Month: June 2007

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

HOT lanes (a.k.a. “Lexus Lanes”) have two main purposes, as far as I can tell: (1) to make better use of HOV lanes by adding as many single-occumancy cars as you can while still keeping those lanes moving at 50mph, and (2) to free up general purpose lanes. I suppose you could add a third purpose, to generate additional revenue. But overall revenue is small, and typically covers only the cost of administering the program.

As this Wall Street Journal article notes, the lanes are successful at the first goal. But they will only benefit the general public to the extent that they achieve the second. And on that point, the record is less clear. Does any extra capacity just get eaten up by people who would have otherwise chosen not to commute? Do wealthy drivers just take more trips now that they have a guaranteed congestion-free option? These questions remain unanswered.

To truly manage congestion in this way, you’d probably have to toll all the lanes, which is the system that King County is supposedly looking into.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Vince Stricherz writes a guest op-ed on the need for a new viaduct:

There were nearly 160,000 ballots cast in the election, and more than 111,000 favored one of the two waterfront roadway options. That implies that the number voting no on both options is only about the same as the number who voted for the tunnel, and almost certainly is far less than the number who voted for the elevated viaduct. But we don’t know that for sure because the ballots weren’t counted that way, so any analysis that says people don’t want a waterfront highway is seriously flawed.

Indeed, it’s true that if you look at the results, you’ll see that 45,000 people voted for the tunnel, and 65,000 for the elevated. But it’s far from clear that tunnel folks would have chosen the elevated as their second choice, which is what Stricherz wants you to infer. He wants to extend an olive leaf to the tunnel supporters, confident they’ll join him in a grand, pro-highway coalition. Personally, I don’t see it. The whole reason for voting for a tunnel is that you explicitly don’t want another elevated highway through downtown and you’re willing to pay more for that to happen.

You have to take the 88,000 who voted “no” on the rebuild as the baseline for a surface/transit solution. That’s 57%, so I’m skeptical that the elevated option would have won even a plurality in a three-way contest. More likely, the rebuild and tunnel supporters would have split the pro-capacity vote (i.e., West Seattle residents), and surface/transit would have skated to victory with, say, 40% support (think Bill Clinton in 1992 – elected president with just 43% of the vote).

Still, he’s absolutely right that the structure of the vote made it hard to really understand the voters’ intent. For example, I could argue that, of the 160,000 votes cast, 105,000 voted “no” on the tunnel, and 88,000 voted “no” on the rebuild. Therefore, 192,000 people, or roughly 120% of the voters voted “no” to both options!! Isn’t math fun?

To me, this proves less about what the voters “want,” and more about the difficulty of using the ballot box for transportation planning.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Clark Williams-Derry takes a deeper look into a Seattle trend: many of us don’t go to work on Mondays or Fridays. After comparing traffic data, he concludes:

Now, I don’t know for certain what accounts for the difference. But I think it’s pretty simple: there are just enough people who don’t work Mondays or Fridays — either because of flexible, 4×10 hour work schedules, or because of people taking long weekends or vacation days — that traffic volumes never quite reach the “tipping point” between free-flow and gridlock.

That’s exactly how traffic tends to work: a roadway that’s operating near peak capacity — full, but flowing freely — can suddenly descend into gridlock if just a few extra cars enter the highway at once. That’s one reason that Seattle’s metered on ramps help keep traffic moving more smoothly: by regulating access, they help prevent the sudden bursts of traffic that can bring a highway to a standstill.

This certainly matches my experience. It also, I think, speaks to how well we could do with congestion pricing.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I was wondering what would happen when the streetcar started running in both directions on Westlake, which is a one-way street North of Denny.

Well, it looks like the answer is that they’re going to make Westlake Ave a 2-way street. Check out the streetlights under wraps for Southbound traffic.

Based on this, it looks like the two-way option has been around for some time.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

David Brewster thinks outside the box. But first, he plays a little fast and loose with density numbers:

The general rule is that only cities with densities of more than 10,000 people per square mile pass the threshold for extensive use of public transportation systems. That qualifies only New York and Chicago, which account for a large percentage of all public transportation in America. Seattle’s density, for its urbanized area, is about 3,000 people per square mile. Moreover, public transportation becomes dominant only in the downtown business districts of these cities.

As we’ve noted, Seattle’s density does put it within striking distance of effective rapid transit. Even so, he can’t account for Washington DC, where the density is far lower than New York or Chicago, but which has the second-highest percentage of transit use in the country.

Brewster does advance three “awkward” theories about why rail is a good idea: it attracts wealthy riders, it spurs real estate development, and it helps planners build compact, transit-oriented neighborhoods.

