Photo by Atomic Taco

• C-Tran (Clark County) measure to raise transit sales tax from 0.5% to 0.7% and preserve bus service is winning comfortably.
• Artists selected for North Link.
• Veterans’ Day has reduced service.
• West Seattle Blog writes up the first open house about route restructures.
• Imagine DC without Metro. In a few decades — assuming we don’t badly botch the zoning — Seattle without Link will be equally unthinkable.
• How to improve sidewalks on the cheap.
• A look at HOV lane enforcement.
• Transit-aware apartment finder.
• Stop consolidation on Proctor St. in Tacoma.
• Sounder-related fatality.
• Seattle Architecture Foundation hosting a forum on “Transit-Oriented Design” at Town Hall ($20) on Nov. 15th.
• Metro’s ad-banning saga not over.
• Crosscut article suggests my worries of a dead waterfront may be unfounded; naturally, the author thinks this is terrible.
• Minneapolis trying everything against traffic congestion.
• There’s an open house on Brooklyn Station construction on Nov. 16th.
• Writeup of the Northgate Station meeting is coming tomorrow.

This is an open thread.

Photo by Erubisu 27

Out of Pierce County comes the news that some cities are considering leaving Pierce Transit because they’re paying taxes and no longer receive any service:

The mayors of Bonney Lake, Buckley and Orting – three cities that have been vocal about their transit concerns – said they favor going through the process.

“I can take not having service. What I can’t take is being taxed for service I’m not getting,” said Buckley Mayor Pat Johnson.

It’s always sad when service levels shrink, but outlying areas are where attempts to save Pierce Transit with a tax increase failed most miserably.  Leaving the district would allow Tacoma and Lakewood to move forward with a more developed transit system.

Leaving the Public Transit Benefit Area, or PTBA, is a non-trivial process, as PT spokesman Lars Erickson explained to me over a year ago. It’s below the jump: (more…)

Paula Hammond, Greg Nickels and Joni Earl (WSDOT)

I’m happy to announce that in addition to Joni Earl, Secretary of Transportation Paula Hammond will be joining us on November 17th to discuss women in transportation and other topics, tolling being a timely topic. I hope I’m not the only one getting super excited for this event.

Also please note that we have secured a location. The event will be held in the 40th floor conference center in the Columbia Tower (701 Fifth Avenue). Please be on time as we’ll start promptly at 6:00 pm. If you’re early you can enjoy the view from the 40th floor Starbucks, easily one of my favorite ways to kill time downtown. The later than normal start time was to ensure that those not in Seattle proper have time to get to the event without leaving work early.

If you have not already done so please RSVP on the previous event announcement.

There’s already a lot of analysis of Prop 1′s failure, but I think most is occurring in specific frames – social justice, transit planning, the economy. I agree some people make decisions about how to vote based on very specific concerns and interests, but for the most part, I think ballot measures are much more simple, and visceral, than we admit.

For most voters, I think these votes come down to two fundamental, linked questions, which I’m hearing echoed in a lot of the comments here as well: “How much will I get, and how much will I pay?”

The answer to what a voter gets can range from the focused, like a streetcar extension along a particular street – to the diffuse, like a list of projects all over town, or no list at all! The answer to how much they pay is similar: As focused as $60 per car once a year, and as diffuse as .05% on every purchase.

During a campaign, the side promoting a measure has to communicate the benefit to as many people as possible. The more focused and simple that benefit is, the cheaper it is to communicate – the slogan can be catchier (“Mass Transit Now!”), the explanation simpler (“A monorail from Ballard to West Seattle”). An interaction that leaves a voter with confidence in your project is shorter, meaning you can make more contacts in the same amount of volunteer time. Even less engaged voters will be exposed to your message, because a simpler message is more easily repeated.

A more diffuse package raises negatives – which are much more powerful than positives. If a measure has roads and transit, people who hate roads will vote against it as well as people who hate transit. People who hate bike lanes voted against Prop 1, people who hate streetcars, and people who hate buses. The more complex your package, the more likely you are to trigger someone angry about another project.

At the same time, the opposition’s job is to communicate the cost. The more focused, like an annual fee, the better for them – $60 per car is easy to communicate, because it’s the same message for everyone, and it’s easy for people to understand – there’s no math involved. It’s more difficult, and costly, for an opposition campaign to communicate a sliding scale or make people angry about a tiny increase on many, many transactions, simply because it takes more words, time, and even math to tell each voter about it. This is why we have a sales tax! It takes work for a voter to understand how much it costs them.

