We’ve just learned that the amendment on SB 6774 to save Community Transit and Pierce Transit is dead. For those just tuning in, it would have allowed – not created, just allowed – transportation benefit districts to be created by those agencies. It failed through a scoping process – reportedly a Senator asked the lieutenant governor, Brad Owen, to rule on whether the amendment would be outside the scope of the bill. He ruled that it was outside scope, and the amendment was stripped.
The legislature as a whole, despite a few friends, did almost nothing for transit this session. Perhaps it would be appropriate to strip them of dedicated road funding?
Every day, when we discuss future transit options, how things are going, what we’re expecting, I see that a lot of us have very different metrics for how we determine success in our transit system. As a result, a lot of our discussions turn into debates about how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ something is today. I don’t want to discourage that – we need to understand what to do next and where the problems are today – but I want to encourage a broader discussion.
Let me start with a little about how I think about transit.
Almost all the time, I try to think on a hundred year horizon. I try to consider what we’re building for the next fifteen years, the PSRC goals for the fifteen years after that, and how other cities have grown in similar situations. I’m also thinking about not just ST3, but ST4 and ST5 – how the city might affect what’s in those packages with their own investments, what our next north-south trunk might look like, and how we can change state priorities to help us and build our intercity rail solutions.
To that end, or rather lack of end, I think we can create a better model for ourselves. More on this after the jump. (more…)
[UPDATE: The bill is dead. Lt. Governor Brad Owen ruled that the Liias amendment was out of scope of the bill. ]
Late last night, the House voted to insist Liias’ amendment to provide Pierce and Snohomish with the tools they need to keep transit from falling off a cliff. This is great news for us, but there is one more step!
Now it’s up to the Senate – we need real pressure on your Senatorsto make this happen, and we’re very close. The last thing we want is to have this fight again next year when we’re trying to fight for a good state capital budget.
There’s a simple tool to find your legislators here. Please urge your Senator to concur with SB 6774! This is it for the session, and it’s the one fight we can actually win. Please help our friends to the north and south, and please comment once you’ve done so!
[Update: Chopp may be reconsidering, there could yet be support for the Liias amendment if he gets enough pressure. Please call him - that's on SB 6774! The bill we need calls to Gregoire on is SB 6381 - we want her to veto the "private provider" provision.]
Sources in Olympia tell us that transit is under attack in the legislature right now on two fronts – as usual. Today, though, there’s at least something we can do!
First, we understand that Mary Margaret Haugen attached a requirement to regional mobility grant funding – transit agencies would only be eligible for these grants if they provide access to their facilities for private transit operators (airport shuttles, limousines, etc.), under a “pilot project”.
Given that the federal transit administration has already pointed out significant problems with the state’s plan, it would be a good step for the Governor to veto the private operator provision – and we’re hearing that with enough pressure, that could be a possibility. If you want to help, call her office at 360-902-4111 and urge her to veto the private transit provider provision in the transportation budget!
In addition, Representative Liias’ amendment to provide emergency funding for Community Transit and Pierce Transit is almost dead. Even with TCC, Futurewise, Pierce Transit and the ATU fighting for it, the Senate voted against concurring with the House transportation funding bill it’s attached to, requesting that the House “recede from” (remove) the amendment.
This means the transportation funding bill will go into conference committee, and we’re hearing Liias may be forced to remove the amendment, under pressure from Haugen. Either Chopp or Clibborn (especially Chopp) could step forward to ask House Democrats to defend the funding amendment. It’s frustrating to hear from a representative that they’re supportive of transit, but see no evidence of that in their actions.
So in addition to calling the Governor, your other action item today could be calling or emailing Speaker Chopp’s office to let him know you want Liias’ transit funding amendment on SB 6774 saved! Chopp’s office phone is 360-786-7920, and he’s chopp.frank@leg.wa.gov.
This is somewhat paraphrased, but overheard on the Senate floor from Senate Transportation Chair Mary Margaret Haugen: “There is no one on the floor of this senate that has done more for transit than I have.”
Noting, of course, that the Regional Mobility Grant program Senate Transportation just stripped funding from was created by Senator Ed Murray…
We all know transit funding is a mess – both Pierce and Community Transit are looking at huge cuts in service – their only option now to ask voters for regressive sales tax increases.
Transportation Choices Coalition is stepping up to help, with bake sales for both agencies next week to raise awareness of the issues. The legislature could still pass transit funding as an amendment on an existing bill, and TCC aims to let riders know what they could be losing, and how they can get involved.
