Month: July 2007

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

We learned back in March that the Airport Link station was going to cost about twice what Sound Transit had estimated. After receiving just one bid from Mowat, the agency went back to the drawing boards.

Now, in the interest of keeping things moving, Mowat has been contracted to build the basic parts of the structure, while ST redesigns the rest:

In hopes of putting a costly airport light-rail station back on track, Sound Transit’s governing board Thursday approved a $35.8 million deal for Mowat Construction to begin work this fall.

Back in March, Mowat was the sole bidder — at $95.3 million, or $43.5 million above the agency’s estimate of $51.8 million. In response, Sound Transit has broken the project into multiple parts. Mowat will sign a reduced contract to build the station’s concrete structure and tracks. Several details, such as glass walls and pedestrian bridges, will be redesigned to save money.

Hmm… $35.8M to build the “structure and tracks.” That sure sounds like the bulk of the work. Does that mean the “glass walls and pedestrian bridges” were going to cost $95.3M minus $35.8M, or $59.5 million?

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Cascadia Prospectus uses a blog post about to the Port of Vancouver to launch into an extended tangent against the “putative progressives” who are opposed to alternative fuels and, by proxy, their tendency to encourage suburban sprawl. He writes:

For its part, “sprawl” is a somewhat loaded concept, reducing to a disease-like term the proclivity of actors in the free market to decide where to live based on laws of supply, demand and consequent household costs.

Just as people cannot be hectored into pricey and pinched urban townhomes merely to suit the objectives of planners and environmentalists, they cannot be browbeaten into taking mass transit. It will work for some on a daily basis, but not for many others, based on their daily travel patterns.

This is an idea you hear a lot from anti-transit people. Sprawl is the product of (presumably rational) “actors in the free market” while dense neighborhoods are the product of “hectoring planners and environmentalists.” In short, sprawl = freedom, density = communism.

But this is obviously not the case, as Matt eloquently argued here on this blog. Suburban sprawl was not handed down from upon high by God and Adam Smith, as some free-marketeers would have you believe. The Federal Highway Administration is one of the biggest corporate subsidies ever conceived. And it’s $30B budget doesn’t even include the billions more spent by states, cities, and counties.

Sprawl is a choice that we made, collectively, in the 1950s. And it was a smart choice at the time! FDR had just inked a deal with the Saudis to keep the black gold pumping, there was a ton of land outside of the cities to develop, and there were so few people with cars that congestion and traffic were almost nonexistant. Given those conditions, it made a lot of sense to re-build our society based on the automobile (let’s bracket, for now, the pernicious efforts of the auto companies to buy up and dismantle the streetcar lines, another way in which the car has robbed us of choices).

But we’ve learned a lot since then. We’ve learned that auto-dependent lifestyles have a cost: wars in the Middle East, greenhouse gasses, time stuck in traffic, loss of rural land, and an obesity epidemic. Those first two can be reduced by switching to alt fuels, but the last three cannot. So just as we made a collective choice to standardize on the automobile 50 years ago, we can make a different choice today.

Or better yet, we can make a lot of choices: we can build roads, trains, bus lanes, bike paths, sidewalks, and ferry lines. And down the road, jetpacks and hovercrafts, anyone? The more the merrier. Let’s have true choice. Not the illusion of choice.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Alameda County (Oakland and Berkeley, CA) is looking at BRT. On the plus side, they can get the whole 16 miles up and running in 4 years for just $400M ($25M/mile is dirt cheap for a transit project). The downside is that, to make it work, to make it truly BRT, you need a dedicated lane, meaning you’d have to remove a general purpose lane.

The key point of controversy is the same thing that makes BRT so effective – the dedicated lane. Telegraph Avenue and East 14th would both lose a lane for car traffic in each direction. Congestion on both streets has grown increasingly frustrating in recent years for both automobile drivers and bus riders. With buses stuck in unpredictable traffic, their average speed has declined 10 miles per hour over the past 10 years. Opponents of the project claim the loss of a lane will make traffic unbearable, while proponents note that the increased speed and reliability of the bus will finally create a viable alternative to private car travel. The Draft EIR found that the removal of a lane would not significantly increase congestion, since the new bus is expected to take a significant number of drivers off the road.

And this is where it starts to fall apart. Grade-separated transit (light rail, monorail, subway, etc.) creates brand-new rights-of-way. Buses, usually, do not. They have to either (a) share with cars, which reduces their speed, or (b) build exlusive new rights-of-way, which makes them nearly as expensive as light rail.

Alameda County is trying an option (c), which is to steal lanes from general traffic. As you can see, it isn’t going over too well, no matter that the EIR finds otherwise. Taking lanes is never an easy sell.

But the fissure here is useful in illumnating the various sides of the debate. As Rob Johnson (whom I assume is the same Rob Johnson from Transportation Choices Coalition) wrote in a comment at the bottom of this too-clever-by-half Crosscut article,

It seems as though all light rail critics in this region are quick to support bus service when comparing the two, but their support dissapears when it’s actually time [to] fight for more bus service increases.

They’re all for more bus service, but only when it’s a matter of trying to deflect attention away from rail.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

This, friends, is what we have to look forward to when we finally get light rail built. Enjoy!

Seriously, though, I think more jostling around with other people will be good for our collective souls.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

You know, when I first saw the plans for the Tukwila Station, I thought it was a little overblown. After all, it’s only going to be the end of the line for about 6 months until the Airport Link opens. After that, what’s the purpose of having such an extensive station?

But, of course, there is a purpose. It’s the only station in the line that’s designed as a park-and-ride:

This is the line’s only planned park-and-ride station, with 600 spaces, plus lanes for buses, shuttle vans, and “kiss-and-ride” users dropped off there. Unlike most other stations, which are designed to encourage walk-up use, the Tukwila Station could lure motorists off the highways.

To be sure, the 2,600 daily boardings dwarfs the 14,000 daily boardings projected for Capitol Hill. It seems like it would be better for a park-and-ride station to be right off of I-5 instead of International Blvd. But I guess that’s where it’s got to be.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The Everett Herald tries to make the case that the Roads and Transit package will go down this Fall because (a) it’s too expensive, and (b) it’s not sexy enough. I’m not kidding about that last one:

“Emotion, emotion, emotion – capture it and you can win at the polls,” said Jami Warner, a public relations expert and campaign consultant from Sacramento, Calif.

The problem is that the so-called Roads and Transit tax proposal is boring – and expensive.

Bring sexy back! Personally, I think voters are ready to pull the lever for anything — anything — that will get concrete pouring.

I’m also skeptical of the article’s heavy reliance on Tim Eyman to prove the thing is dead, saying that Eyman has “been able to gauge the voters’ mood in the past, winning seven out of nine times he’s pitched initiatives since 1998.”

Isn’t more plausible that Eyman is not some magical svengali of the electorate, but rather just an anti-tax crusader whose goals happened to align with the anti-government mood of the 1990s? In the past few years, his initiatives have even failed to qualify for the ballot.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Sacramento’s Regional Transit is experimenting with the idea that two great things go great together: hybrid technology and light rail.

It turns out that regenerative braking, the technology used in hybrid cars, can be deployed to trains, too: as the train brakes, it charges special capacitors that are then used to get the train up to speed as it leaves the station.