Sound Transit Board approves the agreement to lease the center lanes of I-90 from WSDOT. Basically, the money ST is putting into building the outer HOV lanes is offsetting the rental cost, and then some.
ST awards D-to-M Sounder contract to low bidder MidMountain, after initially spurning them for PCL because some forms were late. The $40.8m bid is $800,000 below PCL’s and $26m below the original estimate.
Facing a steep cut in service in 2012 and planning a February ballot measure to stop the bleeding, Pierce Transit is making some non-service cuts, mainly by hitting their non-union employees.
On August 26th PT announced the elimination of management positions. Nonunion employees will also not get wage increases in 2011, and will have to pay more for their health care. The savings will amount to $1.2m through 2012, a fraction of their $50m annual long-term deficit. That’s in addition to $72m in savings through 2012 achieved with previous staff cuts, fare increases, and deferred capital projects. And of course another fare increase is coming down the pike.
Those cuts, however, will not apply to the bulk of Pierce Transit’s work force. Some 845 transit union members won a contract that calls for a 4 percent hike this summer. Agency officials wanted to renegotiate; union leaders refused, saying their members earned their wages and benefits – and suggested there are other places to cut.
“We’ve asked (to renegotiate) twice, and they’ve said no twice,” said agency spokeswoman Treva Percival. “Their contract is up again next year. Negotiations will probably start in the spring.”
Today Pierce Transit resumes its “not on our bus” program, involving uniformed personnel increasing their presence on buses and around bus stops. It is designed to cut down on “unlawful and disruptive conduct on bus routes, at transit centers, and at bus stops near certain high schools.”
This is the second time they’ve done this. Last year’s effort yielded 750 “contacts” with 68 riders receiving 90 day bans from Pierce Transit. Banned riders are posted in the operator’s lobby and the historical recidivism rate is only 3%.
Tacoma has been kicking around the idea of adding a Link stop at Commerce & 11th, which would cut the stop spacing in that stretch from about 1/2 mile to about 1/4 mile. The Tacoma Daily Index has lots of detail on this project, which would cost about $135,000.
You can watch the Council Study Session on this subject right now (scroll all the way down to “Tacoma City Council Study Session”).
After a Metro audit recommended doing away with the trolleybus system to save money, there’s been a lot of anxiety about its future and questions about the conclusion that the system is, in fact, more expensive. In response to these concerns, the King County Council commissioned a detailed study on the cost/benefit tradeoffs associated with trolleys. Last week Dow Constantine’s office transmitted a plan to conduct this study.
In this kind of thing assumptions and ground rules are all-important. After considering a wide array of technologies, Metro has narrowed down the comparison to diesel-electric hybrids vs. trolleys. Conventional diesels, battery electrics, compressed natural gas (CNG), and fuel cell systems were dismissed for various reasons.
The evaluation criteria fall into five categories: environmental impacts, likely to favor the trolleys; scheduling impacts, likely to favor the hybrids; cost advantage, which the audit gave to hybrids but is disputed by trolley proponents; and both the impact on both state/federal grants and existing legal agreements, which I can’t even begin to assess.
Importantly, the cost study will include a sensitivity analysis of energy costs, which will capture the benefits of relatively stable-cost electricity. The study is expected to begin this fall and release a draft report early next year. Some other thoughts about the trolley argument here.
If you last checked this blog Friday around lunchtime, you should go and read the substantially revised SR520 post from Friday afternoon. It’s of great interest to anyone interested in effective transit over the new bridge.
City Administrator Rich Conrad said Metro has agreed to supply a van and assist the city with the task of searching for a securing parking. So far, the city has agreed to provide volunteer drivers…
The need for a north-south shuttle stemmed from lack of parking at the two-story Park and Ride, which was expanded more than two years ago in an effort to add more parking. Parking spots increased from 250 in 2006 to 447 in 2008 after a two-year, $19.1 million expansion project.
What’s curious about the article, an earlier article on the subject, and a related editorial in the Mercer Island Reporter, is the failure to even mention existing Metro bus service. The 204 provides mid-day and weekend service in that corridor, while the 202 covers both directions in the peak and goes on to Downtown Seattle. In either case, headways are roughly a half-hour. Both are middling routes by Eastside performance standards, a little below average but by no means dogs.
I suspect that making the shuttle distinct from Metro may save money by not having to pay into Metro’s relatively high cost structure. It’s elsewhere referred to as a “vanpool experiment” and there’s talk of volunteer drivers, so it’s clear they’re looking to do it on the cheap. On the other hand, not integrating with the network is only going to make it harder for people to find out about it and make it less reliable.
