Via John Niles, a map of vehicle registrations of cars parked in the Tukwila/International Blvd lot:

Sound Transit confirmed that it took this data on a single day — January 10th — sometime between 9am and 3pm.

I find the distribution of this somewhat surprising. Beyond the outliers (Mercer Island?) that are presumably using this as airport parking, it’s revealing to see the large numbers coming over from Renton and Kent, site of Sounder service that is in many ways superior. Is this an artifact of parking shortages at Sounder, or of the advantages of Link over Sounder in terms of span of service, frequency, and destinations?

Sound Transit has posted the slides from the Roosevelt 60% design open house, covered here, at their website.

AvgeekJoe/Flickr

• Ben and Seattle Subway in The Stranger. It’s a nice update on where they stand and how the details are working out.
• U-Link 3 months ahead of schedule.
• Comment period on the Ride Free Area is extended to Friday, April 13th. Submit comments here.
• SDOT making capital improvements to Route 44. RapidRide D Line work begins.
• Edmonds Mayor Dave Earling to the ST board; Mukilteo Mayor Joe Marine out. Earling spoke about his agenda here.
• Further CT route adjustments.
• Bonney Lake and Sumner mayors trying to save PT 496.
• Jane Hague sponsors measure requiring the Executive to report on options for expanding ORCA availability. Report is due April 19th.
• Free downtown shuttle to replace the RFA.
• Corner stores may become legal again in Seattle.
• Edmonds Sounder parking inadequate.
• Streetcar/bike lawsuit tossed.
• Downtown office vacancies falling.
• Roger on Tax Increment Financing.
• Vancouver’s Mayor talks CRC.
• TriMet eliminates Free Rail Zone, moves to flat fare.
• Ferry fares rise next month.
• WWU students to vote on their transit pass.
• Bus vs. utility pole.
• More transit use, less driving.
• A contrarian view of urban freeways.
• Some zoning rules are about keeping poor people out.

This is an open thread.

Sen. Haugen

Senate Bill 6582, which made it all the way through both houses and a conference committee, is now likely to never get final approval from the Senate, reports Jerry Cornfield. As is so often the case, it’s been blocked by Senate Transportation Chair, Mary Margaret Haugen (D-Camano Island):

Rep. Marko Liias, D-Edmonds, [in the House version of the bill] proposed allowing counties to charge residents an excise tax of 1 percent on the value of their vehicles with the approval of voters. And if a county chose not to do this, a transit agency would be allowed to seek voter approval of a half-percent MVET of those living within the boundaries of their district…

Haugen didn’t like this idea. She preferred only transportation benefit districts be able to impose an MVET. Her opposition didn’t soften and by March 23 — the 12th day of the month long special session — Haugen forecast its fate.

“In my mind, I don’t see how we can move it,” she said.

The bill originally passed the Senate by a 1-vote margin, so there may be other Senators with veto power that aren’t speaking up.

Given successful public votes, the bill would have restored Community Transit’s mid-decade level of service and prevented deep Metro service cuts after the CRC authority runs out in 2013.

Elander/Flickr

John Niles and I definitely disagree about the significance of current Link ridership to the project as a whole, but I’m for adding more people and this is a constructive question:

If Sound Transit were to have an incremental 50 million dollars (pick a number) to invest in either (1) additional parking at Tukwila Station or S 200th Station, or (2) TOD at any light rail stations of its choosing from Husky Stadium to S 200th, which investment would provide the largest increase in light rail ridership?

Follow-up question, which investment would most meet the intent of regional public policy?

Additional follow-up question, which investment would be best for the sustainability of the region and the planet?

and in a later comment:

I’m pretty sure that providing as much parking as possible at Tukwila or the new S 200th station with giant promotion of its availability would drive up Central Link ridership more than anything else Sound Transit could do. But let’s discuss if that’s the right thing to do.

The shame of it is that Sound Transit itself has little power to do anything at this point. There were multiple decisions in the period 1995-2005 that could have dramatically improved 2012 ridership¹, but now most of the power lies with Metro and the City of Seattle. (more…)

Atomic Taco/Flickr

The ORCA consortium is selling a limited number of cards at seven Saar’s Market locations in South King and Pierce Counties.  They’re open 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, but only for a limited time. Those seeking a reduced fare ORCA are out of luck.

In more permanent news, PSRC has $1m in FTA money and is considering spending it on ORCA vending machines, and they’re taking public comments:

The machines will be located in existing public places, such as King Street Station, community colleges, shopping centers, libraries, municipal buildings and park and rides throughout King County. The public review and comment period for this transportation project will run from April 3 to 26, 2012.

