At a 2:30 press conference today at Tukwila Int’l Blvd Station, Sound Transit spokesman Bruce Gray and Chief of Police Ron Griffin announced the discovery that approximately 4.2 miles and 70,000 pounds of copper wire has been stolen from within LINK’s hollow elevated guideway. With the exception of the stations themselves, all of the wire between Rainier Beach and SeaTac Airport has been stolen. The copper wire sections – roughly an inch in diameter – function to isolate stray current that might otherwise be absorbed by the structure, slowly weakening it over a period of decades. At current copper prices, the theft is valued well over $200,000.
Photo by the Author
Gray and Griffin were understandably unwilling to discuss the details of ingress points that allowed the thieves to access the guideway, but they did say that upon successful access there would have been no way to know that anyone was within the structure. Gray stressed that there are no operational safety concerns related to the theft, and that the wire was strictly for the purposes of reducing stress on the concrete and rebar, thus extending the useful life of the structure. Sound Transit expects to replace the copper within 2-3 months.
Sound Transit is seeking the public’s help with any information that might lead to the discovery and arrest of the thieves. Anyone with information is encouraged to call the King County Sheriff’s office (206) 296-3311.
Perhaps the most pressing concern about the September elimination of the Ride Free Area (RFA) is the likelihood of severely degraded peak-hour travel times within the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel. Without significant mitigation, the already precarious mixed bus-rail operations of the DSTT are certain to get much worse. Of particular concern are northbound trips in the PM peak, as each crush-loaded departure (particularly to Northgate and the UDistrict) will require at least an additional minute of platform time to accommodate fare payment, in addition to the mandatory and time-consuming inspection that each Link train makes before proceeding from Westlake to the Pine Street Stub.
The DSTT currently operates approximately 1,500 trips per day, 750 in each direction. Median overall headway is every 3 minutes in the morning and evening, every 30-60 seconds in the peak, and every 2 minutes mid-day. This offers impressive capacity but – like closely stacked dominoes – precious little room for error. Bus and train breakdowns, cash fares, overly discursive drivers and passengers, overly restrictive train/bus separation requirements, and wheelchair/bike accommodation, can and do cause cascading delays whose magnitude is far greater than the sum of the individual behaviors.
In the absence of instituting proof-of-payment (POP) in the DSTT, it is clear to me that the transition to Pay-as-You-Enter will require reducing overall tunnel bus frequencies in order to avoid a total breakdown of service reliability. Thankfully our agencies are able to “tunnel” or “surface” routes with far less public process than is normally required when a service change is being considered. As someone who commutes from Convention Place to Tukwila every day – in which my mornings are a reliable 30-minute breeze and my afternoons a variable 50-minute headache – I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking in big-picture terms about the proper role of the DSTT in our regional transit system. Below are 5 principles – roughly in order of importance –that I offer as one model for determining which routes to keep underground.
Principle 1: Common corridors should be served by common stops.
Principle 2: Keep routes slated for future LINK conversion.
Principle 3: Remove local routes.
Principle 4: Until the DSTT is rail-only, keep all-day express routes to regional transit hubs.
Principle 5: Except where it conflicts with Principles 1 and 2, remove peak-only routes.
What would the DSTT look like under these principles? And would it solve the capacity problems that will be brought on by the elimination of the RFA?
Metro just announced that during Bike to Work Week (May 14-18), any cyclist loading their bike on a Metro bus will ride free. All Metro-operated Sound Transit routes (540, 542, 545, 550, 554, 555, 556, and 560) are also included.
More information and a link to the promotion will be added when it becomes available.
PSRC wants to know where and why Puget Sound bicyclists ride, and they have partnered with Bay Area smartphone app Cycle Tracks to allow bicyclists to record their trips and share their data directly with PSRC. The data will help prioritize present and future investments in bicycle infrastructure and will improve the ability of planners to model cycling demand variables such as slope, arterial speed, presence or absence of bike lanes, etc…
Cyclists may start using the app anytime, while PSRC will begin collecting data on May 1. The app is available only for iPhone (download) and Android (download). The app asks for your age, email, gender, home/work/school ZIP, and cycling frequency, but all of these inputs are voluntary. For the purpose of grouping trips by user, the app does require your Unique Device Identifier, but this data will not be shared.
