For those of you who missed Jarrett Walker’s hat tip, TransLink has finally unveiled an excellent system-wide frequency map (PDF), a vast improvement over its predecessor (PDF), which bears several similarities to Metro’s current system map. The map uses both color and line weight (thickness) to denote frequency while basic and limited services are deemphasized. Frequent services include the three SkyTrain lines, the two B-Lines (BRT-style), and other routes that run at least 15 minutes during the day.
Unlike Spokane’s new frequency schematic and Oran’s own design for Seattle, TransLink managed to use a geographically-accurate map base, aided in part by Vancouver’s very clear and regular grid. The best part of the map is the ability to see the viability of anywhere-to-anywhere travel within Vancouver supported by frequent connections. It’s also much easier on the eye than the old system map.
While Metro has yet to follow suit, they are beginning to the catch on to the frequency map palooza, with an excellent Eastside map that was released along with last October’s restructure. However, as the agency aims to continue restructuring its system in accordance to the new service guidelines (PDF), what better way to educate the public than to do the same for the entire system?
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 232-190 to defund the American Community Survey (ACS), one of the Census Bureau’s most significant demographic data-collection programs in addition to the decennial census. The ACS, conducted annually, effectively replaced the long-form of the census and provides important data to planners and policymakers at every level of government. The program’s elimination is just one assault in a long line of legislative actions against transit and cities by the House.
The impetus for the cut is that the ACS is too prying and too costly. What supporters of the bill are forgetting, however, is that the data the ACS provides informs how hundreds of billions of dollars are spent and which programs they go to, including those that concern transit, housing, and urban infrastructure. Elimination of funding not only has a major impact on public policy, but would also effectively kill academic research and private economic development programs vital to the health of cities. The Atlantic has a good synopsis on what kind of effects this move has:
The issue is that the information collected in the ACS is used heavily by the federal government to figure out where it will spend a huge chunk of its money. In a 2010 report for the Brookings Institution, Andrew Reamer found that in the 2008 fiscal year, 184 federal domestic assistance programs used ACS-related datasets to help determine the distribution of more than $416 billion in federal funding. The bulk of that funding, more than 80 percent, went directly to fund Medicaid, highway infrastructure programs and affordable housing assistance.
Reamer, now a research professor George Washington University’s Institute of Public Policy, also found that the federal government uses the ACS to distribute about $100 billion annually to states and communities for economic development, employment, education and training, commerce and other purposes. He says that should the ACS be eliminated, it would be very difficult to figure out how to distribute this money where it’s needed.
House Republicans are forgetting that there is a lot of money, both private and public, directly and indirectly attached to the ACS. While the Senate won’t likely reciprocate defunding the program, this move puts the program in a dangerous political crossfire that jeopardizes funding for cities whenever voters feel like electing someone new every election cycle. That makes it a risk too great to toy with. Call your congresspersons today to oppose the cut.
With U-Link coming online by the end of 2016, rail will serve some of our densest neighborhoods as well as one of the largest employment centers in the region. To date, however, most of our attention has been absorbed by development opportunities and disputes further up around other North Link stations. While the UW Station area is a less than ideal candidate for a dense interconnected grid of mixed-use development, it does provide a unique opportunity to reviving what has been a traditionally an auto-dominant area.
Because the station will be located just to the south of Husky Stadium and Montlake Triangle, a significant TOD barrier rests in the fact that the area’s immediate vicinity is all University-owned land, comprised of medical, athletic, and recreational facilities. These are, by no means, small buildings, and the local geography and street network alone create irregularities in subdivision potential. There are also major institutional hurdles to jump when even considering breaking up large tracts of University land for private development.
The President is making another swing into town tomorrow, May 10th. That means you can expect lots of traffic tie-ups, which, in our bus-dominant world, means transit delays. Two major closures to be aware of are at Convention Place Station and Pine Street. Metro has more details here:
From about 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Convention Place Station (CPS) in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel will be closed to all pedestrian access. Buses will continue to travel through CPS, but will not stop there. No passengers will be allowed to board or exit buses in the station, or access the tunnel from the CPS entrance at 9th Avenue and Pine Street.
