Improved Brooklyn Station Design (north to the right)
At yesterday’s briefing to Sound Transit’s Capital Committee, a subset of the Sound Transit board, Link staff brought forward an improved design for the Brooklyn subway station. Two months ago, we reported that Sound Transit had chosen a low risk, but less effective, station design – a single entrance halfway between NE 45th St and NE 43rd St on Brooklyn. That plan would have been a poor choice for many reasons, notably reducing station visibility and increasing the surface walking distance for most users.
Sound Transit has now confirmed that they’re moving to this new plan – a north entrance just behind the Neptune theater, and another prominently on the corner of 43rd and Brooklyn. See full presentation here. This design maintains the lower risk that originally caused the one entrance plan – keeping the station box away from UW Tower (the former Safeco building), while significantly improving station accessibility. This is very encouraging – it continues to show that Sound Transit is taking pains to ensure their long-term infrastructure is designed well from the beginning.
Last week, Mayor McGinn announced that he intends to ask for $10 million to get to 15% design for 8 miles of westside light rail.
This sounds great in theory. But Sound Transit plans to do basically the same work in a few years – they have $12 million set aside around 2015 to study the same corridor.
Stepping back outside the political arena, what makes the most sense here is for McGinn to ask voters for money to accelerate Sound Transit’s work. Having study work done a few years sooner gives us more time to build public support and look for grants.
It makes sense for several reasons to have Sound Transit as lead on a West Link project: they have experience in planning and building light rail, and they’re experienced in winning federal funds. A partnership here would save millions – if not tens of millions – and could result in a line built with both Sound Transit and city of Seattle funds, rather than a low capacity option likely to be the result of city funding alone.
The Mayor has said before that he doesn’t want “Cadillac” light rail, but we already know from previous study work that the West Seattle and Ballard corridor would develop more ridership than any of Portland’s lines, and these neighborhoods will only become more dense with time. The monorail project was right to want grade separation, at least in the city center.
We can’t afford to be in the position Portland is today. Their light rail is already running into serious limitations, only twenty-five years into a hundred year system. Trains are packed at peak times on the older lines, and there isn’t room to run them with more cars or more often.
While I applaud the Mayor’s initiative in pushing to build more mass transit, I’d like to see him work together with Sound Transit on this issue, rather than going it alone.
The Seattle Times reports that McGinn wants to ask voters for $10 million to do 15 percent design on an 8 mile potential light rail line. This is a good first step – it would do enough work to design a real ballot measure for construction, and to start looking for federal money.
I would be concerned about putting even a small measure on the ballot in 2011, but with West Seattle and Ballard residents still looking for solutions since the monorail project and light rail under way to other parts of the city, now is always the best time.
I think it’s important for the city to work with Sound Transit to prevent duplication of effort with the agency’s planning in the same corridor, but with Sound Transit’s work not planned for several years, I don’t see much risk there – Sound Transit can scope their future work to avoid overlap if they feel they can use some of the city findings.
This is encouraging – we haven’t seen any movement in this corridor since funding ST2. Any news is good news!
We all make decisions about what transportation mode to use. For most of us, these choices don’t change very often – we have routines and have thoroughly explored our options. But we do still make them – if we change jobs, if we move, if a new light rail line opens.
These decisions, like most, are largely cost-benefit: What’s the cost of busing to a suburban job and losing flexibility? How much would I save on parking if I bought a bus pass instead? They’re often complex, trying to balance everyday needs with exceptions while trying to predict future changes.
Most of us are here because we want to see those costs and benefits change: Some directly for ourselves – we want to be able to use transit, walk, or cycle more easily. Some more indirectly – we want to see lower carbon emissions per capita, or the political and social changes that come with more dense neighborhoods.
I think it’s important to recognize that an individual’s decisions about what mode to use are almost entirely a product of their environment. We all have preferences about what we want – a downtown condo and a subway, a rural house with a sports car – and these are equally valid desires. We each value our desired lifestyle differently – some people are willing to pay more than others toward their preferences – but for the most part, we are maximizers, looking for the best deal possible.