I have been testing out the app for the past week, and it has a generally pleasant user interface and its basic functions work well. Trips are saved by date and trip purpose, all trips are mapped, and average speed is given. Other apps such as SpeedTracker provide more information, such as color-coding your map by speed so you can see your bottlenecks. There are some unfortunate quirks, such as the app only being able to run on an active (though dimmed) screen (i.e. you can’t press the top button on an iPhone or this will stop the trip from being recorded) Using CycleTracks on my 13-mile bike commute drains about 35% of the battery.
Overall, this app represents a nice chance for cyclists to allow their own travel preferences to directly impact how planners understand cycling. An app FAQ is here, and questions can be referred to Peter Schmiedeskamp, pschmiedeskamp@psrc.org.
On Monday, Sound Transit substantially completed the rail bridge over Pacific Avenue in Tacoma, marking a major milestone on the ‘D-to-M Street’ portion of the Sounder to Lakewood Extension Project. Pacific Avenue reopened to vehicle and transit traffic as well – nearly 2 months ahead of schedule – modifying detours on Pierce Transit Routes 1 and 53. Remaining work at the site involves the laying of track, berm construction, construction of a pedestrian underpass on A Street, signal and safety installations, etc.
In October the single-track bridge will serve 5 daily Sounder roundtrips to/from South Tacoma and Lakewood. The other 4 daily round-trips (2 peak, 2 reverse peak) will continue to originate/terminate at Tacoma’s Freighthouse Square.
In accordance with the 2012 Service Implementation Plan, Sound Transit will reconfigure its Pierce County services once Sounder service begins. Route 592 will be cut back to 15-minute headways but all trips will begin at DuPont, whereas currently only 1/3 do. Route 592 will also be rerouted off the SODO busway in favor of the Seneca/Edgar Martinez couplet taken by the 577/578. Route 593 will be eliminated and its service hours added to the 590/594, extending the window in which those routes have frequent service. Though Sound Transit had initially planned to move Route 574’s terminus to Lakewood Sounder Station (instead of the current Lakewood Towne Center), subsequent public comment shelved that plan for now.
This bridge also marks a major milestone for the eventual Point Defiance Bypass, even though they are separate projects with different funding structures. Within 5 years or so Amtrak will begin to use the bridge, shaving 6 minutes off Seattle to Portland trips and significantly improving reliability by reducing conflicts with freight traffic.
I think Sherwin’s piece rightfully complained about the commercial environment on 3rd Avenue; no one can argue that payday loans and smoke shops make for an attractive streetscape. But to counter Sherwin, I don’t think that adding a more desirable slate of businesses (as if one could just do so by fiat) would fix what is an undoubtedly structural problem. Fixing the shops is fine, but it doesn’t fix the shoppers. We have a huge number of workers, tourists, the homeless, and a small number of the condo-owning elite. Missing are the middle-income folks so common to all our other neighborhoods: hipsters, students, immigrants, and families with kids.
In my opinion, downtown’s problem is most easily seen by looking at income inequality. Not enough people live downtown, and we have made it largely illegal to develop residential space downtown (most new construction is in Belltown/Denny Triangle/SLU). As a result we have encouraged housing policies that are doubly exclusionary – where the middle and upper-middle classes are excluded by both the very rich (due to the economics of new construction) and the very poor (due to government support for deeply subsidized housing and centrally-located homeless shelters).
Now some data. One quick and easy way to measure income inequality is to divide mean household income by median household income and look for positive skew (>1.0), indicating that a small number of very high incomes distort the otherwise representative value of the mean. (more…)
Lily Point Marine Park, Point Roberts – Photo by Flickr User Loutron Glouton
I’ve always been drawn to geopolitical oddities. Humans frequently draw straight, arbitrary lines and the terrain makes a mockery of it, such as Minnesota’s Northwest Angle or the Kentucky Bend. Other examples, such as the bizarre Dutch town of Baarle-Nassau, are so anachronistic that you can almost imagine medieval barons drunkenly gambling away their various land holdings parcel by parcel.