During this time please board or exit all tunnel buses at the other four tunnel stations, or at their regularly posted surface street stops before they enter or after they leave CPS. Sound Transit Link light rail service is expected to operate normally in the tunnel during this time.
Additionally, from about 9 a.m. to about 4 p.m. on Thursday, Pine Street will be closed west of I-5. During this closure there will be no bus service on Pine Street between I-5 and 3rd Avenue.
Update: Looks like Publicola’s Erica Barnett beat me to the punch prior to the publication of this post, tackling issues not addressed in this piece. See her rebuttal for more.
The Seattle Times took yet another crack at Mayor McGinn’s parking and transportation policies today, arguing against proposed elimination of parking minimums near transit and furthering the “war on cars” myth so beloved by transit opponents. The piece builds a rather misleading case with irrelevant data, essentially arguing that Seattle’s car ownership rate doesn’t support eliminating parking minimums.
There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of parking and land use at work in this piece– elimination of parking minimums has very little to do with how many households own cars citywide, and much more to do with the effects on real estate pricing that such requirements have. Lynn Thompson, the piece’s author, doesn’t mention anything about the connection with housing, which was one of the Mayor’s primary arguments, nor does she address the issue that housing costs are artificially inflated when parking costs are bundled in.
Last Friday, the University of Washington threw a birthday party for its U-Pass program, which turns twenty this year. In its inception in the early 90s, the U-Pass was one of the first university-wide transportation demand management programs of its kind, and has become a model for similar programs nationwide. A few notable speakers attended the anniversary celebration, including Metro GM Kevin Desmond, UW Transportation Services Director Josh Kavanagh, and former Seattle city councilmember Heidi Wills.
Wills, who was president of undergraduate student body during the time of the U-Pass inception, spoke about the controversy originally incited through the program– which earned the ire of the campus libertarians and many others who objected to the idea of paying for another’s commute. Wills’ response to the opposition was one familiar to all of us– those who don’t take transit still benefit from the people that do. From that mantra grew one of the most successful TDM programs in the country: while the University community is 30% larger than it was in 1992, traffic volumes in the U-District today are lighter.
The most significant change that the U-Pass has undergone in recent years was last year’s decision to switch to a universal model, in which students can no longer opt-out of the program. While earning its own share of controversy, the new funding model has decreased costs while increasing participation rates, which took a precipitous decline after the U-Pass doubled in cost in 2008. Despite any past misgivings, the program will likely remain on this track into the foreseeable future, helping sustain the city’s transit future.
Happy birthday, U-Pass. Here’s to another twenty years.
Third Avenue may be one of Seattle’s most important streets– it houses the city’s most frequent transit corridor, is lined by major employers and institutions, and is downtown’s most central avenue. You can’t fault someone, then, for asking why Third is also one of the city’s most horrible places to be. And so it is– hotspots of drug and gang activity, long monolithic stretches of blank wall, and few attractive qualities of urban life prevail along its desolate corridors.
A few months ago, the Seattle Times printed a story on the arterial’s long, disenchanted history and woes of high crime. After a bit of finger-pointing, there seemed to be a consensus among the planners and policymakers that the solution was twofold: more police and better urban design, summed up nicely in this quote from Jon Scholes, the VP of the Downtown Seattle Association:
“More plantings, more lighting, more trees are great, but if we don’t deal with the drug dealing we haven’t improved the corridor.”
As much as the public likes to think that nicer streets and more cops are the holy grail to making over Third and crafting a more livable downtown, there’s a crucial component in the formula that didn’t so much get a peep in the Times article– commerce, and lots of it. Commerce gives a reason for people to be somewhere, a reason that’s nonexistent right now for the many blocks that span Third. With it comes buyers, sellers, patrons, people, and eyes, lots of them to keep on the street, as Jane Jacobs would say.
As such, the makeover of Third through urban design and policing is directly tied to how commerce is incorporated into the landscape. Design shapes frontage and streetscapes amenable for retailers, retailers attract foot traffic with their wares and goods, and foot traffic helps induce communal policing within the vibrancy of an urban environment. Moreover, commerce creates tax revenue, which help make these improvements to begin with.
