Month: May 2007

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Metro is ordering a whole slew of new hybrid buses to help deliver the Transit Now service improvements.

You’ll recall the first batch of hybrids was rolled out in 2004. However, the P-I reported in December of that year that those buses failed to show significant fuel savings. They were, however, more reliable and helped to lower maintenance costs.

Still, Metro is a little more cautious in touting the energy savings this time around:

Metro currently owns 214 articulated hybrid buses, the largest such fleet in the nation. A National Renewable Energy Lab study found articulated hybrids provide a 30 percent reduction in greenhouse gases and are 40 percent more reliable than diesel fueled articulated buses.

Notice there’s no direct mention of fuel savings. The reduction in greenhouse gases could simply be that the new buses use a cleaner diesel blend than the older ones.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Following up on Matt’s post about NextBus, it looks like the burgeoning transit-planning space is getting a new entrant, HopStop, which covers NY, SF, and DC, among others (but not Seattle, alas).

The cool thing about HopStop is that they’re providing a free API, which will let transit-geek sites like ours provide a custom interface and feature set. Come to Seattle, HopStop!

The logical evolution for these sites is toward mobile phones, of course. That’s where the action’s going to be in a few years.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Seattle Transit Blog flags a story in the Seattle Times about the South Lake Union Streetcar being — surprise! — over budget. Well, not over budget, per se, construction costs are peachy, but the city seems to have been a bit rosy in estimating the operating expenses:

Metro Transit, which will operate the trains, plans to bill the city $2 million a year, compared to the city’s original $1.5 million estimate. Startup costs will add $500,000, compared to the early estimate of $144,000. The current shortfall is about $1.5 million for the first two years of operations, said a City Council staff analysis issued this week.

So we’re looking at about $500K/yr in operating expenses. The streetcar was still a great deal, since the local businesses volunteered to put up half the construction costs. That said, there’s a lot riding on this project (so to speak). It represents a very different way of building a transit system, so it will be heavily scrutinized.

But it’s also the canary in the South Lake Union coal mine. I love the Whole Foods as much as the next guy, but there’s still a lot we don’t know about how South Lake Union is going to turn out. It could be a Potemkin village, if stories like this become the norm. So there’s a certain amount of “pressure” on the Streetcar.

That said, it will take time to really assess the Streetcar, since it will come online years before the neighborhood around it fully matures. And it’s benefits in connecting SLU to Westlake Station and Light Rail won’t be realized for decades, if you think about the potential connection to Eastside light rail. So when you start to see investigative reports on KOMO next year about the “empty” streetcar, keep that in mind.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

It’s good to see WSDOT taking control of more rail lines in Eastern WA:

The purchase of the CW Branch of the Palouse River and Coulee City Railroad (PCC) is part of a nearly six-year effort to preserve the PCC, which is important to Eastern Washington’s agricultural industry. The state will pay $9.0 million for all track and right of way on the CW Branch, which runs from Coulee City to Cheney and Spokane, and certain real property on the PV Hooper and P & L Branch not previously purchased. The state will also receive the operating rights on all three branches.

“Rail is a vital part of our transportation system and supports a large portion of Washington’s agricultural community,” said Paula Hammond, WSDOT Chief of Staff. “This purchase conforms to the recommendations of the recently completed statewide Rail Capacity and System Needs Study and supports Governor Gregoire’s goals for economic growth in our communities.”

This is especially interesting in light of the article in today’s New York Times about the state of the dams in WA’s Lower Snake River. The focus is on opening the dams for salmon runs, but it also notes that the dams allow for barges to float wheat down river. Get rid of the dams, and you need to find an alternative transportation network, like rail.

Of course, you can own all the track you want, it doesn’t make a difference if the train doesn’t stop, as happened with the new intermodal facility at the Port of Quincy, WA.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Seeing that poster the other day got me thinking about the aborted Seattle Monorail Project again. I know most people would rather forget it (opening day was supposed to be December 2007, just seven months from now), but there were some valuable lessons there, and certainly the alignment, Ballard – Downtown – West Seattle is going to need to be served by high-capacity transit sooner rather than later. Especially if the Viaduct goes away.

Transit Now will help in the short term, but even the snazziest buses will get caught in traffic on the West Seattle Bridge or stuck waiting for the drawbridge in Ballard. After the Monorail died, the idea was broached to put in a light rail spur connecting SODO and West Seattle. Assuming you could deal with the technical challenges of crossing the Duwamish River, that certainly seems feasible.

But on the North end, the idea of a monorail between downtown and Ballard is still appealing, for a number of reasons. First off, building another downtown tunnel through Belltown seems unfeasible, especially since it would have to somehow cross through the Battery Street Tunnel. Second, we’ve already got a monorail running down 5th Avenue, and people are at least used to it (and used to the monorail making its way through Seattle Center). Finally, a monorail bridge over the Ballard ship canal is more cost-effective than a tunnel.

My only real objection to the monorail is the cost of maintaining a separate transit system (two separate maintenance facilities, engineers, etc.). But if we’re going to maintain the Seattle Center monorail anyway ($4.5M for the latest round of repairs alone), we might as well make it go somewhere.

