Bike on LINK – Photo by Atomic Taco

One of the first steps into mature thinking about transportation is to remove undue necessity from transportation technologies – to talk not about what they are but what they do.  To fetishize a tool, rather than the utility the tool provides, is to make a fundamental category error.  Both autophiles and railfans make this error constantly.  What we need is not cars nor even transit per se, but mobility, whatever form that may take.

I have nothing against cars as tools (I find them necessary and useful about once a week).   What I have a problem with is the social costs imposed by the ubiquitous and even obligatory use of one tool for all tasks.  As transit advocates we get accused of making arguments about kind, as though the tool (Cars vs. Bikes!, Buses vs. Trains!) were the most important consideration.  The proper discussion is all about degree, the scale of transport required for our daily lives.

Car dependence doubly reinforces this error.  As ownership represents sunk costs – lowering the marginal cost of each individual trip – the incentives to drive soon overwhelm all other considerations.  As a result, one begins to see a car not as a tool well-suited for a particular task, but as transportation itself, appropriate (by definition!) to any trip.  To borrow an analogy from golf, car dependence puts you in the absurd position of driving, pitching, and putting with just one club (and your largest one at that)!

Though I concur with all the standard urbanist arguments, increasingly I find conservative arguments against car dependence the most compelling.  Specifically, my aim these days is to maintain a diversified portfolio of transportation choices instantly and freely available, and to use the least-intensive technology possible for each trip.  By contrast, car dependence poorly manages risk, leaves you badly overcapitalized and acutely vulnerable to price shocks, and forces you into an obligatory all-you-can-drive insurance model that is completely insensitive to usage patterns.  Such dependence actively prohibits you from scaling your life up and down as necessary, and as such it represents a considerable loss of freedom.

The familiar result is waste, as suddenly society must provide a parking space and a lane of road whether the task is as simple as a loaf of bread or as complex as hauling furniture.  We would scoff at someone who buys a $4.75 ORCA PugetPass when his/her daily commute costs $2.50, but we tend not to scoff at the pickup owner who hauls loads a handful of times a year, even though the principle is the same.

If at any given moment you can choose to walk, bike, take transit, taxi, or drive, you can properly match the tool with the task.  I would argue that this provides a liberating flexibility of movement, and a freedom of spontaneous adaptation, that car ownership actively stifles.

Shaw Island – Wikimedia

If you really want to leave it all behind for a night or two, you can hardly do better than Shaw Island.  The least populous and least-visited among ferry-served San Juan Islands, Shaw is a quiet, wooded treasure.  The island has only one commercial establishment, the Shaw General Store, famously operated by nuns until just a few years ago.  San Juan County Parks operates the lone public campground, charging $12-$16 per night for one of 11 tent sites.  The campsites rest on a cliff above a sandy, south-facing beach with great views of San Juan, Canoe, and Lopez Islands.

If you strap on a backpack with a small tent, or better yet take a bicycle, you can have an easy car-free loop, 2 nights of quiet camping, a late lunch in Friday Harbor, and a scenic cruise back to Seattle…while still arriving back in Seattle for a full night’s sleep before work Monday morning.  Here’s a sample itinerary, below the jump.

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Cascades at King St Station

Photo by Jim Wrinn – Editor of Trains Magazine – Original Image HERE

2nd Quarter 2011 ridership on Amtrak Cascades set an all-time quarterly record, with 231,194 passengers.  Ridership was up 8% on Q2 2010, the next highest year.  Since 2007 Q2 ridership has grown by an impressive 25%.  As opposed to Q1 (mudslides, 2010 Olympics, etc…) Q2 ridership is broadly indicative of annual trends, so these numbers are solid evidence of the growing popularity of the service.  Good news!

Cascades has always drawn most of its ridership from Seattle and Portland, and as ridership has grown major cities have only increased their relative share of riders. Comparing May 2010 to May 2011, ridership is up 8% in Seattle, 9% in Portland, 9% in Eugene, and up another 24% in Vancouver BC. Smaller cities lost riders, however, with 5% fewer passengers in Tacoma and 15%  fewer in Bellingham.   It’s clear to me that Vancouver BC deserves a 3rd train. More below the jump.