Prop 1 was basically terrible in this respect. “A $60 annual fee for a wide range of small, difficult to explain projects.” Compare that to “a 0.5% sales tax for 50 miles of light rail,” and I think you get the idea.

We can debate all day what percentage of voters cares about what particular value set, but this is economics. Everyone cares about how much bang they get for their buck, and little projects for big money doesn’t sound good. I editorialized in August that this package needed a signature project to make selling it easier, and while a streetcar might not have been enough to pass Prop 1, I believe the results would have been different. As for the funding mechanism – we need to take that fight to Olympia.

If there isn’t a “war on cars,” why isn’t there one? After all cars are the leading producer of carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. Also, the automobile as a form of transportation has been the central to a social engineering project that promotes far-flung single-family homes woven together by a web of expensive highways, punctuated by shopping malls.

But a war? Of course not. Even though Kemper Freeman quite unabashedly has declared war on transit in our region on behalf of the car, we (transit advocates, pedestrian advocates, environmentalists etc.) aren’t at war. We’re engaged in “messaging.” Messaging is another way of saying “persuading people to do the right thing,” and it’s failing.

The failure of Proposition 1 in my estimation is due to several factors not the least of which is a tough economy. But I think the other side had, to be consistent with my colleagues’ language, a better message. “Why spend your cash on elaborate and fanciful transit planning efforts when you just busted your axle on a gigantic pothole?” they asked. “And those Prop 1 people are just trying to get you out of your car.”

“Absolutely not!” answered the other side. The Prop 1 message was all about how spending $60 on registering your car would help fund things that you wouldn’t use—unless you got out of your car. “This isn’t a war on cars, it’s an effort to make all modes safer and faster.” More after the jump.

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wikimedia

The final results won’t be known for some time, but it’s clear the Seattle Transportation Benefit District Proposition 1, the $60 Vehicle License fee for transit, road, bike, and pedestrian improvements, is going to lose badly. There are a lot of possible explanations, but there aren’t a lot of polls and I think a lot of people are going to see what they want to see in the results. And of course, why people say they vote no and why they actually vote no can be two different things. In that spirit, I’ll lay out some possibilities without really picking between them.

• Too regressive: I think this argument was factually oversold but politically very effective. Unfortunately, there are no other revenue options, and after this vote more authority from the legislature is a pipe-dream. So there’s not much constructive advice for transportation advocates in this analysis.
  
• Too big: $60 is large enough that its regressive nature begins to bite. If the City goes smaller, it’ll have to focus on the least controversial elements, which are probably potholes, pedestrians, and faster transit; meaning less bikes, less planning, less trolleybus, and less “transit access.”
• Too small: with a $200m total budget spread over every transportation interest group in the city, there wasn’t a signature project that everyone could rally around. If it had been more like a Sound Transit measure, with one huge program (say, $80 over 20 years to get HCT to Ballard) and a few smaller ones to provide some geographic equity, it might have done better.
• Too McGinn: the Mayor is a lightning rod for bike and transit skeptics that Mayor Nickels never was, even with virtually identical policies. He wasn’t very visible in the campaign, but he’s fairly unpopular and voters saw him as driving this agenda.
• Too vague: One reason to despise the initiative / referendum / proposition process is that complexity is the kiss of death, which is a terrible criterion to make policy. Regardless, there are three master plans and yet little sense of what projects would have emerged. Voters who don’t read STB mostly didn’t know anything about priority bus corridors. If the TMP had been ready in time*, the measure could have actually promised to build a specific set of them and put them on a big map to mail out, rather than saying “trust us.”

If you have evidence for one of these beyond what your circle of like-minded friends told you, I’d be interested to hear it. My suspicion is that this is like most things and it’s a combination of everything.

* Council-induced delays in starting the TMP last summer look especially bad in retrospect.

Mosler Lofts, Belltown (seattle.gov)

Seattle’s Design Review Program is a detail-oriented process where architects, developers, and community members come together to comment on the design of major projects. At its best, it focuses attention on a building’s impact on the street and avoids really ugly architecture; at its worst, it stifles innovation and throws up roadblocks to development and densification. It is not a zoning board.

Anyhow, Seattle is looking for applicants for board members from both the community and from the professionals. Applications are due December 9th for positions opening on April 4th, 2012. Note that the application, cover letter, and resume should be sent to Shelley Bolser (shelley.bolser@seattle.gov), not Bruce Rips as indicated on the form. Here are the open positions:

Northwest Design Review Board

• Community representative

Southeast Design Review Board

• Local residential representative

Southwest Design Review Board

• Development representative

East (Capitol Hill/First Hill/Central District) Design Review Board

• Design professional representative

Get more information from the press release. It’s a commitment of 12-14 hours a month that comes with an opportunity to make a big impact on a built environment that will last for decades. This low-level stuff is where many important decisions are made, and a few people can make a big difference.