I’m fairly sure there’s zero political or public will for reviving this concept while the body of the last monorail project is still warm. Still, there’s something there worth saving.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Ho boy:

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Speaking of ST videos, here’s one of the tunnel boring machine breaking through Beacon Hill. That means one of the two tunnels through the hill is completed. now they have to go back and do the matching, southbound tunnel.

Just to put this in perspective, at 4,300 feet, the Beacon Hill tunnel is just under one mile. For the proposed North Link, we’re looking at a tunnel roughly six miles long, extending from the Convention Center, through Capitol HIll and the U District, and emerging somewhere around NE 75th St and I-5.

Beacon Hill is the easy part.

On the other hand, Northgate to downtown in 13 minutes? That’s pretty sweet. Imagine shopping downtown on a Saturday and having the nice clerk at The Gap say, “well, we’re all out of that size, but we’ve got a few left in our Northgate location.” You walk 2 blocks to the Metro tunnel downtown, and 15 minutes later, boom you’re at Northgate Mall. Pretty slick.

Personally, this solves my own issue with the lack of a real electronics store downtown. Why is that, anyway? Downtown condo-dwellers don’t buy stereos or flat-screen TVs? C’mon!

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Wired has a fascinating article this month on Dongtan, a “green city” of 500,000 residents (roughly the size of Seattle) being planned for an area near Shanghai. The London-based urban design team working on the project made some interesting discoveries in their efforts to build an environmentally-friendly city:

The team found research on energy consumption in cities around the world, plotted on a curve according to population density. Up to about 50 residents per acre, roughly equivalent to Stockholm or Copenhagen, per capita energy use falls fast. People walk and bike more, public transit makes economic sense, and there are ways to make heating and cooling more efficient. But then the curve flattens out. Pack in 120 people per acre, like Singapore, or 300 people, like Hong Kong, and the energy savings are negligible.

For reference*, based on numbers I grabbed from Wikipedia and some quick calculations:

Portland, OR = 6.5 residents per acre
Seattle = 11
Vancouver, BC = 21
Copenhagen = 24
Stockholm = 41
New York City = 42

Wikipedia has limited data on Stockholm, so take those numbers with a grain of salt. In either case, this stuff is important to keep him mind when we have heated conversations about density. Not all densities are created equal, and it seems clear that adding a few more residents per acre could cut Seattle’s per-capita energy use dramatically without turning us into Manhattan.

*Wikipedia separates the land within the city limits from the water. I used the land-only numbers, since you can’t build on water. I don’t know if that’s what the Dongtan guys did or not. I suspect they, too, used land-only, since NYC’s density drops to 27 res. per acre if you count all the water.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Sound Transit’s video and animation gallery contains some very cool animations of link light rail.

Unfortunately, they use a proprietary flash player and I can’t link to it here.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

In addition to all the wonderful freedom they provide, cars have two major negative effects on society: pollution and traffic (three if you count the health problems related to auto-centric lifestyles, but that’s still pretty new and second-order compared to the first two). We often conflate the two, but they’re really separate problems.

In fact, one could easily see solving one of them while exacerbating the other. That’s the impression I get reading this article on plug-in hybrids. The more energy efficient our cars become, the cheaper they are to drive. Common sense tells us that people will then drive more, thereby making traffic worse.

This is not to say that energy-efficient cars shouldn’t be welcomed with open arms. It’s just that a good deal of public support for mass transit comes from a combination of the two. If operating a car gets cheaper, there goes one half of the coalition. Thus, it may reduce the demand for transit, while, perversely, making congestion even worse.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

In case you were wondering, that’s not a compliment in Canada:

The provincial government’s plan to build massive amounts of new road space in the Gateway project will significantly alter the region’s transportation and land-use patterns.

The provincial government has mainly promoted the Gateway Program as a necessary investment to reduce congestion for commuters and trucks, and it also has argued that road expansion means that emissions will be lowered because vehicles will be idling less as they wait.

. . .

And former Vancouver councillor Gordon Price, also a close watcher of the Vancouver-Seattle-Portland scene, calls it “a tragic turn in the direction of this region.”

“If [the provincial government] does what it says it’s going to do, we are going the way of Seattle.”

The article has some useful contextualizing of Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver’s relative efforts to be environmentally friendly with their infrastructure development, though it singles out Seattle as the “perpetual loser” in the 3-way race, sometimes in spite of itself:

Seattle went the other way, rejecting proposals for regional mass transit twice in the 1960s and 1970s.

Ever since, Seattle has become legendary for devising one transit plan after another, only to have each one shot down by one coalition after another of opponents. Ironically, that happens in spite of the fact that the Seattle public shows signs of wanting to do the right thing environmentally. Bruce Agnew, of the Cascadia Project, notes that sales of hybrid cars are higher per capita in Seattle than anywhere else.

(Via Casciadia Report, who takes a middle-of-the-road stance on the Vancouver expansion project)