Beacon Hill Station (Sound Transit)

Thursday’s photo of UW Station set up a barrage of complaints in the comments about how ugly the station is.  Art-hating barbarian that I am, my problem is much less the design of the station than the fact that it’s an isolated structure.

The quarter-mile radius around light rail stations are extremely valuable properties with which to do intensive land use.  There’s a somewhat less valuable band out to a half-mile, and of course that’s often further constrained by topology, etc.

I’ve already ranted about how Husky Stadium isn’t very intensive land use, but Sound Transit isn’t doing us any favors by falling in love with the plaza-in-a-park design.  You see this at Husky Stadium, Beacon Hill, to a lesser extent at Mt. Baker, and to a small degree even the other Rainier Valley stations.

I’m sure that promising to bring a plaza or a park is a much better selling point to the community than saying you’re going to bring a whole bunch more residents.  Nevertheless, I’d be all for incorporating stations into a much larger building built directly on top of, or immediately adjacent to, the station, as is done at many of the downtown stations.

SP 4449 by Brian Bundridge

This weekend, there are several special rail related events happening in the Pacific Northwest;

July 3-5; Disney’s A Christmas Carol train tour will be open for display Friday and Saturday 9am to 7pm and Sunday 9am to 4pm. The train will depart early morning to Spokane on July 6th.

July 3rd: The Southern Pacific 4449 steam locomotive will be departing Portland’s Union Station at 8am for it’s long journey to Michigan for Train Festival 2009. The locomotive will be away for about 3 months as it tours the Midwest. There are tickets still available for day trip segments if your interested (short notice) This is the first time this century that a privately owned steam locomotive has traveled outside of its home terminal. The last locomotive to make this trip was the ATSF 3751 in August and September 1992. Union Pacific Railroad, which owns the 844 and 3985 steam locomotives travel yearly to various locations across the United States.

July 4th: The Mt. Rainier Scenic Railroad will be having a party on both trains with free cake, flags, and live music on-board the trains.

Feel free to add on to the calendar!

Have a great and safe 4th of July!

University of Washington Station

U-Link opens in 2016.

Central Link (Westlake to Seatac) is 16 miles long.

Lots of items on this last day before the long weekend:

• Goldy at horsesass is sore about some SDOT safety improvements near the light rail line.  Will he be out there blocking the tracks on opening day?
• The new Redmond Park & Ride Garage opens July 6.  By consolidating the spaces from the old surface lot into a smaller footprint, a developer was able to build an adjacent apartment complex.   Bravo.
• TriMet hosted a media ride for the MAX’s new Green Line. (H/T; Jonathan Winslow)
• Portland has also released a Streetcar system plan and is soliciting comments on it.
• Transporation Secretary Ray LaHood was in Portland yesterday.  He called Portland the “transporation capital,” “green capital,” “streetcar capital,” and “livable communities capital of America.”  That’s a bit overstated given how some older cities work, but good for Portland.  He also (rightly) gave a shout out to their awesome congressional delegation. Here’s the video:

Photo by Slack Action

As usual, Publicola gets a great scoop that will be very useful for transit fans trying to discern the difference between Larry Phillips and Dow Constantine:

Phillips said he disagreed with Constantine that the BNSF corridor shouldn’t be reserved for a potential Eastside rail corridor as well as for bike trails. Indeed, Constantine was the only candidate who said during the debate that he didn’t think the BNSF corridor was the right one for Eastside rail. Phillips also pointed out that Constantine actually voted for dual use.

I’ve been looking for something that would illuminate our STB endorsement process, but given the splits on this subject within our own staff, it just muddles the picture more.

Photo by Joshua Putnam

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that Westbound traffic on I-90 is going to be diverted onto the center roadway from July 5 until July 20.  Obviously, traffic is going to be a nightmare.

Metro has released their plan for this period.  They’re putting extra buses in service to allow some hope of at least starting each run on time.  Here are the key paragraphs of Metro’s press release:

Reroutes – Because westbound traffic congestion is expected to be severe, Metro is planning to reroute all Seattle-bound service that travels westbound on I-90 from Snoqualmie, Sammamish, Issaquah Highlands, Issaquah and Eastgate. This will have little impact on bus boarding locations, except for one westbound stop.

Westbound buses that are headed for the I-90 floating bridge will be routed off of I-90 at 142nd Place Southeast at Eastgate and re-enter near Bellevue Way. This will divert buses around several anticipated I-90 choke points and give them a queue jump onto Mercer Island.