Requirements below the jump: (more…)

[Update 9:43PM--

Preliminary results are in:

• State initiatives 
• King County
• Snohomish County
• Pierce County]

It’s election day!  Tonight, we’ll  be watching several races across the region which will have an impact on transit.  Topping the list are the two big transportation ballot measures: Prop. 1 (Seattle), which will help fund transit, bicycle, pedestrian, and street improvements, and I-1125 (state-wide), which would seek to stop East Link, and insert a bunch of tolling provisions with the effecting of increasing transportation costs across the state.  We’ve endorsed a YES vote for Prop. 1, and NO vote for I-1125.

Other important races include the Seattle city council, which will be integral as the city hones in on key land use and transit policy decisions over the next several years, and the Bellevue city council, which is currently struggling over East Link and policy debates on how to fund and develop the Bel-Red Corridor.  Our endorsements for these and more can be found here.

If you haven’t yet voted, there still is time.  Ballot drop boxes will be open until 8PM tonight and ballots going through the mail must be postmarked today.  As we progress through election night, we’ll be keeping a close eye on the races.  Follow live updates on our Twitter account: @seatransitblog and through the general #waelex hashtag.  We’ll bring you results as they come and leave the thread open for discussion.

Roughly two weeks ago the Shoreline City Council adopted the above Light Rail Guiding Principles, which to me essentially boils down to support for an I-5 alignment with concerns about TOD. The principles repeatedly states that transition to TOD could take decades and must ensure that impacts on residents and business are managed. The meeting was short and light on details with Councilmember Chris Roberts the most engaged member of the council. All Councilmembers stressed that they would like Sound Transit to continue public outreach to Shoreline residents.

I don’t have much to add besides that this is obviously bad news for the SR-99 alignment, which does not yet have a strong institutional champion. Additionally, the language in the document is far from hopeful if you’re expecting any kind of significant redevelopment around stations. I do find it surprising that a city that is done so much to re-define its self, through major investments and beautification of Aurora, is not more actively involved with regard to Link.

Joni Earl at February 2009 Meetup (Oran)

UPDATE 11/9: The event location has been set. The meetup will take place in the Columbia Tower on the 40th floor.

In a effort to mix up our meetups and strengthen the participation of women in STB I’m happy to announce that Joni Earl, CEO of Sound Transit, will be joining us at our next meetup on November 17th – starting at 6pm downtown.  Seattle, and Washington in general, has lots of women in leadership roles or elected office and I though it would great to highlight a woman that we all would love to talk with. We’ll start off the event with a focus on women in the world of transportation and then open it up to the characteristically detailed and informative discussion STB is known for. We hope to see all the regulars and some new women faces in the crowd.

Please RSVP in the comment section.

Note: Location to be announced, but it will be somewhere in downtown Seattle. The venue we had lined up experienced water damage and is no longer available.

King County Metro 31, at the Center of the Universe

As every regular STB reader who’s not been hiding under a rock for a week probably knows, one of the more controversial ideas in Metro’s proposed Fall 2012 restructure is moving Route 5 from Aurora to Dexter, trading the speed of Aurora for the better connectivity to other routes, access to Fremont, and economy of service that Dexter provides. To help quantify that trade-off, last Friday I posted graphs that show the difference in travel times and reliability between Aurora and Dexter, and the day before that, I posted ridership charts for Routes 5 and 28.

Black: Current alignment Purple: Change idea.

In this post I’d like to float a slightly crazy idea, one that has not been proposed by Metro, but which may have, on balance, as much merit as the idea of switching Route 5 to Dexter, namely moving Route 16 to Dexter. The trade-off is similar in many respects: speed for access and connectivity, although with some minor differences, both pro and con.

The details are as follows: Route 16 would stop serving the Seattle Center detour, instead proceeding on exactly the same alignment from downtown as the proposed Route 5 on Dexter. It would turn right on 35th Ave to Wallingford Ave, then head north, rejoining the existing 16 alignment on 45th St. The proposed 28X would become a local bus, serving all stops on Aurora, probably with an additional preak express service that did not.