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A Closed SR520 – Photo by WSDOT

A quick reminder that numerous closures this weekend will snarl regional travel.  From Friday at 11pm to Monday at 5am, both SR 520 (Montlake to I-405) and the I-5/Mercer interchange will close completely.  SR520 buses will be rerouted to I-90, and expect backups in and around downtown Seattle all weekend.

Saturday is also the 32^nd annual Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic (STP).  10,000 cyclists (including yours truly) will make the 204-mile trek to Portland.  For our mutual sanity and safety, you would do well early Saturday morning to avoid Montlake, the University Bridge, Lake Washington from Madrona to Renton, West Valley Highway, Puyallup, Pacific Avenue/SR7, and SR 507.

In addition, I-5 northbound around Joint Base Lewis McChord will be restricted to a single lane (9pm Friday to 5am Monday), and WSDOT is predicting an 11-mile backup just as STPers drive and bus back from Portland.  If planning on traveling to Portland, Amtrak Cascades is your ticket out of congestion (ok, Horizon too).

Though these closures will frustrate motorists and transit riders alike, I would suggest making the best of a bad situation either by kayaking/canoeing in Union Bay or by visiting the Arboretum (walk, or take the #11 or #8).  The sunny and mild weather, combined with the tranquility afforded by a closed SR 520, should provide a lovely glimpse into the sights and sounds of pre-highway Union Bay.  (Each time I visit the Arboretum I’m grateful anew that the R.H. Thompson was never built.)   During the last viaduct closure I discovered that it’s really quite stunning to be near a major highway without the attendant white noise; one doesn’t internalize the scale of roadway noise until graced with its absence.  So take advantage of it!

At the STB Quarterly Board Meeting last Saturday –ok, informed nerds having brunch– we discussed at length various ways to improve STB.  We want to grow our readership, fix technical challenges, and improve the reader experience.  This thread is your chance to let us know what you’d like to see on STB.  A few seed thoughts:

(1. Comments. Trolling is significantly diminishing the quality of comment threads.  Of course, please don’t feed the trolls, but STB also has a strong position against blocking commenters unless they are abusive.  To improve everyone’s experience, we are beginning the process of overhauling the comment system.  What would you like to see?  Possibilities include :

• Up/down ratings to bury trolls at the bottom of the thread and reward smart comments
• A return to deeper threading
• Integration with Facebook comments
• A preview/edit feature

(2. Template and Design. We’ve taken pride in the lightweight, minimalist framing of STB.  Articles are always on the front page, there are no sections, etc…  We’ve wanted to keep the posts timely, on-point, frequent, and accessible, and a simple site has been great at doing that.  Nonetheless, cross-referencing with past posts is more difficult than it should be, and there is currently no organization of posts by thematic content.  We’re considering adding tab-like features just above the current article, with your standard array of reference articles, such as About Us, Best Arguments, Seattle for Visitors, Agency Links, Blogroll, etc. We’re also working on a mobile theme.   Aesthetic comments from information designers would be quite helpful.

(3.  Content and Audience. We know that STB is a high-concept, incurably wonky blog.  We attempt to conduct good analysis, have good conversation, and hopefully have a political impact.  With a few exceptions (we’re human) we  try to avoid the polemical, lazily framed writing that predominates at many other transportation sites.  Most items here are news+analysis, with occasional strong editorials, guest pieces, and of course Sunday Open Threads.  But what types of articles do you want more and less of?

(4.  Advertising. How is the current advertising working for you?  Our goal is for it to be mostly transportation related, non-intrusive, and bring in a healthy revenue stream.  We value the ability to make the site financially self-sustaining and subsidize meetups, and advertising has been successful for us so far.

Empire Builder in North Dakota – Photo by Flickr User mwahlsten

It has been a terrible year for the Empire Builder.  On-time performance over the last 12 months is hovering around 10-15%, and delays have frequently been 5-12 hours or more.  Service has been either truncated or canceled outright over 50 times so far in 2011.  While collisions with vehicles, our epic mudslides, and an Idaho rockslide have all disrupted service, the heart of the problem is flooding in the Devil’s Lake Basin of North Dakota.  As an endorheic (closed) basin, Devil’s Lake has continued to rise over the past decades as precipitation has increased, increasingly submerging the railbed and 2 key bridges.  (BNSF has not operated through freight service between Grand Forks and Minot for over a year).  Amtrak, however, limps onward on the troubled segment.  On June 15, BNSF and Amtrak agreed in principle to split the $100m cost of rebuilding 17 miles of the corridor, raising the railbed and rebuilding the bridges.