Routes 111 and 114 coming from the Renton Highlands will also avoid some portions of I-90. Mercer Island routes 202 and 205 will have a short reroute on the island to enter I-90.

All regular stops on all routes will be made except at the westbound Eastgate flyer stop above I-90.  Passengers who normally use this stop will now board northbound on 142nd Place near the back entrance to Bellevue College. Look for signs directing you to this location.

Remember also that on Friday, July 3 virtually everything is on a Sunday schedule.

• We trade safety for convenience and cost all the time.  Holding Light Rail to a standard to a standard beyond all other modes of transportation doesn’t make any sense unless you’re trying to stop light rail.
• Almost everyone agrees that, all else being equal, grade separated is better than not, for many, many reasons.  Some people really don’t like the visual impacts of elevated track, but that isn’t me.  The problem is that all else isn’t equal.  For various political and financial reasons grade separation simply wasn’t going to happen if this were to get built at all.  If you put basically no value on having rail in the region that’s a small price to pay, but for the rest of us that’s a big deal.
• Running Light Rail down the street is not a daredevil stunt.  It’s done all the time in cities across the United States and around the world.  There’s likely to be an adjustment period, but after that people will get used to it.  There’s no reason to be an alarmist.
• I went back and read John Niles’s report more carefully.  I think the technical core of his argument is that non-passenger injuries should have been included in the FTA safety analysis, and therefore that the project should have been rejected by the FTA.  Different strokes for different folks, I guess, but I should point out that (a) it’s far from clear, from a legal standpoint, from the document that one should include external injuries; (b) I don’t see any reason to view the FTA criteria as particularly valid, in a metaphysical sense, given the way we treat other transportation modes; and (c) given that the money is already awarded and spent, the whole argument is irrelevant.
• All that said, the reason we’ve been given that there isn’t a short, tasteful fence along the length of the surface segment is that emergency vehicles have to be able to make turns and U-turns over the tracks.  That’s a valid interest, but someone ought to do the analysis on whether that actually saves more lives than fencing the thing off except at designated crossings.

Oran recently took some video that might be useful for people to understand the noise levels on MLK, as compared to the general din of traffic.  As someone who lives a couple of blocks away from MLK, the noise is distinctive from the traffic noise, if not noticeably louder.

Certainly the bell is the part that’s most distinctive:

"The 212A", by raggiesoft

Pierce Transit’s July 12 service change (pdf) includes an overall 5% cut in service.  According to the News Tribune, that’s 33,000 service hours and about 300,000 boardings.  As one might expect, it’s due to a $10m revenue shortfall out of a $121m budget.

Apparently, the agency has decided to cut low-productivity routes, even though that cuts off some people from bus service entirely.  King County, fraught with subarea resentment, is still agonizing over that value judgment.

Pierce Transit has also worked all the cost-cutting gimmicks, like layoffs, dipped into reserves, and increased fares by a quarter.  Interestingly, their farebox recovery is only 13%, well below King County’s.

www.amtrakcascades.com

We’re very fortunate that Congress funneled some of the ARRA (stimulus) funds directly to the PSRC, because Olympia was (and is) a black hole for transit.

We knew that state funding of transit is well below par in Washington, but a new report from Smart Growth America about the flexible portion of each state’s transportation stimulus funding laid out just how reactionary the legislature’s position is.  No surprise here, but our state put exactly zero into public transportation,and 4% into bicycle and pedestrian projects.  As Erica C. Barnett points out, 16 states beat us in the former category and 21 in the latter.

As the Transportation Choices press release observes, the road money wasn’t even spent well: 29% went to new highway construction, rather than clearing the sizable maintenance backlog on the state’s roads.  This kind of project does little for driver safety and simply encourages sprawl, as well as being less job-intensive than regular maintenance.

Seattle at an Angle, photo by author

This is a bit wonky and not quite transit related: but here’s an update on the march toward density in our area. According to the state Office of Financial Management (via the P-I), Seattle’s population grew 1.6% from April 2008 to April 2009, reaching 602,000 people. The state overall grew 1.2% to 6,668,200 and King County grew 1.3% to 1,909,300 (1% outside of Seattle). The state’s population growth has slowed from 1.9% to 1.2%, but Seattle’s growth has grown during that period from 1.1% to 1.6%. Why has Seattle’s population grown faster than the state at large and King County? Housing growth. King County added about 10,500 housing units from 2008 to 2009, while Seattle alone added nearly 6,000. Future growth in housing stock will likely slow over the coming years due to the housing bubble bursting,  however there’s still fair amount of housing construction underway right now and the city’s growth will likely continue over the next twelve to eighteen months.