Washington is home to one of the stranger examples in the United States, Point Roberts, a ‘practical exclave’ on the tip of the Tsawwassen Peninsula just south of the Vancouver suburb of Delta. Jutting just past the 49th parallel makes it part of the United States, one of (I believe) only two settlements in the western U.S. accessible by land only via Canada (the other is the tiny hamlet of Hyder, Alaska).
Point Roberts also makes a great day trip or short overnight visit, and it’s easily accessible via transit. When I lived in Vancouver BC I visited twice, each time spending a lazy half-day circumnavigating the peninsula on foot.
The easiest way to get to Point Roberts car-free from Seattle is as follows:
Take the first Quick Coach of the day from the Seattle Center Best Western (200 Taylor Ave North) to Bridgeport Station on the Canada Line. The trip takes 3 hours and costs $51 round-trip.
Transfer to TransLink Route 601 (map) to South Delta. The ride takes 50 minutes and costs $3.75.
Either stay overnight, or catch the last Quick Coach back to Seattle.
Here’s a overview map:
The transit connections are easy. TransLink #601 runs every half hour 7 days per week until 10pm, and the border crossing is open 24/7/365. Anchoring your trip at Bridgeport Station also gives you the option to explore Vancouver’s rail transit with ease. Taking Amtrak Cascades is also possible for longer stays but will take roughly twice as long and require three transfers to reach Point Roberts (Amtrak–>SkyTrain–>Canada Line–>601).
Land use here is very similar to the San Juan Islands; thick (and brushy) second-growth forests, pockets of old growth, quiet and narrow roads, scattered homes of widely varying quality, a small grocery store, and a high-end marina on the southwestern tip. A leisurely 3-mile walk will bring you to the steep cliffs of Lily Point, where on clear days you will have expansive views of Boundary Bay and Mt Baker. Hike down from the bluff to the beach at low tide and you may spot Purple Sea Stars, and you’ll have a chance to see the pilings remaining in the beach from the old Alaska Packers Cannery. By no means a wilderness adventure, Point Roberts is merely a chance see American gas priced in litres, to set foot in an accident of geography, to pass through a comically excessive border patrol checkpoint, and to walk a few miles on quiet roads for the sheer pleasure of it.
Sound Transit just released its Q4 2011 Ridership Report, an encouraging trinity of big ridership gains, increased punctuality, and reduced (though still high) costs.
ST Express: Ridership is up 13% on weekdays and 10% overall, with average weekday boardings of 48,094. Strong growth on Snohomish County routes is likely due both to ST absorbing riders affected by cuts at Community Transit and the completion of Mountlake Terrace Transit center in March 2011. Ridership is up 20% on #510, 28% on #511, 44% on #513, 20% on #532, and 7% on #535. Other routes saw healthy increases of 4-15%, the only exceptions being ridership losses on #560 (-10%) and #566 (-11%). Cost per boarding declined from $7.48 to $7.04. On-time performance increased from 87% to 88%.
Sounder: South Sounder ridership is up an impressive 22%, and North Sounder is up 15% (though it must be noted that 22% of total North Sounder boardings were on Special Event service). Overall weekday ridership is up 27%, with average weekday boardings again exceeding 10,000. Cost per boarding declined from $13.74 to $12.71, with an on-time performance of 97%.
Central Link: Ridership is up by 12%, with average weekday boardings of 24,070, though ridership is still 24% below budgeted estimates. Cost per boarding declined from $6.78 to $6.29, and on-time performance improved dramatically, from 81% to 87%.
Tacoma Link: Ridership is up by 20%, on-time performance is 99.9%, and cost per boarding declined from $3.93 to $3.59.