The two bake sales are Monday, March 1st, from 7—9am at the Aurora Village Transit Center, and on Tuesday March 2nd from 7–9am in downtown Tacoma (9th and Commerce). We encourage you to go buy a cookie!
First, the bad news. We’ve discussed SB 6570 in the recent past. A state bill, it would allow private transit operators, such as Microsoft’s Connector service or airport shuttles, to use transit-only facilities, including such facilities as BAT lanes, flyer stops and transitways. Our Puget Sound transit agencies have responded in a letter to the chairs of Senate and House Transportation, calling out efficiency problems, costs, and safety issues that would be caused by the bill. Potential delays in HOV lanes, for instance, could cause agencies millions in additional operating costs.
The Federal Transit Administration has also weighed in on the issue, pointing out that projects receiving federal funds require a case by case evaluation to be opened to private transit operators, as opposed to the state bill’s blanket exception. The FTA says clearly: “such a use would appear to conflict with FTA’s rules where those transit facilities and highway lanes … were funded with FTA grants.” The state bill has an exception for state projects that receive federal funds, but this wouldn’t cover agency, city or county facilities, as the FTA points out – and Sound Transit, especially, builds a lot of HOV access ramps.
As we stated before, it doesn’t appear that legislators voting for this bill are considering its impacts, or legal obligations regarding receipt of federal funds. Senate Transportation clearly did not exercise due diligence before passing this bill out of committee, and we hope House Transportation does not make the same mistake.
Fortunately, there’s also good news out of Olympia. The state’s regional mobility grant program for transit, recently stripped of funding in the Senate, has seen $14 million replaced in a House Transportation amendment expected on HB 2838, the House Transportation funding bill, which passed out of committee yesterday. Representatives Mary Lou Dickerson (36th) and Marko Liias (21st) led this effort, and reportedly it passed unanimously. These grants have gone to a number of urban transit agencies in the past, generally to fund congestion reduction capital projects, and it’s good to see House Transportation sticking up for transit funding.
We’ve just gotten ahold of an earlier draft of the downtown Bellevue analysis, and there’s an interesting numerical revision.
The earlier 2030 boarding projections for the downtown segment were: 5,500 for the C14E (I-405 alignment), and 8,500 for C11A (surface, two stations). The final numbers in Monday’s document were 6,000 and 8,000, respectively. This means that somewhere in the process, we went from a ridership difference of 3,000 between the two options – meaning C11A would have picked up more than 50% more riders – to only a difference of 2,000. The final draft is presumably the best judgment of both City and ST, but I hope this is discussed at the workshop. We’re following up with both agencies to get an explanation.
I’d like to encourage those who can to show up at 5:00. It’s fine to show up at 6, but let me put it this way – there should be a special guest or two, and the joint ST Board and Bellevue City Council workshop just down the street ends at 4:00. I will be there at 5, and I encourage you to as well!
Sound Transit and the City of Bellevue have just released their joint analysis (PDF) of the East Link options for downtown Bellevue. East Link project manager Don Billen briefed me (and happily answered all of my questions) by phone on Saturday morning.
Four options were studied, and two come out as rock stars – C11A, a surface option with two stations, providing great walking distance coverage to almost all of downtown Bellevue’s jobs and homes, and C9T, a more expensive tunnel option that provides decent walking coverage of downtown, plus reduced travel times that attract more riders from the east. Both of these alternatives get the segment 8,000 weekday riders in 2030.
The two not-so-good options are losers for clear reasons. C9A, a surface version of the tunnel option, has the same downtown travel time as C11A, but doesn’t compete with C11A in walking coverage, especially as downtown grows. The City’s walkshed maps are similar to what Adam did for our First Hill Streetcar piece, using the actual walking times from the platforms to different destinations via the network of sidewalks and paths, rather than just drawing a circle at a particular distance. As a result, they give a much more accurate view of what’s accessible from a station.
C14E is the other loser – the I-405 alignment that Kevin Wallace has proposed. Analysis found that a circulator bus would offer no significant benefit. It would attract only 6,000 riders, completely failing to serve western downtown.
The real comparison here will be between the better two: what I’ll call the tunnel (C9T) and surface alignment (C11A).
I really don’t care whether we have HOV 3+, HOV 5+, or transit only lanes on the 520 bridge replacement. Even 3+ will keep transit flowing, and if it turns out there’s a problem, we can change it to 5+ later.