Attempts to contact Mercer Island leaders and staff on the shuttle proposal did not produce a response. More on the parking shortage after the jump. (more…)
According to Beacon BIKES! representative Dylan Ahearn, the group thinks the bike master plan is too focused on creating a neighborhood-to-neighborhood bike network that caters primarily to the commuter crowd. His group wants to create an intra-neighborhood network that helps people (especially children) ride safely between Beacon Hill destinations.
“When I’m biking around the neighborhood, I try and imagine whether it’d be safe my five-year-old daughter to ride on the road,” said Ahearn. “If we can [create facilities that] accomplish that, we’ll have succeeded.”
As mascot of the casual cyclists, I have to say “Bravo”. I don’t begrudge the regional trails and other improvements that serious bicyclists have won for themselves, but improvements to one- and two-mile trips can open up a whole new population to bikes. That builds the political coalition, but more importantly makes bicycling safer for everyone by building the presumption of drivers that there are bicycles around.
In my feeble experience cycling, I’ve found that it’s that one-to-two mile threshold under which it’s faster than taking transit, give or take the specific circumstances of the trip. That kind of mobility is important for people looking to go without a car, or a family going to one car. Long trips and long commutes are about recreation and exercise; the shorter ones are about practical mobility. There’s nothing wrong with the former, but it’s the latter where the masses are.
[Note: This post is a substantial revision of two posts that were accidentally written based on outdated materials and taken down. If you did read those, you'll find that the situation for SR520 buses has gotten substantially worse.]
Last week’s SR520 meeting had lots of pictures of how Montlake Blvd is to be configured when the project is done. The plan includes a transit lane in each direction to improve connectivity between the interchange and the Husky Stadium light rail stop, absolutely critical if the Montlake Flyer Stops are removed to save money and reduce the overall width of the interchange. The bad news is that some compromises in the project, made with good intentions, will make this connection not quite as smooth as it might otherwise be. You can find the meeting materials here, especially the key presentation.
Proposed Cross-Section at Hamlin St. (WSDOT)
Note that there is no Southbound HOV lane in the picture above. More after the jump.
It’s come to my attention that I somehow managed to pull the materials from the July 22nd SR520 working group meeting, instead of the August 19th one. I’ll be doing a complete rewrite and getting something correct up shortly.
We haven’t posted much about the minor Council/Mayor scrum over the Commercial Parking Tax (CPT) and the seawall. However, this Streets for all Seattle letter of August 5th clarifies the transportation angle:
We are writing today concerning the proposal to fund seawall-related work by raising the existing 10% commercial parking tax (CPT) to 12.5%. While Streets For All Seattle coalition members recognize the City’s obligations on the seawall replacement, we believe that allocation of our limited, flexible transportation funds to a single, capital-intensive project would unnecessarily curtail the opportunity before us to engage in a holistic transportation discussion during the budget process.
As I understand it, the CPT can only be used for transportation improvements and is capped at 20%, 10 points above its current level of 10%. The Mayor would like to have a property tax measure this year to pay for the seawall and dedicate the CPT revenue (according to PubliCola a 5-10 point increase) “toward road maintenance, bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure,” in the words of McGinn spokesman Aaron Pickus. More after the jump.
Seattle, using Bridging the Gap funds, will be implementing “Complete Streets” on 15th Ave S and S Columbian Way on Beacon Hill. The latter will improve connections with the Columbia City Link station. Beacon Hill Blog reports:
You are invited to stop by the Open House and view project plans, provide feedback and chat with the project team. The event is Tuesday, August 24 from 5:00 – 7:00 pm at the Jefferson Community Center Meeting Room, 3801 Beacon Avenue South. You may also email your comments to walkandbike@seattle.gov or call 206-684-7583.
Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) 587, somewhat miffed at perceived attempts by King County to bargain through the media, relaunched their media relations with an informal press briefing yesterday, featuring the usual transportation reporter suspects and me. Erica C. Barnett was also there, and STB doesn’t pay nearly enough to do a writeup of the main points when there’s a perfectly fine one already available elsewhere.
I don’t think anyone who rides one of Metro’s more troublesome routes can dispute that driving a bus can be a difficult job with a fair amount of responsibility. Neither union solidarity nor union busting is part of this blog’s agenda, but it’s clear that the best personnel equilibrium from a rider’s perspective is one that pays the absolute minimum amount that still attracts quality personnel. That’s pretty vague, but I have to do some more deep thinking before saying more.