The Fall 2012 Service Change does many good things, which Bruce has covered in exhaustive detail. But I wanted to draw particular attention to the effects of the proposed service changes on the Central District. Though I support the changes to Route 2 (and as a former Madrona resident I have credibility on the issue), and though I have long supported the elimination of Route 4, the newest service change proposals radically underserve the commercial hub of the Central District at 23rd/Jackson.
In short, with the reduced peak frequency on the 14S and the (overdue) elimination of Route 4, riders on Jackson east of 14th will have only half-hourly service to both the International District and downtown. Furthermore, by moving the 27 to Spring/Seneca, the 14 will become the only decent east-west grid connection between Jefferson (Route 3) and I-90. I drew up a quick map to visualize the changes:
The First Hill Streetcar will be built. Its alignment has been approved by the City Council, the interlocal agreement between Sound Transit and Seattle is secure, and construction begins next month. I’m personally quite excited to ride it from Capitol Hill to Little Saigon/Chinatown to get cheaper produce than I can get at QFC.
But let’s be clear, the First Hill Streetcar is an expensive investment (transit planning as consolation prize) that will do very little for mobility in central Seattle. In its current configuration – and in the absence of money to connect the line through downtown – much more mobility could be purchased through trolleybus investment. As a staunch rail advocate this is a difficult thing for me to say, but comparing modal choice across origin-destination pairs makes it abundantly clear that the streetcar loses in most cases to existing bus service.
President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper have announced a sweeping new security agreement. The agreement will expand the NEXUS program, increase the number of American security officials working in Canada, and dramatically streamline border procedures to improve the throughput of cargo.
Relevant to STB is that this agreement will end the duplicative border inspection for southbound Cascades trains. By the end of 2012, all customs and immigration will take place in Vancouver’s Pacific Central Station. This will save 10-25 minutes per trip and harmonize northbound and southbound running times to 4 hours. Mike Lindblom has the full scoop.
I definitely cheer the streamlining of rail (and air) service, and indeed also to improving trade (some estimate that up to 1% of Canadian GDP is lost to bureaucratic redundancy at the border). But these efficiencies were only possible via a Canadian capitulation to American security standards and policies, which in a post-Patriot Act era are already excessively heavy handed. Far more information will be shared between the two governments, the practical result of which is far greater American access to information on Canadian citizens. I am quite sympathetic to the fears – of eroded national sovereignty and lost civil liberties – that many of my Canadian friends have expressed.
In Seattle we tend to like alliterative self-effacement. Since we already have the Mercer Mess, let’s talk a little about the Denny Dilemma (disaster? debacle? despair?) Pick your favorite ‘D’.
Guerilla Signage Spotted at Fairview/Denny in November 2011 – Photo by the Author
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Route 8 provides critically important mobility. A rare non-CBD/crosstown trunk route in central Seattle, it connects Uptown, Cascade/SLU, Capitol Hill, Madison Valley, the Central District, and the Rainier Valley. Especially on its east-west segment, perhaps no route better exemplifies our city’s stated goal of connecting dense urban villages.
The 8 is also one of our least reliable routes, frequently subject to severe delays and bunching, a problem especially severe eastbound in the PM peak. Though Route 8 is a local route its reliability problems are almost entirely due to I-5. I-5’s construction cut off Capitol Hill from Cascade and Uptown, funneling all traffic onto Denny, whereas in the downtown core the grid was better preserved via Madison, Seneca, Pike, Pine, and Olive. If topography and local access problems weren’t enough, the only ramp onto I-5 southbound between Mercer St and Spring St is at Yale Ave, a two-block length section of street that serves exclusively to queue cars seeking to get from Denny to I-5 southbound. Backups routinely stretch over a mile, all the way back to Seattle Center. Eastbound #8s that depart their Lower Queen Anne terminus on time can be up to 30 minutes late reaching Capitol Hill, just over a mile east!