I especially don’t care about putting rail on the bridge. There is no plan to connect it to anything. Whatever we build now will almost definitely turn out in the long run to be in the wrong place, or installed the wrong way. That’s a great way to kill future transit ballot measures – opponents can just point and laugh.
There are two things I care about in the 520 debate.
We will eventually add rail transit to 520. My best guess is that we’ll build from Ballard to the UW, and eventually extend it to Redmond. That’s a good idea, and I think we all agree we should make sure the bridge can handle rail later. The big problem is going to be whether the later transit investment will require buying a bunch of the bridge from WSDOT again, like Sound Transit is having to do with I-90. We can prevent that.
So, point one: Specifically call out that design features and capacity for transit are paid for with non-18th Amendment funds (such as tolling), and are dedicated to transit. This should, at the very least, cover the HOV lanes, so they can, if necessary, be turned into real BRT, or even light rail.
Point two: We should keep the Montlake flyer stop. That said, if we have to lose it, the midday and nighttime service that people currently use there needs to be replaced. We need UW-Redmond, UW-Kirkland, and UW-Bellevue service to keep us from screwing UW students, faculty, and staff – not to mention patients and game-fans. That means Sound Transit’s new route 542 would need to run from 5am to 11pm seven days a week. The 540 would have to run on weekends and late at night. If the legislature is choosing to remove the flyer stop, they need to mitigate the loss with dedicated transit funding.
I think the other debates about transit on the bridge are distracting us from these two immediate issues.
When calculating Link ridership, Sound Transit staff record the data provided by infrared electric eyes over the doors on some cars. Reading that data is something of an art – the sensors take some tuning and the data isn’t always perfect. It’s not just a “one” or a “zero”, we’re told – children register differently, for instance. Sound Transit controls for all this when calculating ridership – and sends out manual counters to be sure they’re getting accurate numbers.
As a result, though, sometimes ridership numbers are wrong. Sound Transit found two small errors in their counting methods – one for Tukwila station in the summer and one for Airport station (affecting late December data), and in both cases were throwing out good data that looked bad in the first pass.
It turns out (Excel), in fact, that December weekdays averaged just over 14,900 (300 higher than previously reported), with a peak day on December 28th with over 19,950. Weekdays after Airport Link opened were averaging 17,350. I’ve seen anti-transit activists claim as few as 12,000 weekday riders – don’t let them.
With ridership off by 15% in Portland, this looks pretty good. We’ll have to wait to know how far off Metro ridership is, but I’m willing to bet that without a recession, Link would be beating projections.
In light of all the news lately about East Link alignment choices, and in large part just because we haven’t had one, it’s well past time to have a meetup in Bellevue. Our planned date: Thursday, February 11th.
I’m waiting for a confirmation, but we should have space at the Rock Bottom. It’s a block from Bellevue Transit Center, in the Galleria – which I understand is neither a Kemper Freeman nor a Kevin Wallace property (although it’s probably someone with their values).
I’d imagine you should start filtering in around 6, but don’t worry if you can’t show up until a little later – I’m sure folks will be there until at least 9. Please comment if you can (or can’t) make it!
Although King County Metro has found short-term fixes to their ongoing shortfall, come 2012 they’re still going to have to either find significant new revenue or cut service.
With that in mind, in a proposal from Larry Phillips and Jane Hague, the county council plans to put together a transit task force (.doc) to make policy recommendations that could change the high-level design of Metro. These would not only include particulars such as how Metro grows or shrinks with available revenue, but goes as far as how they weight land use, environmental and social justice, and efficiency when determining where and how to provide transit, and even what Metro’s role in our transportation system should be.
I think this sounds like the kind of overhaul Metro needs. This year’s discussion of service cuts seems like it was just a window into a larger problem. As we’ve seen, Metro has routes that serve a few dozen people a day, and routes that serve eight thousand. Is it really Metro’s place to provide minimal service everywhere to the detriment of really usable core routes? How can we make Metro’s operations help serve our long term land use goals, but keep serving transit dependent communities? How can we stabilize Metro’s revenue so we don’t keep having to argue over it?
This task force could answer these questions. It will consist of a broad group of stakeholders – elected officials, representatives of social services, transit agencies, environmental, business, and educational groups, and others. Their timeline starts in February, with policy recommendations ready for implementation in September.
We held off on writing about yesterday’s East Link news to get some more information and more fully understand the process – and I’m glad we did, because there’s more to it.