My personal opinion is that this amounts to doubling down on a short-to-medium term solution.  Bypassing Devil’s Lake may be the better long-term choice.  While those in and around Grand Forks would lose service, using the direct line between Fargo and Minot would be faster, more direct and significantly more reliable.  Politically, however, it’s a non-starter.

It is beyond frustrating that rainfall in North Dakota means that Seattle passengers can’t get to Spokane, etc…  Though famously subsidized, Amtrak operates without a shred of redundancy, so when things go wrong, they tend to do so spectacularly.  With sufficient equipment and crew, Amtrak could (and should) operate segments of the line when service is disrupted, especially between Seattle-Spokane and Minneapolis-Chicago.  Perhaps these problems will someday bring about state support for Eastern Washington service that is independent of the long-distance network.

In normal times the Builder is perhaps the premier long-distance train in North America, offering unrivaled scenery, a lifeline to the northern plains, and quality onboard amenities.  It’s a shame to watch the service degrade into chaos without the ability for Amtrak to adapt quickly.

Deception Pass – Wikimedia

As last weekend’s weather represented the start of Silly Season for Seattle Happiness, I thought I’d write up another carfree Saturday daytrip. Deception Pass State Park, bringing together Fidalgo and Whidbey islands, is a pretty spectacular place.  As the bridge between the islands is itself a prime attraction, Deception Pass is a premier roadtrip destination, and can get very crowded on sunny weekends.

This 12-hour, relatively easy Saturday transit loop takes you from Seattle to Whidbey Island and back via Amtrak Cascades, Island Transit #411W, Island Transit #1, Washington State Ferries, Community Transit #113, and Sound Transit #511.  It allows time for a beautiful train ride along the central Sound, a 90-minute brunch in Mt Vernon, 4 hours of walking along the beaches and bays of Deception Pass, and has you back in Seattle before a June sunset.  Variations could allow a nice hike to the top of Mt Erie or an alternate return via Port Townsend and Bainbridge (only attempt on weekdays!).

And this loop is very cheap.  Island Transit is a fare-free agency, and doing the loop counter-clockwise gives you a free ride on the Clinton-Mukilteo ferry.  Aside from your Amtrak fare ($13-$20), with an ORCA card this trip allows you to ride 5 buses from 3 agencies for only $3.50!

Bike Parking Outside 12th Ave's Cafe Presse. Photo by SDOT.

The faux-war between ‘cyclists’ and ‘drivers’ has gotten depressingly out of control, even though it is being fought almost entirely in the media.  The 900+ comments in Danny Westneat’s recent Seattle Times column (“What’s With All the Bike Bitterness?”) reveal that the mutual acrimony has grown past the absurd into a parody of itself.

A simple truth:  cycling is not an inherently political act.  When a person is on a bicycle, they are just cycling, a verb whose adverbial embellishments (recklessly, quickly, safely, cautiously, etc…) have a short shelf life and extend only to observed behavior.  When people insist on twisting you into a noun – a Cyclist, a Motorist – you become not a person doing something, but rather a category expressing some fundamental defining value.   By definition, categories are constraining, and they make it easier to load transportation choices unnecessary moral weight.  As transit advocates we also do this to “Drivers” – and it’s just as unfair to “them” as to “us”.

This intellectual laziness provides the framing material needed to animate call-in radio shows, network news segments, and (to a slightly lesser extent) print and social media.  As the Fundamental Attribution Error rears its ugly head, we lose our ability to handle complexity and begin thinking in binary.  “Cyclists do X, Motorists react with Y,”  as though cyclists never drive, drivers never cycle, and that the two have a necessarily adversarial relationship.  Worse, each time we do this we risk losing the crucial ability for integrated systems thinking, descending into both mode-based and region-based parochialism.

