Month: August 2007

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Cascadia Prospectus gets serious:

Ridership is up [on the DC-to-Boston Acela line], according to the article, as business people – wary of endless hassles at Northeast airports – increasingly turn to the comfort of Acela high-speed trains. Meanwhile, folks traveling on this side of the country (from Vancouver, B.C., to Portland, Ore.) are riding old Superliner equipment, while the eight-year-old sleek, highspeed, Spanish-made Talgo equipment is laid up because of cracks in the train sets.

Congress and the Administration need to get serious about funding a national freight and passenger rail system. And they should reward states like California and Washington who have invested hundreds of millions of dollars worth of state transportation funds in partnership with Amtrak – not just the politically well-connected Northeast states that have hardly invested any state or local resources. [emph. in original]

I’m much more interested in seeing the states rewarded by the feds for working together on reliable, frequent 100- to 500-mile routes than I am in seeing the feds themselves pour more money into expensive, transcontinental ones.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Apologies for the dearth of posts lately. I’ve been out of town and then work got hectic and, well, you know how it goes. In the meantime, I hope you’re reading CIS’s enlightening series on the history of road financing.

… or Clark Williams-Derry’s eloquent summary of the I-5 closure.

Regular posting will return shortly.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Heh.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Though I sympathize with Erica Barnett’s plight in not being able to get off the bus before it took her all the way to West Seattle, I think she has to realize that the rules are there for a reason. Once the bus drivers start making concessions for some people, and not others, then every decision to bend the rules starts to come under scrutiny. That is to say, it adds a ton of stress to the driver if every decision has to be weighed. If you just have a blanket rule that you enforce, no matter how absurd it may seem in a particular situation, you absolve yourself from the stresses of each particular decision. More importantly, Metro absolves itself from having to deal with the politics and optics of each potential situation.

(Again, not that I have a ton of sympathy for bus drivers like the jerk who flipped me off in my car for no apparent reason during downtown rush hour last week.)

More to the point, Erica’s a fan of speedy buses. Last fall she asked whether handicapped people should be banned from express buses entirely. So surely she understands that asking the bus driver to make unscheduled stops is not good policy.

P.S. Incidentally, this is also a reason why people like trains. There’s an anonymity. The train starts and stops and you never see the conductor, so you’re powerless to ask them to stop for you, and so you resign yourself to being on their schedule. That anonymity barrier between driver and passenger is helpful in depersonalizing the experience. It’s not about the particular driver, it’s about the system.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Let’s forget about fancy-schmancy infrastructure projects for a minute here on OR and focus on sidewalks:

Forty percent of Seattle streets lack full sidewalks on both sides of the road — totaling 650 miles, the city estimates — but installing them is a staggering expense of about $2 million per mile. It’s not just the cost of the pavement: When a curb is built, it changes the flow of surface water, triggering legal requirements for drainage systems, which in turn can involve buying adjacent property. Many cities can build them only as part of a major street-paving project.

650 miles @ $2M a mile, that’s $1.3B to do the whole city, including drainage systems!

A few weeks ago, city staff estimated it would cost Seattle up to $4.5 billion to add sidewalks for all Seattle streets — and this doesn’t include the cost of putting in drainage systems.

Oh. Well, okay, so it’s $4.5B, plus the drainage systems. Well, we better get cracking!

The Seattle Department of Transportation plans to spend about $1 million annually on sidewalk installation, out of the Bridging the Gap levy approved by voters last year.

At that rate, it’ll only take … 450 years to do the whole city. D’oh!

All joking aside, I do hope that the city continues its innovative natural drainage program when it finally does get around to installing these sidewalks.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Starting September 24:

And service will soon get better. On Sept. 24, Sound Transit will add its first “reverse commute” train leaving Seattle at 6:10 a.m. and arriving at Tacoma Dome Station an hour later. At the same time, the agency will add a fifth northbound morning train leaving Tacoma.

By the end of 2008, seven commuter trains will leave Tacoma for Seattle on weekdays – up from four currently – and two will leave Seattle for Tacoma. And the agency hopes to extend Sounder service to Lakewood by 2011.

If voters approve a regional roads and transit measure in November, other improvements to rail and bus service will be forthcoming. Among other things, the $17.7 billion package would extend light rail from SeaTac Airport to Tacoma.

That’s actually a pretty decent amount of trains to run on leased track.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this Seattle Times op-ed, which sort of reads like a backhanded compliment of transit and sort of like a veiled threat:

Bottom line: There have to be enough buses, trains and boats to match the demand, but the key is having enough attendants and signage available to take the mystery out of the process.

Confusion over buying tickets, how to pay, and how to enter and exit strange locations will nip off tendrils of commuter interest faster than a crowded ride or two.

Transit agencies skimp on commuter assistance, signage and security at their peril. The spotlight is on mass transit. This is an opportunity to shine and retain new customers.

Does the op-ed page consistently advocate for the kinds of taxes that would be required to pay for those “buses, trains and boats”? I’m not so sure. But set that aside for a minute, what’s up with the “at their peril” line? You better be good, or else… it seems to be saying.

They’re right about the substance, though. Navigating transit systems can be tricky for the uninitiatied. Although Metro drivers are generally very helpful (except the one who flipped me off during rush hour downtown last week — that was uncalled for!) compared to bus drivers in other cities. it’s still easy to get confused. Better, clearer, color-coded signs and better information about where the routes go would be handy.