The term sheet (.doc) referred to in pieces published yesterday is positive, but it’s not the final agreement – it’s more of a mutually agreed upon starting place for building an agreement. WSDOT and Sound Transit are agreeing that these terms are good enough to use when crafting a more lengthy, complex “umbrella agreement” later in the year. This umbrella agreement will be much more detailed, potentially covering exact dates for project delivery, particular responsibilities assigned to each agency, and more.
The term sheet, though, lets us in the public know that WSDOT has pretty much accepted that they’re not going to get actual cash from Sound Transit for the reversible express lanes, despite Speaker Chopp’s earlier demands. This is in line with what we predicted before – the R8A work Sound Transit is doing to add HOV lanes to I-90 constitutes a benefit to the state, a benefit, it turns out, that outweighs the reversible lanes’ value!
Aside from that, there are two things I find really interesting about this term sheet.
First, it’s temporary. It will last 40 years after the start of East Link revenue service, but the umbrella agreement will provide for a renewal contract extending that for an additional 35 years. This ensures the agreement won’t have to be renegotiated until 2095. Hopefully light rail will have its own bridge by then, otherwise I’m going to have to live to 114 so I can write about it.
Second, this removes all responsibility from WSDOT for additional R8A funding past their already spent or programmed money. That bodes well for East Link’s schedule, as Sound Transit is pretty good about funding things when they say they will. Sound Transit just moved forward with the next step of R8A, as well.
This should be representative of the final agreement, but don’t throw a party yet. There are a lot of costs here, from the airspace lease to bridge maintenance, and they could go up before the umbrella agreement is complete and signed – that said, this is good news.
[UPDATE from Martin: Councilmember Claudia Balducci clarifies what's going on in this comment. Showing up in person is more effective, but written comments can be submitted to council@bellevuewa.gov.]
As a few folks have pointed out in comments in the last few days, the new Bellevue City Council plans to revisit the old City Council’s East Link alignment recommendations.
Tomorrow, the Council plans to look at the “B” portion, from I-90 up to the south edge of downtown Bellevue. The Council previously recommended a modified B3 (PDF), going up Bellevue Way to serve the existing South Bellevue Park and Ride, then heading a bit east on 112th – and giving a wide berth to the angry Surrey Downs neighborhood.
Sound Transit’s preferred alternative doesn’t swing out around Surrey Downs, but is substantially the same.
The new City Council is under pressure to change their recommendation to B7 – which would skip the South Bellevue Park and Ride. I haven’t yet heard an argument for B7 from any interest except the “keep those trains away from my house” interest, so I don’t really have any sympathy.
I do, however, have sympathy for the people who use South Bellevue P&R and might lose their service – Sound Transit intends East Link to replace bus 550, so it’s rather important that Link stop at South Bellevue.
Originally, this Bellevue City Council meeting was scheduled for Wednesday night, but it’s been moved up to Tuesday, with 6:00pm 8:00pm public comments (Note from Sherwin: comments start at 8pm, but coming out at 6pm and staying for the whole session will establish a stronger presence). Do you use that Park and Ride? Do you know someone who does? If you want Link to to go there, being at Bellevue City Hall Tuesday evening to say a few words in support will let City Council know that this isn’t just a NIMBY issue.
Please do show up! I know there are several regular commenters who prefer B3 – we need you tomorrow!
This morning, state Senator Dan Swecker (R-20, Lewis County) dropped a very short bill that probably won’t go anywhere, but I want to bring up to point out just how out of touch some of our legislators are with regional priorities and, well, the future in general. Despite the passage of Proposition 1 and ongoing negotiations to get East Link light rail built, Swecker seems to feel it’s a good idea to waste time and public money in a tightly scheduled session to tilt at windmills. The meat of the bill is simple:
A light rail system or any other rail fixed guideway system may not be constructed or operated on the Interstate 90 floating bridge.
Given that most of the I-90 bridge was paid for by the feds under an agreement that the express lanes were for transit, and as that agreement was updated in 2004 to specify light rail, I have this question for the Senator:
If you’d like to break this agreement, how, exactly, do you plan to pay back the feds for the contribution they made? Inflation-adjusted, it would some $900 million. I suspect the cities involved, who only allowed the I-90 bridge to be built under this agreement, might have some mitigation requests as well.
A call into Senator Swecker’s office was not returned.
Update 2: Stevens’ office returned my call – saying the Senator declines to comment on why she signed on, and that I should talk to Swecker – who still hasn’t returned my call.