Our current investments in bicycling and pedestrian infrastructure are modest, they are appropriate for bicycling’s mode share, and they can only be seen as radical in the context of a cultural expectation for complete car dominance.  When you build your city for its largest scale mode, smaller scale modes are precluded and society actively engineers your mode choice upward toward cars. In a depressing segment Monday on KOMO Newsline AM, John Carlson affirmed as much when he suggested that bicycles be banned from any road with a speed limit higher than 20 mph.  When you build for cars, they become the only permissible game in town.   When you build for choice, all modes are enabled and respected (including cars!).

I would hope that we could all grow up already.  Modal fetishism is immature whether it’s bikes, trains, buses, or cars.  Ultimately, transportation infrastructure should become not a product to be marketed but a public utility matching people’s needs with appropriate tools.  (Something tells me that there is no marketing budget to get people to use I-5!)   As a transit advocate, I simply want more tools in my toolbox.

So when you feel yourself jumping towards the ad-hominem, take a moment and reflect upon inertia, individual economic incentives, the cumulative effects of all the poor decisions that have come before us.  Hopefully this would produce fewer culture warriors and more sober problem solvers.

For more on constraining terminology – see Jarrett.

Wikimedia

The nice(r) weather of late has definitely left me itching for hikes in the mountains.  I usually go with ZipCar for daytrips or Enterprise for multi-day ventures; after all, cars are at their best when providing for the occasional personal trip to a far-flung place.  But Washington also has an impressive amount of rural transit, much of it imperiled by looming cuts.   So as the weather warms I’ll be starting an occasional STB series, highlighting trailheads and itineraries accessible by transit, usually Saturday dayhikes that one can do without missing any days at work.

Wallace Falls is an impressive 265-foot cascade just northeast of Gold Bar.  A well-trodden trail to the Middle Falls offers dense forest, steep switchbacks, and impressive views, yet it is short enough to do a daytrip from Seattle.  For the weekend warrior, Community Transit Route 271 offers hourly Saturday service from Everett to Gold Bar from 6am-8pm.  With an easy transfer at Everett Station, a Seattle daytripper has plenty of time to make a day of it.  A sample itinerary:

• Take Sound Transit #510 from 4th & Union to Everett Station, 7:55a-8:36a ($3.00)
• Transfer to Community Transit #271, 8:55a-10:19a (Free ORCA transfer)
• Get off at Hwy 2 and 1st Ave, and walk 1.7 miles to the trailhead, following the road signs.
• Walk another 1.7 miles through the woods to the falls.
• Take Community Transit #271 6:48p-8:18p
• Transfer to Sound Transit #510 8:28p-9:12p

For only $6 in transit fare (with ORCA), you get a two-seat ride, perhaps a greasy spoon brunch, a moderate 7-mile walking day, and you’re back in Seattle by 9:15pm.  What’s not to like?

Sounder on the Milwaukee Road – Photo by the Author

“Nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return,” Milan Kundera, Ignorance

Pick up an American op-ed hostile to rail and somewhere along the way you are likely to read that rail boosters are either technological reactionaries (they want a return to 19th-century technology!), or that they are clouded by nostalgia for a supposed golden age of travel.  These criticisms are deceptively powerful, and frequently true.  This mentality surely motivates much rail support, especially among the baby-boomer set.

Photo by the Author

I too have a great personal love for trains.  My handy copy of the 1,200-page Complete Guide to the Railways (1954) fills me with something approaching awe.  (You mean there used to be service from St. Louis to Mexico City, with connections to Oaxaca?!? Or for that matter, an electrified ride through the Cascades?)  The scale of service we have lost in the past 60 years is truly incredible.  But it is critically important that as rail advocates we carefully differentiate the sentimental from the sensible.

More after the jump…

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Image from the Rainier Valley Post

[UPDATE: Opening has been delayed till April 8th, so don't go down there this weekend.]

Bring cash and ride Link (or 8, 36, 39) on Saturday for the 10am grand opening of the Othello Public Market. Located adjacent to Othello Station at the NE corner of Othello and MLK, organizers promise that the year-round, indoor market will feature an extraordinarily diverse array of vendors.  A sampling of the vendors includes everything from silversmiths and soccer apparel to BBQ, exotic produce, and “European Hot Dogs.”  Now if only their website included Link on the Directions page.  Grr.