How to make a comment:

Mail: Puget Sound Regional Council
ATTN: Kelly McGourty
1011 Western Avenue, Suite 500
Seattle, Washington 98104-1035
E-mail: tipcomment@psrc.org

In Person: April 12 at 9:30 a.m. or April 26 at 10 a.m. at PSRC

Atomic Taco/Flickr

• Sumner and Puyallup first in line for Sounder access improvements.
• Beacon Hill will get a 65′ tall building.
• CT makes adjustments to Route 196.
• What would keep young families downtown?
• Blaine looking for an Amtrak stop.
• Who should have a say in land use decisions?
• Explaining the state transportation budget.
• Vancouver, BC gets a frequent transit map.
• Vancouver’s SkyTrain non-payment tickets are unenforceable.
• Congress punts on transportation bill, extends old bill (again) for 90 days.
• A worldwide BRT database.
• Ikea to build urban village in East London?
• Positive train control running into trouble.
• The ten fastest growing and fastest declining metros in the world.
• This electrification plan takes CalTrain a step toward high-speed commuter rail.
• Tom Vanderbilt reviews Rethinking the Lot (a book about the design and use parking lots). The money quote is at the bottom.
• Vanderbilt also links to this depressing view of 58 years of destruction for parking in Buffalo.
• Today is National Walking Day.

This is an open thread.

The new Transit Riders’ Union, together with Amalgamated Transit Union 587, is holding their first big event to agitate for more transit funding:

Date: Wednesday April 4, 2012
Starting Point: 11 AM, 6th and Royal Brougham (Northbound)
Rally Point: 11:30 AM, Westlake Park, 4th and Pine

After a rally at Westlake, we will be taking our message to the buses and to the streets, flyering along 3rd Avenue and at Westlake until 6 PM. Join us if you can!

This is part of a “nationwide day of action.” Here’s my report on what the new TRU is all about.

Luxury Apartments under Construction, 4th and Madison, 1900 (wikimedia)

In liberal Seattle, almost everyone agrees that affordable housing is important, although people are as not as quick to speak well of its cousin, reduced housing prices. Meanwhile, new, dense development is both accused of eliminating affordable housing and being the ultimate source to provide it. I think both sides end up talking past each other because both positions contain a caricature of the segmentation (or lack thereof) of the market.

On my side, there’s a very heavy reliance on the law of supply and demand. Build more units and prices should go down. The dynamic turns up again and again in human endeavor and carries a strong presumption of truth. But if we view the real estate market not as a single pile of commodities but as a series of smaller markets segmented by taste, demographics, and income, the situation gets more complicated and obscures the debate sufficiently to allow people to believe many different things in good faith.

For one thing, even a higher mean unit price may not indicate that housing has become less affordable. In an economically marginal neighborhood, replacing a parking lot with a luxury condo tower will almost certainly increase the mean cost of a housing unit in the neighborhood. However, the impact on the actual existing stock of “affordable” housing is  less clear. There is certainly more supply for people who especially want to live there, driving prices down; however, an influx of wealthier people will bring objective improvements in some senses, particularly in nearby retail property value, local school performance, and so on. As a density guy, I’m inclined to applaud objective improvements in quality of life; I’m not worried about “gentrification” per se, but displacement. (more…)

[List of Senators deleted upon request of Futurewise]

Over a week ago almost 100 organizations, including this one, signed a letter to Governor Gregoire urging her to sign the bill that given voters the option to preserve or restore the level of transit service in their communities.

Before that, though, the final (House) version of SB 6582 has to make it back through the Senate, which according to Futurewise is where it’s most at risk.

Let your Senator know what you think.

zargoman/flickr

• Pitchforks come out at hearing on minor, sensible land use changes. I didn’t realize narrow storefronts, which are pro-pedestrian and pro-small-business, could actually be unpopular.
• Why OneBusAway makes mistakes.
• I-90 HOV lane project completes phase two of three; official opening today.  It improves bus flow and fills legal requirements to build light rail.
• New Northgate parking surprisingly unpopular.
• Dense project at Northgate would unfortunately destroy low-income housing.
• Big project in Columbia City.
• WTA considers reliability improvements, more service. Hearing tonight.
• Citizen input on the central waterfront sounds terrible.
• The big pot of federal rail money in Washington.
• Governor signs transportation budget, includes $9m for local transit agencies.
• GM trying to get the disinterested young to covet cars.
• Remember, the RFA open house is tonight.

This an open thread.

Although it’s natural to get excited about any proposal to run grade-separated transit between Ballard and West Seattle, the monorail proposal Oran described this morning is not one worth supporting. First of all, the proposal is deeply flawed for all the reasons our commenters are slaughtering it. Supporting a plan that subsequently collapses merely reduces faith that this city can ever resolve its transportation problems.