Arguments in favor:

• Would maintain the direct connections from Westlake, Dexter and Fremont to Wallingford and Green Lake, and from Lower Wallingford to Downtown, currently provided by Route 26, which would go away under the current proposal.
• Would provide additional direct service to the heart of Fremont, notably the extremely busy stop at 34th
• Would add another another possible connection to what would then essentially be a transit hub at Fremont, arguably adding to the quasi-gridded nature of the new system.
• Would consolidate all service in lower Wallingford onto one corridor on 35th and Wallingford Ave.
• Would shift frequent service away from the extremely-little-used local stops on Aurora to Dexter, which is an infinitely nicer pedestrian environment and much better walkshed.
• Would not make northbound trips slower or less reliable than the current Route 16; the unreliability of and time penalty of Dexter is similar to that of the northbound Seattle Center deviation.
• Would reduce the time spent on 45th St, which is often congested.
• Would almost certainly have more total riders, and riders per revenue hour, assuming no loss of riders from north due to the longer southbound travel times.

Arguments against:

• Would make southbound trips slightly slower, although not much less reliable than the current alignment on Aurora and by the Seattle Center.
• Would route service away from well-used stops on Stone Way between 40th and 45th to Wallingford Ave, which currently has no service north of 40th St.
• Would not serve the Seattle Center. I’ve never seen this detour as an asset, and I still don’t.

What do 16/26 riders in the audience think? Charts and a little more analysis after the jump.

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On October 27th Sound Transit accepted the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Bellevue for East Link Construction. With Bellevue’s approval anticipated on November 14th,  including a commitment to fund up to $160m (2010 dollars) of the increased costs associated with a downtown Link tunnel, it now faces the hard part:  coming up with the money for its share.

It turns out that a lot of this money will actually be “credits” that come from waiving various payments from ST to the City,or doing things that the City would do anyway. From September 19th and October 10th staff reports to the council:  (slide version is here).

As an up-front commitment, the City will take all or a portion of the following actions to reduce Sound Transit’s costs by a minimum of $100m:

• Providing permanent ROW easements
• Providing temporary easements for construction staging
• Contributing the depreciated value of city-owned utilities
• Helping to direct conflicting private utilities to relocate
• Contributing certain taxes received by the City as a result of the Project
• Purchasing certain properties for the Project which may also serve other public purposes
• Other actions that reduce Sound Transit’s costs.

The staff divided these actions into three categories, ordered from least to most painful, below the jump: (more…)

Kind of.  See if you recognize the subway station between 1:19 and 2:07.

As you’ve probably noticed, our server is not doing very well. We’re looking into the causes.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Could this bus be on time?

As if the proposed September 2012 restructure weren’t news enough, on Thursday Metro released its proposal for the June 2012 service change, and it’s another round of good news for those of us who advocate for ridership- and efficiency-oriented improvements to the bus network. This service change is simultaneously broader and narrower in scope: it covers the entire county rather than focusing on the Ballard-Downtown-West Seattle corridor, but involves only incremental cuts and improvements to the network instead of wholesale changes to the network structure; Metro is billing this as “transit reinvestment”, an apt description.

As with the last restructure, I shall provide links to Metro’s descriptions, and a discussion of the highlights, after the jump.

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by TIM BURGESS

I took a different route to work Wednesday morning. Instead of the Metro #3 or #4, I hustled down to lower Queen Anne and hopped on the #8 bound for Capitol Hill.

I chose this route because the Queen Anne-to-Capitol Hill-to Rainier Valley route will receive significant improvements if the voters approve Proposition 1 next week.

I caught the 7:38a.m. trip at the corner of Queen Anne Avenue North and Mercer Street, just a minute after OneBusAway told me it would arrive. Of course, with Prop 1, instead of relying on a bus app (as great as it is), riders could just look to the real-time information signs that display when the next bus is coming.

Efficiency improvements from Prop 1 include transit priority traffic signals and curb bulbs at stops so buses can pick-up and drop-off without having to pull to the curb. Metro reports that the average speed of a bus in Seattle is between 6 and 8 miles per hour. The improvements will help increase these speeds to 10 to 12 miles per hour, a significant difference if you’re trying to get to work, home or school.

One of the first differences I noticed as we traveled east on Denny Way toward Capitol Hill was the age of my fellow riders; much younger than my regular transit experience to and from work. Most looked like students on their way to Seattle Central Community College or Seattle U. We had the usual collection of office workers, too.

What if this bus had a little device that would change the traffic signals for our benefit and turn them green to keep buses moving faster? That would help a lot along a congested street like Denny Way. Proposition 1 will make that investment, improving travel times for all riders. More after the jump. (more…)

King County Metro 26 on Dexter

In the posts I’ve written about the proposed Fall 2012 restructure, one complaint I’ve heard repeatedly is from Route 5 riders in Greenwood and points north, regarding diminished reliability and speed in exchanging Aurora for Dexter, due the attendant exposure to delays from the Fremont Bridge and Fremont traffic generally.