With Metro’s “rainbow of frequent service” and the prospect of a much larger role to play when the DSTT becomes rail-exclusive, the future of Third Avenue can be promising. And while design improvements have a power of their own, only the attraction of people, and a lot of them, can truly make it a great urban street. Commerce, as we’ve argued all along, is the best way to do that.
With the failure of Pierce Transit’s Prop. 1 at the ballot last February, the agency has been scrambling to find non-cut options, the most promising one being a redefinition, or shrinking, to be more precise, of the current service area. While Prop. 1 received rather generous support in Tacoma’s core urban areas, the vote was largely dragged down by anti-tax suburban communities. As such, shrinking the boundaries is being sold as a win-win for everyone: more political support for PT, and no taxes for cities that don’t want to pay for transit.
At last, Pierce Transit’s Public Transportation Improvement Conference has come up with ideas for a new district boundary (PDF), with a bold purge of suburban communities like Buckley and Sumner. Before the new district can be improved, however, the PTIC will host a hearing to solicit public input. As usual, our friends at Transportation Choices Coalition are at the helm of organizing turnout. The hearing is 6pm this Thursday, March 8th, at the Pierce Transit Training Center in Lakewood:
We are never going to have decent bus service in Tacoma and Pierce County unless Pierce Transit secures additional revenues. The current map proposed in front of the PTIC will align Pierce Transit’s taxing district with where there is bus service, paving the way for more efficient service in the future and allow voters in Tacoma, Lakewood, Gig Harbor, and Puyallup to vote for transit revenue (again) and restore their bus service.
Voters in Bonney Lake and rural areas should NOT decide the fate of transit service in Tacoma and its suburban neighbors. Please attend this hearing and tell the PTIC to PASS THE MAP! Due to the schedule to get on the ballot, we need to this to pass at this meeting!
Of course, the biggest concern with excluding cities like Sumner and Bonney Lake, in particular, is the elimination of connectors that feed Sounder stations. But given the existing momentum for that to happen anyway, PT doesn’t seem to have anything to lose with a contraction of its service area. For more information on the boundary issue, Chris Karnes over at Tacoma Tomorrow has already provided excellent coverage.
Whether or not Seattle might get an NBA team now is a decision that might be left in fate’s hands, but regardless of the prospects, building a new arena in SODO to accommodate both an NBA and NHL carries huge implications. The partnership that was brokered between a private hedge fund manager and the City would essentially site the arena directly south of the Safeco Field parking garage, making a kind of chain of sports complexes from north to south. Although there’s a bit of a populist flair in marketing a mega-sports district, I think there’s plenty not to like in this proposal planning-wise.
Transit, for one, gets a good shaft considering the fact that the nearest two stations, SODO and Stadium, are well out of walking distance for many people, at 0.7 miles a piece. For the huge crowds that a major-league event might draw, you could argue that fans are more willing to bear the brunt of the walk especially given the relatively high costs of event parking. But consider this– just as many Seahawks fans use Stadium Station to get to CenturyLink Field (despite International District’s closer proximity), a great deal of transit-riding NBA fans would do the same, and have to traverse through WSDOT’s monstrous new SR-519 ramps, scant pedestrian facilities, and a cruddy street grid to get to the arena.
For land use, the implications are even greater. The revitalization argument is a bit of a two-edged sword– as event-based destinations, sports complexes alone don’t make for good urban amenities, especially since non-use most of the time creates large dead zones with little to no activity. Seeing as our existing professional sports arenas and stadiums are no exceptions to this even now, stringing them together would add little value and only help reinforce bad segregation-based planning principles from the past.
For the City to hedge its bets on a bunch of cheap land is probably a poor investment decision that especially doesn’t further the cause of promoting density, transit, and the great neighborhoods that should go hand in hand. As vital as sports are to Seattle’s cultural fabric, planning for their facilities are almost always a one-sided affair with limited appeal to the city as a whole. If we want great civic life to come first, however, we should treat our sports complexes not as event destinations, but amenities within our urban landscape. This proposal falls well short of that.