In an era of austerity, fixing Route 8 is no easy task. Denny is very narrow – limited to 2 lanes in each direction except for a turning lane at Fairview Ave – and there is very little room to widen it. HOV/BAT lanes would reduce general-purpose vehicle capacity (slightly more than) 50%, and they would do little for transit anyway as eastbound Route 8 must stay in the I-5 access lane in order to serve its stops at Dexter, Westlake, Fairview, and Stewart. So what can we do with a severe problem and very little money to fix it?
As expected after very heavy rainfall, the first mudslide of the rainy season occurred this morning at 7am near Edmonds. Sounder North service for Wednesday is cancelled. Per BNSF’s 48-hour rule, Amtrak Cascades trains 510 and 517 will be cancelled through Friday morning at least, trains 513 and 516 will be truncated to Seattle, and the Empire Builder (trains 7, 8) will turn at Everett. In all cases there will be bus replacement service offered.
With the rain yet to abate, expect more mudslides in the coming days. Sounder North is still scheduled to run on Saturday for the Apple Cup, but there’s a good chance of additional mudslides canceling that as well.
In 2014, the Panama Canal will double its capacity, adding a third shipping lane and dredging its channels to 60′. The primary effect of this will be to make East Coast ports significantly more attractive to Asian shipping interests, most of whom currently call at prominent West Coast ports (Long Beach, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver, Prince Rupert, etc…) for intermodal transfer to the midwest and east by rail. Despite our highly successful shift toward services and technology, a robust industrial base remains key to a healthy Cascadian economy, and a significant drop in freight rail traffic would cause significant harm.
To remain competitive, our regional governments (the British Columbia Legislative Assembly, the legislatures of Oregon and Washington, and to a lesser extent, the Idaho legislature) should recognize the urgent need to partner on major rail investments in the next legislative cycle. Washington has the most urgent needs, and the proposed investments are expensive.
Back in 2006, the Washington State Transportation Commission released the Washington State Rail Investment Plan, identifying major chokepoints and necessary improvements (see image above). It is worth noting that the mainline between Seattle and Portland is significantly less congested than the cross-Cascades routes: Seattle-Portland was just over 50% capacity, Portland-Spokane (BNSF) and Portland-Boise (UP) were both at 90-100% capacity, while Everett-Wenatchee (through the Cascade tunnel) was 22% over practical capacity. The report laid out two alternatives (reproduced below): Alternative A would have added capacity for 24 additional trains per day and cost $350 million, primarily by crown-cutting the Stampede Pass tunnel to allow for double-stacked trains. Alternative B would have added capacity for 75 additional trains per day forapproximately $2.0 billion, constructing a new Stampede tunnel, allowing 20-minute headways between Auburn and Ellensburg, and allowing two trains in the Cascade Tunnel at the same time, among many other improvements.
2006 WSTC Rail Investment Plan
Despite continuing austerity at the state level, it is very likely that a major transportation package will be forthcoming in the next session, and I sincerely hope that we can simultaneously identify a new and sustainable source for transit funding while securing the investments necessary to sustain our industrial base.
Of course, such investments would bring welcome new opportunities for passenger service as well. For instance, a daytime round-trip train between Seattle and Spokane would take 6.5 hours on a Talgo, be immune to seasonal disruptions in the Midwest, and do much to bridge the cultural Cascade Curtain. New cross-Cascades passenger service could piggyback on freight investment for very little additional cost, especially considering the fact that we will have surplus trainsets until after the Point Defiance Bypass is complete in 2017. Considering that air service between Seattle and Spokane is being reduced in January, now may be the time to look at additional rail.
Amtrak Cascades service between Seattle and Portland has been canceled until Thursday October 6th due to an early season mudslide at Titlow Beach near the Tacoma Narrows. Buses will transport passengers between Seattle and Portland.
Trains 501, 506 and 508 are canceled.
Trains 500, 504, 507, and 509 will continue to run between Eugene and Portland.
Trains 510, 513, 516, and 517 will continue to run between Seattle and Vancouver BC.
Trains 11 and 14, the Coast Starlight, will run Portland-Los Angeles.