This is where public policy comes in. Public money spent on infrastructure has for centuries changed the costs and benefits for an individual when making their transportation choices. So much, in fact, that today ‘transportation choice’ is practically a code phrase for ‘not a car’, when only a hundred years ago road trips didn’t even exist – much less international flights.
The transportation and land use policy changes you’ll hear wonks and ideologues like us suggest are about changing those costs and benefits. The single largest reason these are so hard to change is that people everywhere around us have made future plans assuming the status quo. These can be as simple as “I plan to drive to work tomorrow” and as complex as “I plan to vote to expand this highway because I was elected largely due to contributions from employees of a labor union that does most of its work on highway projects.”
There’s a huge range in the relative difficulty of changing a transportation decision. On one end someone just might not know they can get a transit pass from their employer. On the other end, you might have to run challengers against entrenched politicians to stop a project. So the decisions we often make as activists are about the cost effectiveness not of transportation choices, but of our activism choices.
Activists like us can’t build a lot more transit right now. Link expansion is under construction, and getting significantly more means going to the legislature. Transportation for Washington is pushing bills to provide better local transit funding, mostly for bus agencies, but we won’t have a big opportunity to build rail for at least a few years, until today’s budget issues are worked out.
In the meantime, we can set up for the future: push to allow more development around transit, and to remove parking minimums. We’d let the market do our work for us – people who move into new buildings without parking are natural transit users, just like the vast majority of Capitol Hill voters who supported Sound Transit expansion. This is our low hanging fruit that makes the decision not to drive that much easier.
In this episode of “How You Can Help Get Us Transit,” we look at a couple of examples that help demonstrate why removing highways is not only not a big deal, but also good for transit.
I’m going to use two real viaduct commutes as examples. Both originate in West Seattle. One drives to work at Google. The other drives to First Hill – this is actually the commute of a doctor I know, so we’ve talked about it quite a bit. He usually takes the bus – he’s an occasional driver.
Today, both commutes are highly congested on the West Seattle Bridge, but not very congested on the viaduct itself. Neither spend very much time on surface streets in the city today, most is spent on highways. Google lady gets off 99 near Fremont, and doctor dude takes the Seneca exit.
If the tunnel were built, Google lady’s trip time would be faster – the deep bore tunnel is designed for this commute. It would be more expensive for her, but it would be faster. Her time on the West Seattle bridge would remain similar, but her time on 99 would decrease. At the same time, some of the traffic that was using today’s viaduct goes to downtown streets. So instead of the bus looking like a more attractive option than the toll, because she would have to take two buses *and* the buses are now a little slower, she keeps driving.
Doctor dude switches to I-5. His commute time increases overall for bus or car, and he’s very angry, because this tunnel thing was supposed to help. He votes for a Republican to replace Governor Inslee in 2016 because he remembers this is Gregoire’s fault. The Republican scuttles Sound Transit 3…
If a surface option were built, Google lady’s time on 99 would be a little slower than it is today – by as much as a couple of minutes. However, because the fast bypass through downtown isn’t there, a lot of trips aren’t taken, so the West Seattle bridge is less congested – making up time. Her total trip is still slower, but not nearly as slow as tunnel proponents suggest. Because the surface option also included transit improvements, there’s also a significantly better chance that she’ll take RapidRide and a local bus (or Dexter bike lane) the rest of the way to work. There’s another good discussion here about Central Streetcar and a future Fremont extension, but that’s for another post.
Doctor dude uses the new surface boulevard when he drives – it’s faster than sitting in traffic on I-5. He wasn’t spending that much time on 99 anyway, and the West Seattle bridge is now slightly faster, so his commute time improves. Transit improvements more than made up for that travel time decrease, though, so he continues to bus.
