamily housing in the city just feeds the single-family lobby more ammunition and fulfills their prophecy of gentrification. What’s the obstacle to making density happen in Seattle and what’s at stake?
Rapid urban growth would mean denser neighborhoods, which makes many Americans uncomfortable. Preventing this density, however, denies workers access to the best opportunities, constraining the mechanism that helps support a strong middle class.
The standard, single-family home in Seattle is presented by the single-family lobby as apple pie. But Avent points out that the idea that density is a bad, socialist potion just isn’t true. To make our country, region, and city work we have to see land use as fiscal policy–loosen regulations and expand what housing suppliers can do and we can create not just more jobs but better jobs and more and better housing. The more we support density the better life, work, and play can become.
The public hearing on density in Roosevelt is right around the corner, September 19th. Now that the New York Times has weighed in, perhaps members of the Seattle City Council will give more credence to the arguments that squashing housing supply to appease single family home owners is bad for our local economy and way of life, not to mention transit, air and water quality, and climate.
It seems like anytime someone brings up a proposal to restructure a bus network, advocate for rail, or says anything that really encourages dense transit-friendly growth, there’s always a knee-jerk counter-reaction from someone in the community, whether it’s a social service organization, a neighborhood activist, or a well-meaning resident. Saddest is the fact that most of these people are transit users, believe in social equity, are generally environmentally conscious, and pretty much believe in the same goals that we transit advocates do.
So it’s rather baffling that there’s this strange dichotomy of us vs. them, experts vs. neighbors, bureaucrats vs. the people. The rhetoric is strikingly similar to the debates with transit/density opponents that tend to end up riddled with political and cultural ideologies. Too often, it’s pitted as the smarmy planners and experts swooping down into the neighborhood to tell residents that they know better. Paint it that way, and you’ve instantly ignited a culture war with the seeming effect of having flushed all those shared goals down the drain.
For transit advocates and planners, the bottom line that needs to be communicated is that we’re all on the same side as the people we plan for. Transit isn’t planned and changed just for the sake of planning. It’s done because there’s a core benefit delivered the system as a whole and the communities it serves, which, unfortunately, almost always ends up being invisible to the people that bear the brunt of the biggest changes. And out of selfishness (good or bad), people will never fail to scream loudly at the things that affect them the most.
Planners can’t change human nature. We can’t tell people to stop being selfish or to tell them to accept change for the greater good. We can only be objective as possible and let facts be facts. If the political leaders and decision-makers we commit to elect can look beyond the pluralistic choruses of “me! me! me!” and see that the facts do ultimately stand with community interests in the long-term, then we can start to get somewhere.
Over the past several weeks, the elevators and escalators in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel (DSTT) have seen a very high incidence of breakdowns with some of them out of service for several weeks and counting. I contacted Sound Transit who informed me that King County Metro is responsible for maintenance in the DSTT. What I found out is that while the elevators and escalators are under regular maintenance contract, the useful life of many core components has been exceeded and breakdowns occur with some frequency.
Last year, Metro applied for and received a $5.38 Million grant from the Federal Transit Administration’s “State of Good Repair” grant program. The work was scheduled to begin in 2011 and explains why we are now seeing several escalators out of service for long periods of time.
While escalators themselves are not considered ADA devices, Metro has been responding to elevator outages quickly. Unfortunately there have been some instances of simultaneous breakdowns, as was observed on August 8th when both escalators and one elevator were out on Westlake Station’s northbound platform, leaving just one remaining elevator operational on the northbound side. This was in addition to multiple long-term downtime on escalators inside University Street Station.
According to a statement by a Metro spokesperson, Metro estimates that the major repairs on the Westlake escalator should take an additional month to complete. However, escalators and elevators outside the DSTT, such as at Mt. Baker Station, fall under the responsibility of Sound Transit. According to an ST spokesperson, the elevator outage at Mt. Baker is due to a required custom part, which is estimated to require an additional three weeks before the elevator can be put back in service.
Yesterday, the Community Transit Board voted to proceed with a hybrid alternative for their system restructure set to be implemented next February. Like the original Alternative I, it will preserve the core commuter route network with some trip deletions here and there. The local network, however, is more similar to Alternative III, a complete restructure of local services.
In 2012, Community Transit’s commuter service will maintain much of its current routing with fewer trips, while local service will be restructured to serve higher ridership corridors. This afternoon, the agency’s Board of Directors voted 6-3 to approve a plan to cut Community Transit bus service 20 percent effective Feb. 20, 2012.
After a summer-long public comment process that included reviews of four proposed service plans, the board chose the so-called Hybrid Alternative, which combines the commuter routing proposed in Alternative I with the local routing of Alternative III, with some modifications. The board did not restore service on Sundays or major holidays.
The gory (or promising, depending on your outlook) details are available at CT’s website. The hope here is that the local restructure will make the system more productive and efficient than it is now. And between Sounder and frequent express service already available at Lynnwood, Ash Way, and Mountlake Terrace, there’s a good opportunity here to emphasize connections that are certainly more cost-effective than one-seat rides.