Last week, the New York Times penned a rather fascinating piece on New York’s Pennsylvania Station– no, not the architectural masterpiece that was once the city’s crown jewel, but the modernist hellhole that sits there now, buried under the bowels of Madison Square Garden. While the city has been trounced with guilt, grievances, and lamentations since the demolition of old Penn Station, a decades-long plan to evoke the neoclassical grandeur of Penn has been in the works for some time now.
The Moynihan plan, as it’s known, would convert the adjacent post office to a new rail terminal. Yet the plan is not without its drawbacks:
It’s true that the Moynihan plan will eventually improve a few access routes to subways and commuter trains. But it will add no new tracks and have limited effect on the congestion and misery of Penn Station. New tracks aside, the challenge is at the bare minimum to bring light and air into this underground purgatory and, beyond that, to create for millions of people a new space worthy of New York, a civic hub in the spirit of the great demolished one, more attuned to the city’s aspirations and democratic ideals.
As ambitious as Bellevue’s plans are for growth in the Bel-Red and Eastgate/I-90 corridors, investments will still need to be made to ensure that infrastructure to support development are up to par. As such, this means that there are a lot of transportation projects that need to be funded, and Bellevue, not immune to the recession, will have to figure out which ones to prioritize. Luckily the public can weigh in on the matter, which is a plus given the broad support for light rail and the Bel-Red plan in the city.
There will be four open houses in February along with a survey to solicit input on the Transportation Facilities Plan (TFP). According to the City of Bellevue, the prioritization of projects in the TFP helps inform the development of the capital budget, which will be critical in providing the funding needed to build major projects:
The public can weigh in on what should be funded in the future. Those interested can respond to an online survey, beginning Feb. 20, available atwww.bellevuewa.gov/transportation-facilities-plan.htm. Or, they can attend an open house, from4:30-6:30 p.m., on one of the following dates:
Wednesday, Feb. 15, at Highland Park & Community Center, 14224 Bel-Red Road
Thursday, Feb. 16, at Factoria Mall, 4055 Factoria Boulevard SE
Thursday, Feb. 23, at Bellevue City Hall, 450 110th Avenue NE, Rm.1E-108
Tuesday, Feb. 28, at Crossroads Mall, 15600 NE 8th Street, Community Meeting Room
This is a good opportunity to make sure Bellevue maintains a progressive attitude towards its transportation future. Even if you’re not a resident but still frequent the city, I’d encourage you to attend. Some of these projects will be making good on big regional investments, so it’s fair to say that a lot of people, both in and outside Bellevue, will have a stake in the process.
One of the most notable social interfaces that we make in the realm of transit is with the driver. Chances are there will be some kind of greeting when you board, maybe a “thank you” or “bye now” when you de-board, and occasionally you might find some passengers will strike up a conversation with the driver during the ride*. None of these verbal interactions are actually necessary; all they really do is foster politeness and social civility. Of course, there are instances that do require the driver’s speech**: announcing stops, rules, and answering passenger questions.
However, sitting on a delayed bus while the driver is answering the question of a passenger who’s standing outside the front doorway can be infuriating for passengers already on board. But beyond just the interests of the passengers, sometimes this can throw buses off schedule, cause bunching, and even break connections. To be sure, there are times when driver assistance is necessary– visually-impaired passengers, for example, might need the route number read aloud. Most of the time, however, the driver is asked information which is already readily available elsewhere.
Good transit systems actually minimize driver-passenger interaction, which does two things: 1) information about the route/system is clearly conveyed, either online, in paper, or posted at stops, requiring less reliance on the driver; and 2) precious minutes on the schedule can be saved to boost system reliability and efficiency. And it’s not like we don’t already do this– train drivers and engineers, for example, are hidden away from public view entirely on our rail modes, simply because you can trust passengers to know what they’re doing without needing assistance.
As mentioned at the top of the post, there is also social component of driver-passenger interface, which can be good or bad. Driver attitudes, for one, tend to rub off on passengers. Any regular transit rider will know that a sour driver is more likely to inflame your own tempers, while an amiable one can spruce up your day. While the trade-off is there, I’m a big believer that we shouldn’t have to intertwine drivers into our social lives, and that it’s best to just let them get on with their jobs.
*King County Metro actually discourages its drivers from casually conversing with passengers. This rule is often broken.
