Month: September 2007

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

And no, it doesn’t run windows, and it’ not cheap, either:

“This is not cheap what they’re doing,” said Kevin Desmond, general manager at King County Metro Transit. “Microsoft employees enjoy good benefits that many employers would give their right arm to be able to provide.”

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, acknowledged it is expensive but declined to say how much the company is spending.

The pilot program will include 14 buses, including seven large coaches with bike storage, and electrical outlets at each seat, in addition to Wi-Fi. Seven midsize coaches will be used for neighborhood pickups. There will be multiple runs in the morning and afternoon, Smith said.

Running one bus for one hour costs the Metro system about $110, which includes the driver, mechanic and fuel, Desmond said. At that rate, it would cost $9,240 per day to run 14 buses for six hours, or $2.4 million per year, not including weekends, the cost of new buses or Wi-Fi service.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Flexcar users are understandably peeved that their “rentals” are now subject to the same 18.7% tax rate as other rental cars. Alan Durning does a good job of explaining why these taxes exist:

Many Cascadian cities, with state authorization, put special sales taxes on rental cars. The rationale, as best I can understand, is that rental car taxes are mostly paid by nonresidents: business travelers with expense accounts and vacationers who don’t vote locally.

Flexcar, however, has created a whole constituency of in-state car renters, and suddenly the legislators are caught with their pants down (apologies to Larry Craig), taxing their constituents at a rate that will approach 20% once the RTID/ST2 taxes pass this November.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Okay, before we all get overtaken with ferry madness, Ernst and Young would like to splash some salt water on the current ferry schedule:

The audit recommended that at times when there are two runs sailing at 45 percent capacity or lower, that one of the round-trip runs be removed, allowing the remaining run, ideally, to have a 90 percent vehicle-capacity usage.

The audit did not specifically identify particular round-trip runs that should be eliminated. But it did include a table of possible routes that could be reduced for all seasons.

This is couretsy of the Auditor’s office that was set up courtesy of Tim Eyman’s recent initiative. It’s not clear that WSDOT is at all interested in listening.

Feel the accountability!!

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I’ve been half-heartedly following the recent activity on L.A.’s rail expansions, mostly out of general rail-geekdom, but also because, well, if they can build it there….

This summer’s been a flurry of activity down there in that respect. First you have them breaking ground on the new Westside line, which is the long-planned effort to link Santa Monica to downtown LA by rail. It will run along an old rail right-of-way, which will make it relatively cheap and quick to build, but, of course, it will also mean running at-grade and having to stop at traffic lights. And the rail corridor’s not exactly centrally located:

The first 8.6-mile leg of the line will run from the 7th Street/Metro Center station in the heart of downtown to Culver City. But it will be nowhere near many of the Westside’s most congested destinations, including the Miracle Mile, Grove-Beverly Center areas, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Century City and Westwood/UCLA.

Instead, it will move along an old Southern Pacific rail line through relatively quieter southwest L.A., roughly following Exposition Boulevard.

This first leg got a good chunk of funding today, but it still needs to make it all the way to Santa Monica to really deliver.

Meanwhile, across town, East LA is getting a full-on, grade-separated light rail extension that could change the neighborhood, probably in much the same way that the Central Link will change South Seattle.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The WSJ article I alluded to last week is chock full of great stuff. The high-speed Acela trains are on time 90% of the time, far better than the NY-DC air shuttle. And even non-Northeast routes are doing well:

But Amtrak’s success lately isn’t confined to the Northeast. While the railroad’s long-distance trains continue to suffer from lengthy delays, its ridership is up sharply on some improved state-supported corridors, including Chicago-St. Louis, up 53% in the 10 months through July.