Growth management finally seems to be working: unincorporated King County only gained 2,030 people, or 0.59% from 2008 to 2009. This is offset by annexations of unincorporated areas. Still, main urban areas are accounting for much of the state’s growth. From 1999 to 2009, Seattle’s population grew 38,624 in total, a 6.9% uptick with no annexations. Bellevue grew by 10,773 people to 120,600, a 9.8% increase with 2,747 (2.7%) coming from annexations. Tacoma and Spokane have both crossed 200,000 this decade, with reaching 203,400 and 205,500, respectively.

I should caution that these are official approximations, and could end up looking very different from the official census that will be taken in 2010. The OFM creates these approximations from data such as driver’s licence filings, school enrollments and voter registrations.

"Stopped at Othello", by Steven De Vight

Shortly after 5pm today, a car traveling on Martin Luther King Jr. Way South made an illegal turn against a red light and was hit by a passing Link Light Rail train. The driver of the car sustained non-life-threatening injuries and was transported to the hospital. We’re awaiting word about the train’s condition, but hopefully any damage was minor and it’ll be out looking beautiful on July 18th in just 18 days.

The best photos are available at the Rainier Valley Post.

This incident comes one day after we reported about John Niles’ suggestion that Sound Transit be liable for all car vs. train incidents, even in cases like this when the driver made an illegal turn.

[UPDATE: John Niles, in the thread below, points out that he never uses the word "liable," and is instead using "chargeable" as a way of saying Sound Transit could have prevented it.  There's a strong tone implying negligence in the piece, however, so readers can be the judge. -Editor]

Despite who’s at fault, the city is looking for ways to make the area safer. Earlier today before this accident, KIRO posted a story about merchants who are opposed to the installation new barriers designed to prevent car/train collisions, claiming they would hurt business. According to the story, a few business owners are threatening to block the track on opening day in protest. Seattle Transit Blog would like to remind our readers that standing on any railway, regardless of political motivation, is a very bad idea, and that your chances of successfully stopping a 2-car train are very low.

Also tonight in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, home to many STBers, a family crossing the street was hit by a car. There aren’t a lot of details about this incident yet, but Capitol Hill Seattle reports that at least three people (two of them young children) were transported to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, and Seattle Police arrested the driver at the scene. Hopefully everyone injured will recover quickly. To John: should these children be responsible for the driver’s legal fees? Or maybe the city for not grade separating all the crosswalks?

Sound Transit has lots of information about staying safe around Link on their website, including a guide for drivers.

City of Destiny by Brian Bundridge

Great news for the upcoming Sounders FC vs Chelsea game on July 18th, on top of Link’s grand opening, Sound Transit will be running 2 Sounder trains between Seattle and Tacoma and 1 train between Seattle and Everett!

The Tacoma trains will leave at 9:30 and 9:45am and arrive in Seattle at 10:30 and 10:45 respectively. Both trains will be making all stops.

The Everett train will leave at 10:00am and arrive in Seattle at 11:00am and will be making all stops.

As always, trains will depart 30 minutes after the end of the event from King Street Station.

For more information, check out Sound Transit’s special events

Add: I want to add and stress the crossings in SODO will be VERY busy between Link, Sounder, and Amtrak trains arriving and departing. Use extra caution when crossing over the railroad tracks, especially at Royal Brougham where there is construction for a new overpass.

SR-520 Tolling Options

On 10/10/10, WSDOT will be the first state DOT in the country to toll a existing facility that is currently untolled. A few months ago the state legislature passed ESHB 2211, authorizing the tolling of SR-520. The writing has been on the wall for a while, but still the fact that it passed is no less amazing. For comparison’s sake, not even NYC has stepped up to toll previously untolled bridges or tunnels into Manhattan. Toll on SR-520 has significant, and I believe overlooked implications for tolling in our region.

Background

WSDOT in partnership with KC Metro and PSCR won USDOT funding, and due to the Legislature’s actions will receive a $154 million dollar Urban Partnership grant. The Urban Partnership program aims to reduce congestion through the four T’s:

• Transit ($41 million for buses and P&R expansion, $27 million or ferries)
• Tolling ($63 million for installation and construction of tolling system)
• Technology ($23 million for ATMS)
• Telecommuting ($0, build off of existing TDM program)

From the Flickr Pool

UPDATE: John Niles, in a later comment days later, points out that he never uses the word “liable,” and is instead using “chargeable” as a way of saying Sound Transit could have prevented it.  There’s a strong tone implying negligence in the piece, however, so readers can be the judge.