**Many of these functions are disappearing as Metro installs its new on-board system with automated announcements.
Throughout Metro’s network, there are a number of common-stop corridors along which multiple routes will run, usually combining for frequent service. Some of these corridors are scheduled to optimize the distribution of service frequency and eliminate bus bunching, others not so much. Along the corridors with no schedule coordination, you’re likely to see several buses come at once within the span of a few minutes, then no buses at all for the next several minutes.
A lot of this is the result of other scheduling “hotspots” in the network, or timepoints and pulses, mostly at park-and-rides, transit centers, and other major hubs were infrequent and frequent services come together at one destination. Scheduling to incorporate both timed connections at these hubs and frequency coordination along common corridors is no simple task– that’s why Metro splits up its scheduling responsibilities by each bus base.
Unfortunately, this brings up another challenge: common corridors are sometimes made up of routes based out of different bases, hence different schedulers. At Eastgate, for example, routes like the 212 and 218 combine for frequent service to downtown Seattle in the peak*. However, because both of these routes each come out of two different bases, uncoordinated scheduling often leads to bunching at the freeway stop, limiting the usefulness of passenger capacity the bus at the rear end of a bunch brings.
While an easy administrative solution is to simply apportion the routes along common corridors to one scheduler, I recognize that the network is much more complex, routes need to move around, and common corridors tend to straddle the edges of geographic boundaries. That said, Metro should develop a standard for developing coordination among separate schedulers for common corridors.
I’m not aware of any other corridors in Metro’s network where this is an issue with all-day frequent service, but assuming the free interchange of routes between bases can happen at any service change in the future, it’ll be a good practice to ensure stable and reliable service along our most heavily-traveled corridors.
*I chose this selfishly to illustrate my personal commute, at the same time recognizing that it’s not a very good example, given the limited peak-only span. If anyone has a clearer or better example, particularly with all-day service, I’d like to hear it!
Branding is always an exciting topic to discuss, largely because we can exercise our imaginations without having to spend lots of capital money. One of the finer points about branding that Jarrett Walker touches upon in his book Human Transit is transit’s associated terminologies and nomenclature. Choosing between whether to use line or route, for example, can reveal a lot about your service or at least how you want your service to be perceived.
The most clear-cut example of this across North American transit agencies is the fact that we usually reserve “routes” for bus transit and “lines” for rail transit. Jarrett’s excerpt at Human Transit really deserves a full read:
…Lurking inside these two words, in short, is a profound difference in attitude about a transit service. Do you want to think of transit as something that’s always there, that you can count on? If so, call it a line. We never speak of rail routes, always rail lines, and we do that because the rails are always there, suggesting a permanent and reliable thing…
Obviously there’s existing cultural and institutional inertia behind the conventions of transit nomenclature– people use certain terms because they’ve always been used in that way, which helps produce the semantic vernacular of locally accepted definitions. You’re likely to use the term ‘bus route’ because people know what you mean and you know what they mean, not because you have a value judgment to make against bus transit.
Nonetheless, I think there is a solid argument to be made in reorienting transit’s vocabulary around its physical and practical qualities, like service levels, frequency, utility, etc. While I don’t think the word “route” will ever disappear from common usage, there should be a strong delineation between the level of service a “line” will reflect, as opposed to what a “route” will reflect. RapidRide, for example, does just that, by branding what is really higher quality bus service as lines (e.g., A Line, B Line, etc.) instead of routes (e.g., Route A?).
If you want to really follow that criteria, however, there are a lot more routes in the regional network that should be rebranded as bus lines– the 41, 150, 255, 511, 545, and 550 to name a few. To be sure, there are even finer nuances in classifying service levels beyond what “route” and “line’ offer us, like stop spacing, vehicle type, boarding operations, etc. But if we really want a good place to begin in promoting our high-quality frequent transit corridors, then we should start referring to them as “lines” irrespective of the mode.
There are few neighborhoods in our region that have as good transit service as the International Blvd area of Tukwila does. With that comes an opportunity to harness existing capacity and use it to stimulate development. Yet Tukwila is often overlooked when it comes to TOD and land use. Indeed, the town is largely suburban and low-density; however, it also has one of the State’s highest minority populations and is, geographically, situated at an important “crossroads” in South King.