WSDOT recently received an additional $31 million for mudslide mitigation and weather-related track improvements, and with another La Niña likely let’s hope the funds are quickly put to use.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, freight service resumed on the other mainline track 30 minutes after the mudslide. The 48-hour rule – declaring an automatic passenger moratorium in the event of mudslides – is far too rigid. WSDOT, Amtrak, and BNSF need to institute a case-by-case procedure for track closure flexible enough to handle diverse situations while maximizing passenger train availability.
The recent string of high-profile cycling fatalities has been really dispiriting. Seattle is killing people on bikes at the rate of 1 per month, and we seem more interested in discussing the behavioral problems of people driving and cycling rather than addressing the structural problem, the underlying safety of our transportation network. Given the fallibility of human behavior and the assurance of operator errors, we would be wise to reduce structural risk rather than rely on educational campaigns. I was a vehicular cycling advocate myself until a near-miss last December removed cockiness from my advocacy equation. (I landed on my head after a 20mph, over-the-handlebars crash on River Road in Puyallup, escaping with ‘only’ a cervical spine sprain and permanent neck pain.)
Rather than emphasize the vehicular status of bicycles and make a point of accommodating them on all streets, we should recognize that, wherever possible, separated facilities benefit us all. Even as a daily bike commuter I recognize the general incompatibility of non-motorized and motorized modes (including transit!) at anything approaching arterial speeds. In collisions below 25 mph the odds of survival are much higher. Why in the world would I want to ride on a 35 or 45 mph street if I had reasonable alternatives? Yes, we still need traffic calming measures throughout the city, but the need for separated uses persists.
When our government installs bicycle facilities, it implicitly vouches for the general safety of their use. In my opinion, in Seattle we dangerously overemphasize the need to accommodate bicycles on arterials. Many of our bike lanes (hello 2nd Ave!) leave people unnecessarily susceptible to injury and death at the hands of both cars and transit. I bike through Madrona and the Central District every morning, and for my own safety I rarely use 23rd, MLK, Cherry, and/or Union, streets that our Bicycle Master Plan seeks to emphasize. Rather, low traffic streets work perfectly well and with a bit of repaving could be optimized as safe bicycle boulevards. In my case, I’d happily trade Union for Marion, MLK for 27th, and 23rd for 19th/20th. Other substitutions could be King instead of Jackson, Federal instead of 10th, and many others.
Vancouver BC does this very well. While justly famous for its separated cycle tracks downtown on Burrard, Hornby, and Dunsmuir, I am more impressed by Vancouver’s western neighborhoods. Take a look at Vancouver’s official bicycle map (full PDF):
Between Cambie St. and UBC, the main east-west arterials for cars and transit are 4th, Broadway (9th), 16th, King Edward (25th), 33rd, 41st, and 49th. Looking at the official bicycling map you’d hardly know it! Bicycles are directed instead to use 3rd, 8th, 10th, Nanton (29th), 37th, and 45th. Bikes don’t ride in high traffic, and they rarely interact with transit except to cross north-south arterials. The same pattern holds for north-south streets.
In Seattle we may lack many things, but we have an abundance of quiet, low-traffic streets directly adjacent to our busiest arterials. We should put them to better use and save a few lives.
Event Notice: On September 22nd several grassroots community groups advocating for neighborhood greenways (aka bike boulevards) are hosting a presentation at the UW with Mark Lear and Greg Raisman who are experts on the subject. Facebook event here.
Hurricane Rita and Gridlock on I-45 in Houston, TX (Wikimedia)
Last weekend Hurricane Irene caused an unprecedented shutdown of Metro New York’s transit (including all air travel, MTA, NJT, LIRR, Metro-North, and Amtrak). Given the assurance of wind damage to catenary wire, the probability of toppled trains on exposed elevated alignments, and the assurance of flooding – it takes all-day pumps just to keep New York’s subways from flooding every day – a shutdown was the only prudent course of action. New York was fortunate both that Irene was weaker than expected and that a large-scale evacuation was mostly unnecessary. Though there were very vulnerable spaces, such as Lower Manhattan and the Rockaways, relative safety could be had simply by traveling to the wild uplands of, say, midtown Manhattan. The New York Times deserves much credit for featuring transit news and advice prominently throughout the storm, but most other communities spoke only to drivers’ needs.