John Niles and the Coalition for Effective Transportation Alternatives think Sound Transit should be liable for all car vs. train collisions, regardless of whether the driver is at fault, because they didn’t grade separate the entire line.  I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to apply that sort of standard to any other transportation project of any kind, anywhere, and see where it gets you.

I get that Niles and CETA don’t think that light rail is worth the investment; that’s a value judgment that I don’t agree with, but whatever.  But this kind of spiteful maneuver — arguing that the buildout wasn’t expensive enough, and trying to make it even more expensive by adding liability — is utterly contrary to their entire history of complaints about the project, and makes a mockery of any claim that they’re just trying to make transit work as effectively as possible.

I look forward to Niles and CETA pushing for various local tax initiatives to make sure that all other lines in the region are grade separated, and vigorously fighting NIMBYs opposed to elevated segments in neighborhood meetings.

"Link at Night", by Steven De Vight

In 2020, Sound Transit is projected to open light rail service to Northgate, Downtown Bellevue, and Highline Community College.

The elevators in the Beacon Hill Station are supposed to take 20 seconds to travel between the platform and the surface.

Link will operate 20 hours a day every day but Sunday.

Some random flotsam from the internet:

• Hugeasscity gets just a little bit suggestive about the Link opening.  And they say we at STB love rail too much!
• Trimet wants to exempt Portland’s buses from the Fareless Square.  They figure the free rail options downtown are good enough.
• Sound Transit CEO Joni Earl is spreading the light rail gospel in Honolulu.  Attention Hawaii light rail boosters: STB staff speaking fees are extremely reasonable.

Site of the accident

Last October, we discussed the fact that AIG’s failure cost some transit systems huge amounts of money. In agreements between transit agencies and banks, the banks would purchase transit vehicles, and the agencies would pay regularly in lease agreements. AIG insured the transit agencies’ payments – so when they failed, some of these banks used a clause in their contract to ask for immediate payment of the full vehicle costs.

In March, PBS quoted Carol Kissal of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority on the potential of these payments: “So this would mean, you know, no maintenance on track, delay, cuts in service. Repairs would go to the wayside.” It’s unclear if any payments to banks have been made as a result of AIG’s insolvency, but there is a question here – could last week’s accident be an indirect effect of our financial system’s mess?

The NTSB has said a test train at the location of the stopped train last week wasn’t detected by the automatic train control system. It’s not clear yet that maintenance money was an issue here, but it’s clear WMATA doesn’t have the money they need to keep running at their current capacity – they say they need $12 billion over the next ten years for maintenance, and they have nowhere near that available.

In good news for us, Sound Transit plans for operations and maintenance somewhat indefinitely. Part of the funding for Sound Transit 2 is operations and maintenance money, and even if we didn’t expand our system again in several decades, when the Sound Transit 2 taxes were rolled back, the Sound Move portion would continue to fund maintenance for Link.

Municipal Street Railway Opening, Ballard Bridge, 1918, c/o Seattle Municipal Archives

In 1922, GM President Alfred P. Sloan established a unit to investigate replacing streetcars nationwide with GM-manufactured buses, cars and trucks – GM was losing tens of millions at the time and felt this was the only way to expand their market. The same year, Electro-Motive Engineering Company was founded, which later became GM’s division for the manufacture of locomotives – including those used on Sounder today.

Some news items from the last few days:

• Construction on Second Ave. in Downtown Seattle is rearranging many bus stops there.
• There’s a serious effort to turn all but one lane of Bell St. into a linear park.
• LA broke ground on their BRT Orange Line extension.
• There’s a meeting in Tacoma tonight about extending Sounder to Lakewood, specifically on some crossings in the Dome district.  Opponents demand a more expensive bridge option that  preserves parking.  (H/T: Douglas)
• Photographer Joseph Songco, who is chronicling the “path of destruction” of light rail construction, is part of the free Artopia exhibition, Saturday, in Georgetown.  Via Damon Agnos at Seattle Weekly.   Preview Songco’s work here.
• Mayor Nickels has proposed that, effective January 1st, the $25-per-employee head tax be repealed.  It generates about $4.7m per year for roads and sidewalks, including transit-friendly road improvements, although it had not been allocated to any particular project.