The first theory is counter-intuitive. He claims that light rail use in the Rainier Valley will be “disappointing,” because it’s not affluent, but that doesn’t really jive with the fact that bus use in such neighborhoods tends to be very high.

The second and third arguments are basically the same thing: the reason rail lines spur real-estate development is precisely because they concentrate growth along the alignment. When you create pockets of land that are very desirable for people to live, work or shop, those pockets are going to become valuable.

That latter argument is most compelling. If we start to clump our housing and employment centers in the right areas — Downtown Seattle, Bellevue, Overlake, Northgate, etc. — we can induce transit use. It doesn’t have to be the New York or Chicago all-trains-into-downtown-and-back model. A decentralized model that moves people among several nodes (think London or DC) could be just as effective.

We’ve gone over the basic arguments for rail so many times (buses get stuck in traffic, buses can’t carry nearly as many passengers as trains, buses will never be as fast, etc.) so many times that I don’t want to rehash them. But if I wanted to offer a slightly awkward case, to complement Brewster’s list above, it would be this: rail is romantic. Bus systems just don’t inspire T-shirts. There’s value in that: real, quality-of-life, this-is-a-great-city value.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The Richard Morrill piece in Crosscut has been sufficiently fisked today by STB, so I won’t duplicate efforts (1% of trips? Really? Have we not yet comprehended that it’s only peak rush hour trips, not the 3.a.m. dash for Dick’s Burgers, that cause traffic and therefore need to be mitigated with transit?)

I do want to respond to Dr. Morrill’s comment “the cost of driving must and will rise.” Well, that’s true and not true. In the long term, the costs from congestion will certainly rise. But in the medium term, the cost of driving a car is likely to decrease. Think about it: the average fuel economy in the US is about 21mpg, but the Prius gets north of 50mpg.

We’re not all going to drive Priuses, but the cost per mile traveled will definitely go down, certainly for heavy commuters who choose such cars. Finally, the cost of carbon emissions will certainly decrease as plug-in vehicles become available that can be charged by nighttime excess hydro power.

In other words, it’s hard to say. We don’t know what the future will bring. But we’re pretty sure that we’re going to add another 1 million residents in the next 30 years, so we should probably invest in a diversified transit portfolio: roads, trains, buses, seaplanes, jetpacks, PRTs, etc. as well as Morill’s preferred solution, demand management (i.e. tolls and congestion pricing).

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Carless in Seattle references the idea of a bored (as opposed to cut-and-cover) tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct broached here by Cascadia Prospectus.

One interesting challenge for a non-waterfront downtown tunnel is that there’s already a maze of tunnels through downtown. In addition to the Bus Tunnel, which most people are aware of, you’ve got the Battery Street tunnel and, even less well-known, the freight rail tunnel that runs the entire length of downtown from Alaskan & Virginia to the King Street Station. CP’s parent organization, the Discovery Institute — which actually does a lot of great transit research when it’s not obsessed with hawking questionable intelligent design “theories” — actually came up with one of my favorite transit-projects-that-never-happened, the University Street Transit Hub:

The idea here is that you’d be able to build, at relatively low cost, a Sounder stop right in the middle of downtown, as opposed to just the one at King Street.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The Bellevue Downtown Association, which presumably stands to benefit tremendously from the RTID/ST2 package, has endorsed it. And why not? They’re getting a big, fat I-405 and a light rail link to Seattle, UW, and the Airport. Win, win, win.

Kemper Freeman, the big downtown developer, is opposed to the plan. But he seems to be increasingly isolated. Where’s the big money and clout going to come from to oppose this thing? So far, I’m not seeing it.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Personal Rapid Transit is coming to London’s Heathrow Airport:

Tomorrow’s public transit could look very different from today’s if Martin Lowson’s $20 million project at Heathrow Airport in London is a hit. Starting in 2008, Lowson’s company, Advanced Transport Systems, will be whisking passengers between Heathrow’s new Terminal 5 and a parking lot a mile away in tiny driverless vehicles that run on an elevated concrete track.

Unlike buses or trains, Lowson’s ‘pods’ are private — about the size of a taxi, fitting as many as four adults — and arrive on demand, within five minutes after passengers press a call button.

People laughed — perhaps rightly — when Steve Jobs boasted that the Segway scooter would “erect entire cities” around the Segway scooter. But, on the other hand, it’s obviously true that the design of our cities is more or less circumscribed by the transportation options available to us. A city designed around PRT would look very different than the one in which we currently live.

(Photo via)