Photo by Oran

Today Vancouver BC’s TransLink announced the name of its new smartcard, Compass.  Currently using magstripe tickets and passes (for bus) and proof-of-payment (SkyTrain and B-Line buses), by 2013 TransLink will transition to universal adoption of the Compass card.  TransLink has chosen Cubic/IBM to provide the smartcard technology, the same company used by many agencies worldwide, including the Bay Area’s Clipper and London’s Oyster.  (Cubic recently bought out ERG, the supplier for ORCA.)

This $170 million project will reduce fare evasion on SkyTrain and the B-Lines (which, unlike the privately-operated Canada Line, are rarely fare-checked) and provide heaps of ridership data to TransLink for use in planning service improvements and future fare policy.  TransLink will continue to use its impressive network of small retail outlets and pharmacies to provide fare products.

Relative to our experience with ORCA, TransLink has many strategic advantages that should provide them a smoother transition than we have experienced.  Without a ride-free area to overcome and with no shared bus/rail operations, faregates can be installed at all rail stations.  Further, its integrated governance structure should allow it to avoid the interagency administrative nightmare that ORCA has produced in our region.  TransLink owns the primary bus/seabus operator (Coast Mountain) and the SkyTrain operator (BC Rapid Transit Company), directly operates the West Coast Express commuter rail, and owns but contracts out operations of the Canada Line (ProTrans).  Revenue sharing issues might arise with the West Vancouver routes – independently owned and operated since 1912 – but given that routes and fares have long been integrated, any issues should be minimal.

Given intense crowding and peoples’ continued expectation for 3-door boarding, I hope that Compass readers will be installed at all doors on the 97 and 99 B-Lines.

As an unrelated postscript, while researching this post I came across a sentence that made me wince:  “TransLink’s diversified funding portfolio gives TransLink greater certainty regarding annual funding levels and enables us to plan for the long term.”   While no North American agency has had an easy few years, take this chart as food for thought.

Chart by the Author

Screenshot from the New York Times

I thought I’d pass along a data reference tool that I’ve found very useful in understanding our city and region.  A few months ago the New York Times launched a project called Mapping America – Every City, Every Block.  The maps use data from the 2009 American Community Survey to display basic population data (density, race/ethnicity, income, education etc…) but they are especially useful in their use of automatic scaling; the maps adjusts your viewing for either census tract or county depending on your level of zoom.

It’s always nice to have a reliable and easy-to-read data source to use in urban research.  Enjoy!

And now for something completely different.  If you’re free tomorrow night from 5:30-7:30pm (or later for an afterparty), Hollow Earth Radio is sponsoring “Light Rail Dark Rail”, a series of live musical performances onboard Link.  Performances start at IDS at 5:30, with “concertgoers” catching a southbound train at 6:00.  Once at SeaTac, you’ll have a choice of northbound trains, “Light Rail” or “Dark Rail”, but you won’t know which you’ve chosen until it departs.  Expect eclectic local music, nervous security guards, and surely dumbfounded passengers wondering what hit them.

Photo by Mike Bjork

The 2004 Comprehensive Plan designated South Lake Union as an urban center, and it laid out ambitious growth targets.  Since then we’ve seen solid growth in the neighborhood through the Hutchinson Cancer Center, Amazon’s relocation, and of course the Seattle Streetcar.  But the real potential for densification lies in incentivized upzones, and to that end the City of Seattle has released a draft Environmental Impact Statement, South Lake Union: Height and Density Alternatives.  It studies the environmental impacts of three zoning alternatives that would create space for 23,000-31,500 jobs and 15,000-21,000 residences.

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Sounder at Freighthouse Square – Photo by DWHonan

(We generally try to avoid overly self-referential posts here on STB, but I hope you’ll indulge me on this occasion.)

I have impeccable urban elitist credentials.  I haven’t owned a car for 6 years, and I’ve been unduly proud of it.  Despite myself, I’ve slowly been becoming the “smug cyclist” that provides such lazy framing material for our city’s overblown culture wars.  Quite frankly, I have had to fight not to be annoying.  But these days I’m quieter, more circumspect, more patient.  Why the change?  My daily commute to the suburbs has relieved me of my arrogance.

More after the jump…

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