Although driving jobs out of Seattle to less transit-friendly places is always a problem, there are two things to really like about this tax.  First, it is waived for any employee that doesn’t drive alone to work, discouraging the commute mode that generates the most external costs.  Secondly,while it may be true that higher-than-expected parking tax revenues offset the revenue loss, there’s a huge sidewalk backlog in North Seattle that could use that money.  Seattle is the level of government where generic transportation funds are most likely to be spent progressively, and it’s a shame to take money out of this fund.

Fancy, But Unaffordable

I hear a lot about electric cars. There’s the Tesla Roadster already, little “neighborhood electric vehicles,” and a lot of “soons,” like Aptera. With those in mind, why even write a transit blog? What’s the point, technology is advancing so fast, we’re all going to have cheap electric sports cars as they’re mass produced, right?

Simply put: I doubt it.

I’m not going to get into the urban planning issues here, and I’ll just point out quickly that we aren’t presented with anything like the full costs of cars today: in everything from the real estate costs of the land reserved for parking, to the funding of our highways (and most of it wasn’t gas taxes, something we’ll write more about later), to the innumerable environmental and health costs.

What I’m interested in is helping dispel the idea that affordable electric cars are around the corner. I’ll keep it short.

People are often surprised by the fact that electric cars actually came before internal combustion engine cars, and fared very well for some time. Electric motor technology hasn’t changed all that much since the 1890s – it’s more efficient now, lasts longer, but it’s basically the same. The lead-acid batteries used at the time were a quarter to half as efficient as the lithium-ion batteries we have now, and weighed more per unit of energy stored. But those cars weren’t often owned by individuals – they were essentially taxis, often literally horseless carriages, used by the relatively well-off. Batteries were swapped out during the day.

What the internal combustion engine brought to the scene was a way to get mobile energy storage for nearly two orders of magnitude lower cost. With the cost of batteries and electric motors far exceeding the cost of an internal combustion system, and the cost of fuel for a 200 mile range comparable to the cost of an electric charge for a 50 mile range, the price dropped and utility increased to the point where ownership increased dramatically.

A hundred years of development has gone into both sets of technologies. But something else has changed – the distance we expect our cars to go.

A Model T’s range was 200 miles. The only electric vehicle on the market that can travel that far (some 230-250 miles) is the Tesla Roadster, which costs $109,000, and has been estimated to cost more than that to produce. The battery itself is estimated at some $36,000 of that, with a rated lifetime of only 7 years or 100,000 miles. After 50,000 miles, the range drops below 200 miles per charge. While great for an early adopter, this is not exactly competitive with a $12,000 Kia Rio that can go 300-350 miles. Sure, they’re aimed at different markets – but the Tesla’s performance is largely due to some of the same design choices that give it range. Don’t be too excited about Tesla’s sedan – the projected $59,000 base price ($50,000 with a current tax credit) is not the ‘extended range’ model – it goes 150 miles on a charge, and is far outside affordability for most, if it can be built for that price at all.

The Tesla cars use lithium-ion batteries, the most energy-dense battery technology we’ve developed so far, to get this kind of range. Much of the energy taken to drag an electric car around is to move the batteries themselves – so every time you add batteries to increase your range, you also add weight to offset the increase. It takes very lightweight batteries to keep that added weight from eating the range increase – and those batteries aren’t getting much cheaper or much lighter – but they’re all we have. Lower range electric vehicles using lead-acid batteries simply don’t sell, with ranges of 50-70 miles. The Department of Energy agrees (PDF) – battery technology simply can’t support affordable electric vehicles, and won’t in the forseeable future without massive reductions in cost and increases in longevity and reliability.

Lithium is rapidly becoming scarce, as well – Bolivia has about half the world’s reserves, and isn’t too interested in having American companies strip it quickly of a natural resouce that will only become more valuable. With energy storage issues becoming more prominent over time, they only prosper through delay.

Please don’t think this is a magic bullet. While short range electric vehicles will likely be a great solution for eventual last-mile transportation, I see them today as mostly a way for people to cling to the idea that we can keep living a lifestyle that was only possible before we knew the impacts of burning fossil fuels.

Photo by Oran

Metro is gathering comments on the Route 7 stop consolidation. To accelerate the crawl that is Route 7, at all times of day, Metro wants to cut from 107 stops to 76.  Route 7 will otherwise be untouched by the sweeping Southeast Seattle service change.

They’re collecting comments through the end of July and seem to be targeting the September service change.  It’s a change long overdue.

What other routes could use a stop diet?

Some fun riffs on how transit is often slower than driving. But hey, I like browsing the Internet with my phone while busing to work. What do you do when you’re riding?