Fortunately, Metro collects data that can allow us to quantify the effects of this change, and I’ve assembled charts that will allow readers to do just that. There are two timepoint pairs involved:

• 3rd & Union to 34th & Fremont (and vice versa). This is the travel time of the 26/28 pair from Downtown Seattle to (and from) the heart of Fremont.
• 3rd & Pine to 38th & Fremont (and vice versa). This is the travel time of Route 5 from Downtown Seattle to (and from) its closest current stop to Fremont.

The additional travel time of about one minute between Union and Pine conveniently offsets the approximate travel time from 34th to 38th, so these charts provide an excellent travel time and reliability comparison between the current alignment of Route 5 and the proposed reroute to Dexter. Some points to bear in mind, when reading these charts:

• Express service on Greenwood and Shoreline via the Aurora bridge will operate during the peaks, in the form of either Route 5X or 355.
• The underlying data run from February through May, so neither the speed and reliability improvements from the Wall/Battery bus lanes, nor from the Dexter reconfiguration will be reflected in this data.
• Arguably the most precise timepoint comparison just to compare Aurora and Dexter would be from Aurora & Denny and Dexter & Denny to Fremont, but that data doesn’t exist (as far as I know). On the other hand, these two timepoint pairs most accurately characterize what riders experience under the current 5 versus the proposed revised 5.

Charts after the jump.

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Option B, 112th Ave SE Crossing

Next Monday, Bellevue will hold another East Link public hearing, this time in response to city’s approval of the “flyover to trench” alignment along 112th as well as recent updates to the MOU with Sound Transit. The MOU, which outlines the shared tunnel-funding agreement, has actually already been approved by the ST Board provided that the Bellevue city council will reciprocate the move within two weeks time.

The hearing might possibly be one last-ditch effort by East Link opponents to try and halt the project. But if you’re interested in seeing East Link come to fruition, this is a meeting you’ll want to attend. You can RSVP with TCC here.

Photo by Zargoman

• Viaduct closure traffic is bad at times.
• I’m a big park skeptic, so it’s unsurprising I’m not wild about any of these waterfront ideas, except the funicular.
• 46 more bicycle lockers at Columbia City. Get a $10 Orca card for signing up to use the $50 a year lockers.
• Burien adopts complete streets ordinance.
• Yonah Freemark on East Link.
• Debunking complaints about the Bike Master Plan.
• To helmet up or not? What do Portland BTA members think?
• A meditation on air travel vs. train travel. It helps to live in the Northeast. CAHSR is in trouble.
• Seattle car usage down.
• Feds send $8m for Tukwila Sounder.
• Negative campaigning against pro-light rail candidates hits Bellevue thanks to the big pockets of Kemper Freeman.
• Urban freeways not one of our best regional decisions, but it can’t truly be undone.
• More about free ice cream and parking. Study shows that below-market street parking adds to “cruising,” increasing congestion and wasting time.
• Cascade’s pro-bike candidate voting guide.
• Community Transit budget hearing today.

This is an open thread.

King County Metro 28 in Broadview

Perched on a ridge north of beautiful Carkeek Park and west of Bitter Lake, Broadview enjoys a broad view of Puget Sound — sort of like living on Sounder North — and shares the quiet, leafy feel and chip sealed, sidewalk-less roads that characterize much of north Seattle past 85th St. Homes here are exclusively single-family, and tend to be on lots a little larger and more widely set-back than streetcar suburbs, but this neighborhood feels similar to walk through, possessing a mostly-intact street grid and houses in a jumble of styles and ages and states of repair.

Broadview is served by two Metro routes: 5 and 28, and the express variants 355 and 28X. Route 5 currently operates on Aurora and Phinney/Greenwood before splitting, with half of the trips continuing straight up Greenwood Ave to serve Broadview, Bitter Lake and Shoreline, terminating at Shoreline Community College; the other half continue to Northgate via Holman Rd . Route 28 currently serves Dexter and Fremont, then jogs west to 8th Ave NW before heading up to Whittier Heights, Crown Hill and Broadview, terminating on 145th St near Aurora.

Notably, due to the absence of suitable roads, Route 28 operates three blocks west of Greenwood Ave, on 3rd Ave NW, for most of its alignment north of Crown Hill, even though no intervening terrain feature acts as a barrier. I’m not sure when this alignment was created, although it goes back at least to the 80s and streetcars existed south of 85th St on both 8th Ave NW and 3rd Ave NW.

Long-time readers can probably guess where I’m heading with this, after the jump.

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