Signing a petition isn’t even useful as “a statement” that people demand rapid transit in this corridor. By going for a ballot measure without really laying the groundwork, CenTran is working at cross purposes with the Seattle Subway organization, which in my opinion has a much, much more feasible approach to making something really good happen. Moreover, Seattle Subway actually understands what makes a transit system work, which is not a line with downtown parking garages, zero transfer points to Link, and PRT.

There is a very low signature threshold for this type of initiative – only 3600. Please don’t help bring about a vote that will end up giving transit a black eye, and sabotage carefully developed efforts to build a system of which we can be proud. I’m happy for there to be yet another movement that’s building enthusiasm for transit, but sending them to the ballot in August is premature and counterproductive.

Mike Lindblom has a good scoop about a new design option for Link in Downtown Bellevue. It’s about saving some money.

The boldest new concept would abandon the 2011 proposal to excavate a huge underground station downtown, perhaps 70 feet deep with a mezzanine, beneath the intersection of Northeast Fourth Street and 110th Avenue Northeast. Instead, Sound Transit would look at a shallower Bellevue Transit Center Station for the East Link route.

Builders could exploit the slope that descends from the financial district to Interstate 405 — where tracks are supposed to emerge from the tunnel anyway, then become elevated near Meydenbauer Center. One layout involves a so-called “diagonal” station that cuts the corner where there’s now a City Hall parking garage and vacant King County land. The second concept is oriented east-west along Northeast Sixth Street.

Engineers are also looking at ways to save money at the 110th Avenue Northeast location by making the station shallower or narrower.

If you’re a bit confused, the article has a useful diagram.

I have mixed feelings about this concept. First of all, broadly speaking I’m not a fan of ST’s station designs, or the DSTT stations they inherited.  I have significant complaints about 8 of the 13 existing stations*, even only considering things that wouldn’t have taken much money to get right. Anything that brings the platform closer to the surface makes the train that much closer to everything in every direction, simultaneously. That it saves money is gravy, so three cheers for shallower stations.

Moving it a half-block or block eastward, however, starts to move it further away from the downtown core that it already skirts the edge of, and towards the interstate that we know is the death of walksheds. Here’s hoping that they make it shallower, but keep it as far west as possible.

* In case you’re wondering, I have no major problem with Chinatown, Beacon Hill, Columbia City, Othello, and Seatac. The rest have significant usability flaws.

Steven De Vight/Flickr

There is a remarkable front-page piece in the Times today rather unsubtly titled “Parking around Seattle may get worse as city planners favor transit.” My first thought was Seattle was taking away street parking for transit lanes (Ha!) but in fact it’s just eliminating parking minimums in certain areas.

I was all set to write a takedown but Erica Barnett at PubliCola seems to have covered the main points. Apparently a top-down command-and-control economy is the only way to save local business, especially since local auto shops are worthy of protection but “developers” are something to be fought.

Like many political issues, I think this gets rather unfortunately wrapped up in identity politics. Urbanists try to discourage driving, partly for environmental reasons, partly for aesthetic ones, and partly because car dependence is simply unworkable at a certain level of density. Admittedly, among some there’s an added sense of “screw’em if they refuse to stop driving.” The other side opposes these measures, thanks to a combination of fear of losing their current quasi-free, low-effort car access, the abrasion of the less tactful urbanist edge, and a general sense that their lifestyle is being labeled as immoral.  That said, the impact is likely to be either beneficial or small. Either people will switch from driving, in which case we’ve just created affordable housing with few negative externalities, or people won’t, in which case the market will demand parking in accordance with the old minimum.

Anyhow, I think moral condemnation of people’s choices isn’t helpful. Except for those of us who are simply too poor to consume anything, most of us have at least some indulgences that have significant environmental consequences. Some of us drive the SUV when there’s a suitable express bus, some of us eat lots of meat, and some of us fly all over the place for leisure. I’ve been searching for a syntax that says “it would be good public policy to stop encouraging people to do these things” without the added connotation of “people who do that thing are morally wrong.”

Steven De Vight/Flickr

• Not yielding to buses is actually illegal in Seattle. Who knew?
• Sound Transit Board asking great questions about parking around Northgate Station.
• Update on 125 and 128 service proposals.
• Dan Bertolet provides a good roundup of all the big projects, of all types, going on in Seattle.
• Do “project labor agreements” drive up public works costs? Pat McCarthy and Joni Earl argue “no”.
• Two Metro accidents.
• Greenway movement is cruising.
• UW students try to fix transit in Ballard.
• Kirkland pushing ahead on trail corridor, has hopes for rail.
• Side-by-side comparison of transportation bills in the U.S. House and Senate.
• The bizarre political topology of urbanism.
• This is how it’s done: “Half of SF’s Traffic Signals to Get Transit Priority Within Two Years.”
• The Seattle Monorail as a video game.