Chicago-St. Louis is about 300 miles, a bit longer than the NY-DC route. That’s the sweet spot for passenger rail, 100- to 500-miles. The downside, the WSJ notes, is that we’ve essentially let our passenger rail infrastructure atrophy for the past century, so there are some major bottlenecks that need to be fixed, which would collectively cost billions of dollars:

Acela will never clock the steady 180 mph speeds reached by the fastest European and Japanese trains as they travel on dedicated tracks from city to city. On the Northeast Corridor, Acela is stuck with curvy tracks that it must share with freight and commuter trains. Space for more and faster trains is limited particularly in New York, where the Northeast Corridor squeezes down to just two tracks under the Hudson River.

Still, for $625 million in upgrades to tracks, equipment, signals and electrical power systems, Amtrak could shave 15 minutes from the Acela’s 2¾-hour schedule between New York and Washington, Mr. Kummant told Congress last month. Further time savings would come at a higher cost. Mr. Kummant says that to save an additional 10 minutes would cost $7 billion for new tunnels in New York and Baltimore, new bridges at other locations and track upgrades at five stations.

Still, there is a plan on the table, which seems reasonable to me, to hand the Northeast Corridor line over to the states it serves, in a model that would probably match the Northwest’s successful Amtrak Cascades service. Those states would be at a huge advantage relative to us here in the NW, since they’d be getting a rail corridor that’s exclusively for passenger rail, while we have to share ours with BNSF.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I-5 is open again, but some folks are sticking with Sounder:

The Sounder averaged 7,423 riders a day in the three weeks before the construction, but ridership jumped to a daily average of 9,480 during the I-5 lane closures.

Some riders returned to their cars during the project, seeing that a drop in the number of vehicles on the road had eased the pain of the highway commute. Still, based on morning and afternoon trips Monday and Tuesday, and on Wednesday morning’s commute, the average daily ridership remained about 8,120.

Add that to the Mukilteo station breaking ground, and things are looking up for Sounder. In terms of daily trips, it’s a blip compared to what light rail will provide, but it’s still significant in our overall transit strategy.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The club loses round 1:

The Sierra Club, the main force behind the NoRTID campaign, asked the court Friday to decide whether the “con” statement in the King County voter’s pamphlet is legal. The group says it omits an environmental point of view on the RTID portion of the ballot measure, falling short of fully informing voters.

Townsend said the “con” statement, written by citizen activist Will Knedlick, Bellevue developer Kemper Freeman and Phil Talmadge, a former state lawmaker and state Supreme Court justice, is primarily an anti-light rail and anti-tax stance, failing to adequately address the issue of more roads and highways.

I think it’s generally problematic that Sound Transit gets to choose who writes the “con” statement. But then, I think voter initiatives in general are problematic, and this is just one more reason why.

Overall, though, while I respect (though disagree with) their focus on killing the roads piece of the joint proposition, I wonder if the Club is thinking too short-term here:

“We’ve tried to get the two issues separated,” said Mike O’Brien, the local Sierra Club chairman. “When we heard about the shotgun wedding the Legislature created, we knew there was going to be a problem.”

Decoupling the issues — annulling the shotgun wedding, to borrow O’Brien’s words — is a bad idea in the long term. Environmentalists should want holistic, integrated transportation planning, one that includes rails, roads, trails, buses, bikes, hovercrafts, etc. Because that’s how we’re going to get the kind of transit systems that folks like the Sierra Club want to see.

For example, if you look at RTID/ST2 in a vaccum, you see that the funding is split roughly 50/50, about $10B each. An anti-rail person might look at that and say, “hey, why is half the money going to rail when it only serves 1% of trips?” Let’s bracket the “only a few thousand people” line, which has been thoroughly debunked, and focus on the the money. Sure, if you narrowly look at RTID/ST2, we’re looking at 50/50, but if you step back, and look at the hundreds of billions of dollars that we’ve spent on streets, boulevards, highways, byways, and driveways, at the state, county, and local level for the past 100 years, all of a sudden $10B on transit seems like a drop in the bucket.

In other words, we should only consider transportation spending relative to other modes, and the way we do that is by looking at it as one huge pie that gets divvied up.