One simple yardstick is what peer agencies pay. I was gratified to learn that the ATU is not, by state law, allowed to strike, but instead go to binding arbitration that tends to compare proposals to what peer operators pay.
I also asked why neither Metro nor the ATU had brought up incentive pay for some of the more violent and undesirable routes in the system, in order to attract some more experienced drivers. The surprising response was that routes like the 7 are actually driven by fairly experienced staff, because there’s some pleasure in driving a trolley and serving a transit-dependent neighborhood.
Sound Transit’s second quarter ridership report out, which covers all of its services, is out. Sounder and Express Bus ridership is basically flat since 2Q 2009; Tacoma Link is way down; but the system’s overall ridership is up 47% because of the opening of Central Link, which now carries over half as many riders as the entire ST Express bus system.
On the other hand, all of ST’s modes aren’t meeting productivity targets set in the 2010 budget over the first half of the year. And ST is still using a pretty bizarre definition of reliability for Link, one that it’s failing with a miserable 77% on-time rate. The report points out that by a much more sensible headway-based metric (+/- three minutes) the performance was over 90%, not in my view good enough for rail, but much better than the headline number. See the 1st Quarter report for discussion of these reliability numbers.
[UPDATE: Some P&Rs are actually owned by WSDOT, so those would require legislative authority to introduce fees. For county-owned P&Rs, the legislature doesn't have to do anything.]
[UPDATE 2: Metro spokeswoman Rochelle Ogershok points out that $50m is a rough estimate of the annual deficit, after planned cuts, in 2012. The "long term" deficit, going out to 2015, is actually $100m. Corrected below.]
At tonight’s meeting of the Regional Transit Task Force, they’ll be looking at an executive summary of Metro’s various revenue options. It’s a treasure trove of information about what Metro collects now and what else is out there. Metro’s long term 2012 budget hole, after the various efficiencies applied, is still about $50m annually.
There’s still 1-cent-per-$1,000 of property tax authority, unfortunately worth only about $3m.
Theoretically, the County could create a Transportation Benefit District and levy a vehicle license fee of up to $100 — raising $125m! — but the cities have been busily taking this authority for themselves.
King County can tax parking in unincorporated areas only, where of course there isn’t a whole lot of paid parking.
The State has a local option tax for HOV systems, which by applying an MVET or a head tax could top off the capital fund. A lot of Metro’s federal money is already restricted to capital expenditure, so it’s unlikely that this money would free up cash to spend on the operations gap.
Each quarter you raise fares – not listed as an option in the report – generates about $12m.
There’s then a discussion of taxes that would require legislative action to authorize. For reasons unclear to me, charging at park-and-rides is listed as requiring this, and would generate between and $850,000 and $2.3m annually. There’s a strong case Metro and ST should do this anyway at high-demand park & rides, so in my view the revenue is just a bonus.
Aside from that, my favorite proposal is eliminating one of the state’s biggest (and under-appreciated) subsidies to drivers: the sales tax exemption for gasoline. Without any special dispensation for transit, simply applying existing transit taxes to gasoline would raise $28-40m annually for Metro, patching more than half of the hole. It would generate an even larger amount for Sound Transit, which has revenue problems of its own, to say nothing of its positive impact on state and local general funds, and other strapped agencies like Community Transit. We spend a fair amount of money in this region encouraging people not to drive, and it’s senseless to simultaneously subsidize the opposite.
Weekday ridership on Central Link improved on June’s record with a new average of 24,145 boardings per day. We’re still about 6 months away from having meaningful year-to-year comparisons.
Saturday and Sunday ridership also set non-opening-weekend records of 22,098 and 17,127, respectively. Saturday ridership that approaches weekday boardings is unusual in our region. It’s easy to speculate but there’s no data on why Link is a special case.
Image from "the transport politic" (click for full size)
A while ago the transport politic reported that Shanghai has passed London and has the world’s largest metro.* Shanghai started from zero in 1995; not yet satisfied, they plan to add roughly a New York City subway equivalent to that by 2020.
You can always count on China for an absurd superlative. It’s clear that in the United States we couldn’t possibly build so much as quickly, thanks to both property rights and environmental law.** But it’s also worth noting that China has made this a national priority of sorts.
The nation’s budget situation hasn’t been good for a decade or so, but governments of both right and left have, on several occasions in that time, come up with trillion-dollar-plus lumps of funding for their priorities. Sometimes it was deficit-funded, at others they found offsetting revenue. The point is that if we want it enough they find a way.
Don’t let anyone tell you that vision is impossible.