Much more after the jump…
Where New York was fortunate, the New Orleans of Hurricane Katrina was infamously unfortunate. Its 100,000 transit-dependent people (27% of New Orleans households!) were ordered to evacuate of their own accord, with no provision or direction on how to do so. Famous aerial shots depicted hundreds of flooded and ruined buses, while maxed-out contraflow highways made ‘evacuation’ on I-10 a sub-5 mph crawl. Those stuck in New Orleans in the first few days after Katrina endured conditions rivaled only by the poorest nations on earth, and they starkly revealed the fundamentally unjust result of a society built around personal cars. When I lived in Britain, more than once my colleagues marveled that a society could order an evacuation with such hand-waving as, “Y’all better get out!”
Ruined Schoolbuses in New Orleans – Wikimedia
I’d like this post and the comments to be a discussion of how transit can best contribute to disaster planning, both here and elsewhere. Though Katrina showed us the worst of both individualism (traffic, looting, etc..) and government ineptitude (FEMA, etc…), it is clear to me that societies owe each other the means to collectively evacuate themselves irrespective of economic class, and that those choosing to be carless should be provided a means of evacuation.
There are significant barriers to transit-based evacuations. Trains, though they have the highest capacity, are generally more vulnerable than highway infrastructure, as their rights-of-way were usually carved out along lowlands and waterways in 19th century. Bus evacuations are much more likely but have their own problems, such as storage of personal effects (people generally evacuate with lots of stuff) and the role of paid labor vs. volunteer driving and all the attendant liability issues there.
But perhaps the most difficult problems are trust and chaos. In disasters survivalism instinctively appears. Social contracts can quickly dissolve, leading to self-defeating self interest, textbook examples of how game theory explains disaster sociology. The urge toward self-reliance is very alluring; there is no other time I would want to be less beholden to government than when its failure to deliver could mean my death.
Hurricanes give lots of warning, a luxury our quake and volcano-prone region wouldn’t have. A major Rainier eruption could bury our rails and make the valleys impassable. A major quake on the Seattle Fault would damage or destroy up to 80 of our bridges and up to 1,000 of our old masonry buildings. In a major disaster, then, our region should plan less for evacuation and more towards preemptive preparedness and adaptation. But the structural question – our collective responsibility in disasters – is one we need to rehearse over and over until we know exactly what we owe each other.
We’ve just received word that Canadian Minister for Public Safety, Vic Toews, announced in a CBC interview this morning, “Upon careful review of the business case and despite some significant financial constraints, the Canada Border Services Agency has decided that it will continue to provide publicly funded border clearance service to Amtrak’s second daily train.”
This is great news. Even after discounting the effects of the 2010 Olympics and the addition of the 2nd train, ridership has been growing faster to/from Vancouver BC than any other destination, up 24% in 2011 over 2010. Though capacity constraints are well-known and there is not much room for growth, it is encouraging to see the service being well-utilized.
Though Canada has perhaps the least rail-friendly federal government in the rich world, the staffing challenges presented by arrivals spaced 11 hours apart are not insignificant, and I hope in the coming years that Amtrak, WSDOT, BC, and Ottawa will work creatively to streamline service and clearance procedures so that these issues are minimized. Even rail advocates should recognize that the cost of CBSA services at Pacific Central station is a steep C$1,500/day. (Interestingly, until yesterday seats on trains 513/516 beyond October 1st were going for $83 each way, more than double the fare on 510/517. The fare has since returned to the standard $38. Was Amtrak briefly considering passing the border fee onto passengers?)
Of course, most welcome would be a provincial partnership with ODOT and WSDOT for operations funding and capital improvements, but don’t hold your breath. I have an email in to Laura Kingman at WSDOT for more information, and will update this post if any new info becomes available.