For both users, the surface option makes transit more attractive by encouraging trips to match corridors easily served by transit. In the longer run, this means surface gives us more potential ridership for serious mass transit to West Seattle. And it’s cheaper, so we lose a little pressure on the state’s backlog of highway maintenance and repairs – meaning it’s easier to fight for transit funding.
Transit advocates – this fight won’t stop with the referendum, but you know we’ll keep fighting. Please help: donate to the campaign, and email me to volunteer!
In 2006, the Congress for New Urbanism released a report that is still the most important piece of literature on the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project – a study that found major flaws in WSDOT’s work and suggested the surface/transit option was a good choice even from a traffic congestion perspective.
Chapters of this organization, such as Cascadia (not to be confused with Discovery Institute’s Cascadia), bring discussions like this local. Architects, urban planners, designers and more are all represented. This year, their summit (PDF) is in Portland, and focuses on how to bring urbanism to the forefront of the sustainability discussion.
CNU Cascadia has two great speakers lined up, Kingston Heath and Steve Mouzon – both write about sustainable placemaking, each with different focuses. They’ll also have a streetcar tour showcasing good design and urban planning – projects we can learn from here, especially in South Lake Union today and on Capitol and First hills in the next few years. Tickets are only $35, and it’s a good excuse for a trip on Amtrak Cascades.
Today the Seattle Times has a lengthy front page story about undisclosed business deals Councilmember Kevin Wallace had with GNP Railway while also advocating for the B7 East Link alignment. GNP desired to run freight and passenger trains in the BNSF corridor.
While prodding the Bellevue City Council last fall to study possible use of an abandoned rail corridor for a Sound Transit light-rail line, Councilmember Kevin Wallace was negotiating an extensive business relationship with a short-line railroad that wants to run trains on the same route.
He and his father, Bob Wallace, signed a nonbinding agreement in December to invest in GNP Railway and help raise $30 million for expansion.
Wallace Properties Development, a Bellevue-based developer of commercial properties, also agreed in a “memorandum of understanding” with GNP that the councilmember would hire brokers to sell preferred stock, invest $500,000 of its money and manage land acquisition and development of passenger stations, possibly with shops, offices, industrial space and homes. Kevin Wallace is president of the development company.
The Wallaces signed the GNP agreement the same week Kevin Wallace explained in a Seattle Times guest-opinion column why it made sense for the City Council to spend $670,000 to study whether Sound Transit should put its light-rail trains on the old freight corridor.
Because this is a blog, I can speculate a bit more than the Seattle Times can, and this is my own opinion: I think the Bellevue B7 study work basically offers free corridor information particularly pertinent to the business deal between GNP and Wallace. It smacks of using city resources to save GNP/Wallace planning money in the same corridor.
Wallace should have recused himself from these votes, but if he had, they would have ended up tied at 3-3. This could be part of why Aaron Laing (another B7 supporter) is running for Bellevue City Council this year, despite the fact that the council already has a majority – with a 5-2 split for B7, Wallace could take a slap on the hand and safely recuse himself from these votes.
The real kicker? As far as I’m aware, Bellevue doesn’t have a law prohibiting conflicts of interest for the city council.
Are you interested in how Seattle can build livable, walkable, transit accessible communities? The Seattle Planning Commission released their Seattle Transit Communities report (PDF) in November outlining tools and strategies for doing that. This Thursday at City Hall we have the opportunity to hear from three planning commissioners about what investments should be our highest priorities – like complete streets, transit stop improvements, mobile food, and more – and how we might fund them. While we’re in between major transit packages, these recommendations are the best things we can fight for to make the city more livable, so it’s important to be well versed in what our options are and what kind of benefits they bring. Take your lunch and bring along a coworker!
Seattle Transit Communities: Charting Our Path Forward WHEN: March 10, 2011, 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm WHERE: Bertha Knight Landes Room, City Hall
Five new Tim Eyman initiatives were filed with the state this month, including one (PDF) which would drastically limit the uses of toll revenue and the way tolls are imposed.