This is an open thread.

wikimedia

Food trucks are a bit of a silver bullet for urbanists, because they add to street activity without triggering many of the externalities of new construction. In a survey of food truck policy in the Pacific Northwest published just about everywhere, Eric Hess  says Seattle has not achieved food-truck nirvana:

Have the rule changes panned out? Not yet. Since July, the city issued seven new permits for food trucks—defined in Seattle as self-powered vehicles with kitchens onboard—to vend from public streets, and six permits for food carts—think hot dog vendors or push carts—to vend from sidewalk spaces. The numbers don’t signal an explosion of street food. In fact, the number of food cart permits actually dropped a bit since the new regulations took effect…

In Seattle, street food is also on the rise, but largely missing from dense, walkable neighborhoods where it has much to offer. The city lifted many archaic rules, but there’s more to be done.

Erica Barnett follows up with a little more, including this analysis from Sally Clark:

Basically, [Clark] said, she has no idea. One theory, though, is that scarce street parking makes it more profitable for parking-lot owners to use them for parking than lease them to food trucks. “The thing is, actually think seven or eight is a good number for people who want to serve in the parking area or in the sidewalk,” she adds. “It’s just not all that well tested in Seattle yet.”

In the end, thought, I think Yglesias asks the right question: is this really a failure of the rules?

 By tripling fees and giving bars and restaurants veto power over where trucks can operate, it sounds as if the goal of the Seattle government was trying to make sure that the growing nationwide popularity of food trucks doesn’t pose a competitive threat to existing Seattle restaurants. That relatively few trucks are opening under the new regime is a sign that the rules are panning out as intended, not that they’re failing. The question for Seattle’s voters and public officials is why they think that protecting the profits of incumbent business owners should be a goal of regulatory policy.

If you’ll forgive me being pedantic for a moment, I’d like to push back against the corruption of the term NIMBY to mean “anyone who opposes a project.”

The meaning of a NIMBY, although it’s not clear from the acronym, is someone who doesn’t question the value of a project, but always has reasons it shouldn’t go in their neighborhood. They might applaud the expected congestion reduction from a new highway, but try to keep it away from their neighborhood; understand the need for a new prison, but have a reason it would fit in better on the other side of town; or accept that more density will contain sprawl and reduce long-run housing costs, but shucks, it just doesn’t fit the “character” of the neighborhood. The glorious thing about the NIMBY is the stink of hypocrisy, and I’d hate to lose that connotation through misuse of the term.

That’s not the same as a BANANA — Build Absolutely Nothing Anything Near Anyone — or someone genuinely opposes the project no matter where it goes. Someone who doesn’t care about sprawl, or who somehow hasn’t connected the dots, is simply a density opponent, not a NIMBY. So let’s use proper labels when we discuss these issues.

Slack Action / Flickr

• Reforming land use on Capitol Hill.
• ST Board member Richard Conlin wants the agency to consider TOD more.
• Seattle’s survey of neighborhood visitors.
• Everett Transit looking to sell off one of the station lots.
• Love for Amazon’s approach to a headquarters, especially compared to Apple‘s. But should it be taller?
• New apartments coming to Belltown.
• Patent trolling now extends to real-time information. Metro was a target.
• King Street Station update.
• It’s not transit, but the Issaquah Trolley is headed to Iowa for restoration.
• Trouble in Portland.
• Bus Driver Appreciation Day is Sunday.
• Meet the SDOT chief and chat about greenways March 22nd.
• US Senate transportation bill may be prevailing over the house version. Bill includes restoration of the full transit tax deduction.
• New research on how to avoid bus bunching.
• Lack of good alternatives may be the cause of this phenomenon.
• Extending BART into downtown San Jose?

This is an open thread.

Erubisu 27/Flickr

University Place Patch reports that contraction of the Pierce Transit Benefit Area, which we last reported on here, passed the “Public Transportation Improvement Conference” Thursday night.

The County Council has 30 days to terminate the revised boundaries – in which case they will remain as they currently are – and cities have 60 days to withdraw from the revised Public Transportation Benefit Area (PTBA). Otherwise, pending approval from the County Auditor and Department of Revenue, the new boundaries will take effect in 61 days.

“Silence is a ‘yes’ in this case,” said committee assistant Justin Leighton in a presentation that preceded public testimony at the transit agency’s training center. He added that the County Council cannot change the boundary lines from those being proposed. “It’s either all of it or none of it at all.”

We’re down to the last two steps of a complicated process, as I outlined last year.  Spokesman Lars Erickson said that after cutting service and losing the tax revenue, PT “will have less money after everything is considered.” However, this contraction is designed to increase the likelihood of a tax increase passing.