The Bellevue City Council has now elected its mayor and deputy mayor (they choose from council members) – Don Davidson and Conrad Lee, respectively. Both received money from Kemper Freeman Jr. during the election, and both have questionable opinions on transit.
The Seattle Times has an interesting interview up with Mayor Davidson. I call it interesting not because it offers anything new, but because it contains what I consider to be dog whistle phrases as they relate to building light rail through Bellevue. These are the ones I really noticed, from his interview responses:
“I kind of represent a more conservative element.”
Great news! A conservative won’t want to spend extra money, which means he’s saying “I’ll support a surface alignment through downtown Bellevue that saves hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, reduces risk, and keeps East Link on schedule.” (If you detect sarcasm here, you’re on the money.)
“You’re going to find people a little more aware of the taxpayers’ burden.”
This says to me: “I’m not going to ask Bellevue constituents for any tunnel funding.”
“I’m not after light rail, but I am after how it affects Bellevue.”
Uh-oh. This could be adding up to mean “I don’t want surface – I want a tunnel and I want Sound Transit to pay for it.” What’s more, that would really mean “Because the eastside will be paying for this tunnel anyway, many of the same taxpayers will be footing the bill – but this saves me the political cost of asking for it.”
“They haven’t figured out how to get across Lake Washington.”
Mayor Davidson is perfectly aware of how East Link will get across Lake Washington. He’s playing to the element who refuses to accept independent engineering study showing light rail over the I-90 bridge is feasible using existing technology. We could be hearing: “I don’t like the R8A project and won’t raise a finger to support it.”
(last one) “It’s going to be quite a bit of time before we see light rail being laid here.“
If you live or work on the eastside, this is a little concerning. The mayor of Bellevue should be supporting the schedule as it stands, not making remarks disparaging to a project his constituents support.
So, Mayor Davidson: You claim to be conservative. If I’m reading this right, you probably don’t want Bellevue to pay for a tunnel. If that’s the case, the conservative choice is an affordable surface alternative.
Update: As I was writing this, the Times’ Bellevue Blog has more, and it seems to back up this read. He definitely doesn’t want Bellevue to pay for a tunnel, and he points out Beacon Hill being funded by Sound Transit. It’s interesting that he doesn’t make the distinction between Sound Transit and North King, though – Bellevue didn’t pay for any of the Beacon Hill tunnel. Almost all of North King is Seattle – so essentially, Seattle taxpayers paid for Beacon Hill. Keep that in mind as this discussion moves forward.
Update 2: Davidson also claims: “we maybe could get to Redmond if we used a surface system.” As he almost definitely means downtown Redmond, that’s factually incorrect. The money in ST2 only gets us to Overlake.
We’ve recently learned that Sound Transit is planning to put a handful of spare Ticket Vending Machines (TVMs) at major locations around the region to spare transit users a trip to a Sounder or Link station.
The only location that we’ve heard is sure right now is the Bellevue Transit Center, and that TVM should come in April. Sound Transit has up to four TVMs to spare, so they’ll be having a regional discussion about where to put the other three in the next couple of months.
Most regional trips do start, transfer or end near a TVM already, but commuters to places like Federal Way and Northgate have to order an ORCA online or by phone if their employer doesn’t provide one. This will make ORCA a little easier.
While we’d like to see more TVMs in the future, they’re apparently quite expensive – Community Transit CEO Joyce Eleanor informed us at the Swift opening that they were $700,000 – hence Swift’s use of $20,000 Parkeon ticket vending machines that can’t dispense ORCA.
I suspect that the $700,000 number includes administrative, back-end, and maintenance costs, but it hasn’t been examined deeply. TriMet in Portland and TransLink in Vancouver BC use nearly identical systems.
With Airport Link now two weeks old and the 194 on its deathbed, I think it’s worth talking about what transit options are good for people who do fly late at night. Yesterday an author on the Slog had a bad experience with Link on a Sunday night trip, but she didn’t have to, and I’d like to address the concerns she raised.
On Sundays, Link runs 18 hour service instead of 20 hour service – it starts an hour later and ends an hour earlier. When the Slogger made comparisons to other cities, she compared their weekday service to Link’s Sunday service. In addition, as we’ve noted before, the last northbound train on any night doesn’t go all the way to the end of the line. From the airport, it goes to Mount Baker, then goes out of service. This is typical of any system – as Linda Robson mentions in her response to the Slogger, Tokyo, Paris and London all take trains out of service in the middle of lines.(more…)