Section 40 (commonly referred to as the 18th Amendment) of the Washington State Constitution has limited the use of fuel excise taxes to highway construction, operation and maintenance since 1944. Eyman’s initiative would limit toll revenue to the same purposes – in fact, even more stringently, to only construction and capital improvements of the highway, bridge, or street on which the toll is collected.
It would also remove the state’s ability to impose variable tolls, and require that tolling end once construction of a structure is paid off – today’s law allows tolling to continue for operations and maintenance, as well as performance management. This would eliminate congestion pricing, HOT lanes, and even simply higher rush-hour tolls.
A final section specifically changes language regarding tolling on Interstate 90. Current law directs WSDOT to work with the federal highway administration toward authorization of tolling on the I-90 bridge – revenue expected to help fund 520 bridge replacement, and to prevent I-90 from becoming even more of a parking lot when 520 is tolled this year. The initiative would specifically (and perhaps redundantly) restrict I-90 toll revenue to capital improvements on I-90.
It’s worth mentioning that this final section could amount to nothing but a shell game – I speculate that toll revenue on I-90 could, with legislative action, replace gas tax revenue used for projects elsewhere in the corridor, and an equivalent in gas taxes could be moved to 520.
With a transportation package on the table in Olympia this session or next, the rest of the initiative could have major implications. Tolling has been increasingly under consideration as an option for congestion reduction, and as a potential revenue source for transit improvements. Without it, the options for transit in the legislature would look even more slim than they already do.
Seattle Department of Transportation has a call out on their blog for survey responses on how transit is working in Seattle. The transit master plan hasn’t been updated since 2005, and with the monorail dead and Sound Transit 2 passed, an update now will help inform what investments the city should make next.
The transit master plan update will expand upon already identified important transit corridors and assign preferred modes to each. This will be the first time since the monorail that the city will officially take a position on what transit mode should be built in lieu of that project.
The other major purpose of the master plan is to improve existing service through small investments. The Transit Master Plan web page specifically mentions bus bulbs and signal priority as tools in the city’s purview.
Martin sits on the Transit Master Plan advisory group, which next meets on Friday at 8:00am in the Boards and Commissions room at Seattle City Hall.
Brandon Martin-Anderson is at it again with a new project – determining the shortest bicycle paths between destinations in Seattle and San Francisco. This video shows the Seattle map being grown. It would be pretty interesting to do this for transit as well.
Publicola reports that Cascade Bicycle Club, Futurewise, and the Sierra Club have filed suit against the Puget Sound Regional Council challenging their Transportation 2040 plan. They contend that the plan meets neither state VMT reduction or CO2 reduction laws – instead preserving the car-centric status quo.
During T2040′s public comment period, there were five options to choose from corresponding with differing levels of transit and highway investment. Alternative 5 was the option with the most transit, and the majority of public comment on the plan favored 5 – or even more transit investment than 5.
All of the PSRC options are projected to see CO2 growth, rather than reduction. The PSRC doesn’t appear to have studied an option that would reduce transportation-related CO2 emissions at all, despite state law requiring a 50% reduction from 1990 levels by 2050.
Thursday is Dump The Pump day – following bike to work month, this is your day to (if you don’t already) try out using public transit! Maybe you usually drive because taking the bus would be inconvenient – why not do it tomorrow?
Locally, Metro will have free refreshments at three transit centers – Northgate, Federal Way, and Bellevue. Sound Transit will staff the latter two as well. Go have a look! In the past there have been good pastries, and isn’t that a good enough excuse to ride the bus today?
A band called “Million Dollar Nile” is giving $1000 to the environmental nonprofit with the most votes. While there are some other great candidates too, Transportation Choices Coalition asked us first, and they could definitely use the money! Simply go here, find TCC, and vote!
Earlier this week I had a chance to sit down with Ron Tober, deputy chief executive of Sound Transit, to talk about Link reliability. Tober has extensive bus and rail experience – he oversaw the startup of Charlotte’s LYNX system, once headed up King County Metro, and has experience in several other cities.