Transit-wise, this geographic advantage translates into high-quality service at Tukwila-International Blvd to points north, south, east, and west:
A Line: Federal Way and points south along Pacific Highway.
Link: Sea-Tac Airport, Rainier Valley, Downtown Seattle, and connections north.
124: Alternative all-day service to Seattle via the Duwamish through Georgetown & SODO.
140: Burien to the west, Southcenter, Renton to the east, to be replaced by the F Line in the future.
If there’s one thing we learned from our wacky weather week, it’s that no mode of transportation, steel, asphalt, or concrete, is immune to cold harsh weather. During the ice storm, there wasn’t a soul in the region that didn’t find trouble getting around. This included rail users, of course, when both Central Link and Tacoma Link’s catenary lines iced over and rail switches along the BNSF mainline froze. Buses, however, were hit much harder– jackknifed and stranded, many were left out on streets and highways near and far while those that did keep running were slow and unreliable.
During last year’s Thanksgiving storm, Link was lauded for its smooth performance as trains whizzed by parking lot traffic on I-5 and a record number of passengers boarded. The Seattle Times took the opportunity to pit it against Thursday’s ice storm woes, with a seeming interest in demonstrating light rail’s shortfalls. Too often, though, stuff like this turns into fodder for transit opponents, who’ll use it as a case example against building rail, even when the framing is simply saying that ice is more menacing than snow (which it is).
With Link this time around, the woes were attributable to a disadvantage in the electrification technology– the overhead catenary lines froze over, something that wouldn’t have happened with a third rail system or if, say, the line were entirely subway. But you can take just about any form of transportation and improve it in some way shape or form. Just like how switch heaters and third rail help trains fend away ice, studded tires and chains help cars and buses navigate the snow.
Things like this muck up discussions and debates over mode technology, especially when people make an emotional argument against a mode because of one experience they had aboard that mode. If last November was any indication, rail does hold a commanding advantage over road-based modes in inclement weather, not because of any technological ice/snow-proof advancements but because of the physical design of the rail trackway itself.
Whether it’s the track design or higher passenger capacity offered by rail, or the greater coverage flexibility from buses, the inherent qualities of any modal technology should be the real cornerstone of the debate.
*Disclaimer: The author is currently employed by Sound Transit. However, all opinions expressed in this article are completely his own and may not reflect the views of anyone else.
It’s time for our third snow open thread. Just about all agencies regionwide are in snow operations, meaning reroutes, slow buses, lengthy delays, and some canceled routes entirely. If you’re about to head out, the smart thing to do is probably turn around and stay put. Otherwise, be sure to check emergency service revisions.
Any rider-to-rider advice is welcomed in the comments.
Though we’ve agreed that it’s premature to make any kind of definitive conclusion on long-term travel trends post-tolling, one thing is clear– I-90 has begun to adopt 520′s notorious congestion, something that was, of course, to be expected. However, with the R8A Two-Way Transit & HOV project still incomplete and both directions on I-90 competing for the peak, 520 defectors have worsened an already fragile situation.
My bus, for example, has been slowed three times in the PM peak direction express lanes for the first time in recent memory. While the delay only adds up to a couple of minutes for me, the real losers are those using transit in the reverse-peak direction: eastbound in the morning and westbound in the afternoon, which currently has a measly transit mode share simply because the incentives to drive in that direction are far too great.
Of course, tolling just one segment over Lake Washington ignores the fact that both bridge corridors should be considered as part of a cross-lake system. This is a good financial argument for the State to make, too, because there won’t be enough toll revenue from 520 alone to finance the entirety of the bridge replacement. Though currently prohibited by State law, tolling I-90 to offset the funding shortfall can be allowed under an exemption granted by the Legislature.
The discussion around I-90 tolls hasn’t only been constrained to politicians, planners, and transit bloggers. Shortly after the 520 tolls commenced, an anonymous citizen started a Toll I-90 effort with an advocacy webpage and even merchandise to boot. Whether or not the State can muster up the political will to follow through, however, is a much different story.
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 232-190 to 