On time performance has been much better in the last month than it was in the first quarter. Tober showed me more recent data – without weekend and night maintenance, trains have been on schedule about 90% of the time, and headway reliability has been well over 90%.
For now, though, that’s about all we’re going to get, and Sound Transit can’t do too much about it, largely because of the downtown tunnel. More after the jump. (more…)
Launched this morning, the Streets for All Seattle campaign aims to raise some $30 million annually from the City Council to help fund the bicycle and pedestrian master plans, as well as make transit infrastructure improvements.
I’ve been involved with this behind the scenes, and the way it’s shaping up looks fantastic. Improving sidewalks, adding dedicated and shared bicycle infrastructure, and potentially taking the next steps toward West Seattle to Ballard light rail are in the mix – although it’ll be up to the city council to determine exactly how they want to apportion funds.
In the next few weeks and months, we’ll have an opportunity to push our Council to make progressive, green transportation investments. Keep an eye on that site and here on the blog, and as there’s more news, we’ll have it.
A slide from the presentation: "further study" means either bus or rail.
Today, the Mayor has released the report his office commissioned with Nelson/Nygaard to determine the feasibility of light rail on 520. This study was reportedly presented to the Mayor’s office last week, but its release was delayed until today. It’s finally come with a blog post from the Mayor, essentially framing it in the most positive tone possible.
The obstacles the report highlights are similar to what we’ve discussed here in comment threads:
The pontoons would have to be designed to accommodate the weight of trains, and are not.
The west approach (meaning through the arboretum) would have to be at least 10 feet wider than the current A+ alternative to accommodate light rail without having to significantly modify the structure later.
Through the arboretum, the bridge must be wider (or have a gap) to allow light rail to enter and exit the center HOV lanes and diverge from the freeway.
From there are four choices for getting from 520 to the University – a flyover bridge starting out in the middle of the arboretum, a low level bridge along the east edge of the Montlake Cut, a tunnel underneath the Cut, or a surface option along Montlake Boulevard.
I spend a lot of time learning about – and talking about – what rail transit does to connect and improve communities. It spurs new development, it improves public health and increases the number of people on the street, it helps combat climate change, it helps communities form – there’s a long list. Sometimes these things seem clear to many of us, but often we have trouble articulating them in a way that helps others make these connections.
There are many tools available to us to help – from blogs to books to classes – but few are as powerful as direct, in-person explanation from a human being. As such, I can’t recommend Rail~Volution enough – not only is it a set of presentations and seminars about exactly what most of us want to see and how to get there, it’s also a chance to mingle with people who are making things happen. It’s even split into three sections for people with different amounts of existing knowledge and different interests.
In October, Rail~Volution is in Portland, as John mentioned in the news roundup. I’ll almost definitely be going, and I suspect Adam will as well. If you want to geek out about rail transit for a whole weekend, this is the place to be. Registration opens soon – we’ll remind you when it does.
In the last year, they’ve been forced to cut $2 million in service – and they’re looking at another $4 million in cuts next year, including most evening and all Sunday service. That cut would be devastating – WTA had the highest percentage ridership increase of any agency in the nation in 2008, with 32% more riders – Whatcom County has a huge number of transit dependent rural, fixed-income, and student residents.
Whatcom’s GO lines have only recently started offering 15 minute service – the agency has been trying very hard to provide services that let people actually live without a car, and now they’re one of the hardest hit by the recession. A sales tax increase is their only option to raise more revenue, and it’s a hard sell.
If you want to help them out, have a look at Transportation Choices Coalition’s post about the campaign. I don’t know if we have many readers from up that way, but if you have friends at Western, this would be a great thing to call them about.
Around noon today, as we urged previously (along with pro-transit representatives, transit agencies, and USDOT), Governor Gregoire vetoed the provisions in the supplemental transportation budget (SB 6381) tying state transit funding to allowing private transportation providers to use transit-only facilities. There’s been no news item posted on her website yet, but we’ll post more as we get updates.
