This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Martin says that Portland MAX is not teh awesome!
It’s a fair point. The MAX was build more like a streetcar downtown, which is problematic for longer distances. On the other hand, Seattle’s LINK will have some of the same problems. Only the New York City Subway, with its local and express lines, really avoids this (separating longer-haul commuter rail from the subway helps, too) That was some might fine foresight, those NYCers had.
This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
ERG, the company that some have blamed for the delay in the ORCA card, is being criticized for similar delays in delivering the Bay Area’s TransLink card:
Shortly after the announcement in Australia, [BART controller-treasurer] Schroeder sent an e-mail to Bay Area transportation agency officials overseeing the TransLink project, urging them to cut their losses with ERG and “prepare to take whatever legal means are necessary to deal with the inevitable lawsuits that ERG will file.”
…
The Bay Area-wide launch of TransLink is now set for 2010.
The deadlines keep being extended because of various software problems, hardware glitches and concerns raised by participating agency officials who want to make sure they will get the revenue they’re owed from TransLink transactions.
Getting officials in the various agencies – each with their own administrators and governing boards – to work together has not been easy, given their desire to make sure they won’t be short-changed.
Getting the mechanics and the incentives aligned for these kind of projects is never simple, but a pattern seems to be developing here. I’m sure serial catowner will use this opportunity explain to me why this is yet another reason we need regional transportation governance. I think it would be a pretty plausible case to make.
This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
I found myself on SR 167 last week and I saw the HOT lane equipment being installed. I’m pretty curious to see how this project works out. It’s pretty hard to jump into the HOV lane as a single passenger, but it’s pretty easy to do it when it’s an HOT lane. Who’s to say you didn’t pay to get in?
Last weekend, I took the Portland MAX. I fully realize that I am the last man in a 1,000-mile radius to do this, so I’m not looking for props. Still, I’m surprised to say I’m not all that impressed.
Before I go any further, I should concede that at least Portland has a system. Their dedicated right-of-way system vastly outshines our (small) grab bag of monorails, bus tunnels, and bus ways. So for now, advantage Portland.
In a few years, though, our system is going to be a substantially better design than theirs. Consider:
If you look at Sound Transit’s track in the Rainier Valley, it’s much less inviting to pedestrians because it sits in the middle of a boulevard. The crossings are limited so that stations can be four cars long, and the only stretches of the ST2 that have stops along the freeway are Northgate to Lynnwood and I-90 across Lake Washington.
The MAX strikes me as rail-on-the-cheap. There is no less expensive way to build a dedicated-right-of-way system than to do it at-grade and use freeway rights-of-way, although this compromises its capacity, operating speed, and ability to promote long-term ridership through transit oriented development. If Sound Transit delivers on its promises, it’ll be worth the wait.
So the port wants to build a $413 million rental-car center at Sea-Tac. The center will house 5,400-cars at most.
Sea-Tac light rail station? More than 3,000 daily riders at just $73 million.
Sure, apples-and-oranges, whatever. The fact is, cars are hugely expensive, their infrastructure is even more expensive, but few bat an eye when $413 million is spent on them.
Photo from the STB flickr pool.
There’s a great new article in The Atlantic about the trend towards urban living and the likelihood of exurbs becoming low-income neighborhoods. The takeaway is that if you own property in a place like Marysville or Black Diamond, you should sell.
I’m not the best person to critique the article, because it entirely reinforces my prejudices, but I’ve always thought that the hollowing out of our inner cities has been a peculiarly American product of mid-20th-century racism and the breakdown in law enforcement in the 1960s. As those causes recede, we’ll probably end up with a more European-style configuration where the rich people live in the city center and the poor are warehoused out on the fringes.
But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay…
The experience of cities during the 1950s through the ’80s suggests that the fate of many single-family homes on the metropolitan fringes will be resale, at rock-bottom prices, to lower-income families—and in all likelihood, eventual conversion to apartments.
But don’t panic, Bellevue residents:
Of course, not all suburbs will suffer this fate. Those that are affluent and relatively close to central cities—especially those along rail lines—are likely to remain in high demand. Some, especially those that offer a thriving, walkable urban core, may find that even the large-lot, residential-only neighborhoods around that core increase in value. Single-family homes next to the downtowns of Redmond, Washington; Evanston, Illinois; and Birmingham, Michigan, for example, are likely to hold their values just fine.
A little further out, though, oy:
But much of the future decline is likely to occur on the fringes, in towns far away from the central city, not served by rail transit, and lacking any real core. In other words, some of the worst problems are likely to be seen in some of the country’s more recently developed areas—and not only those inhabited by subprime-mortgage borrowers. Many of these areas will become magnets for poverty, crime, and social dysfunction.
This has implications for transit planning. For one thing, effective high-capacity transit is a crucial amenity in those dense urban centers; to not have one is a debit against the city’s quality of life in the same way that a giant chemical plant in the middle of downtown would be. Additionally, the people that will absolutely require transit — who are now the urban poor — may become the “periphery poor,” creating new challenges for transit planners. So perhaps those long-haul transit services, so derided by The Stranger and West Seattlites, may be serving the strongest future markets for transit.
BTW, Seattlest beat me to posting about this by quite a bit.
If you do, and you want me to ask SDOT for answers, leave the questions in the comments below. I’ll be posing them to the SDOT folks tomorrow, and will give you answers here shortly thereafter.
The Seattle Times just seems continually behind the, er, times. First, they ran an editorial for Haugen’s 6772 super-agency bill the day after it failed to escape from committee (lost the link sorry). Now, after the Seattle PI reports they are finishing up on the bridge plans and only working on Montlake section, and the Times Editorial Board come out with this argument for an eight-lane 520 bridge:
But for the 21st century, six lanes is small. A six-lane bridge will be full at rush hour, right from the start. The new bridge will have to charge tolls, and not only for finance but to limit demand — that is, to price the bridge out of reach of people who can’t or won’t have $6, or whatever the toll is.
Uh, I am pretty sure that six-lanes will be huge for the 21st century. If they did build an eight-lane bridge, will it might not be full, the highways on either side would be, as would the on-ramps. That road’s capacity would no longer be determined by the bridge, but rather by the ability to get people on to it. And do we really want an eight-lane highway through Portage Bay?
The Seattle Times is stuck in 1965 thinking.
So now that the Eastside rail has carried its final freight train, and the debate over Eastside rail is picking up, we add a new voice to the fray, Mark Gardner over at Whacky Nation.
But do the math. It’s scary even if the project would only cost the intitial $107 million capital expense plus $10 million (highly suspect) in operating costs every three years. But, I’ll use their numbers to be fair. And I’ll suppose two trains would support 200 commuters a day. Over a twenty-one year period, subtracting out weekends and a week’s worth of holidays, I pencil out the daily tax-payer subsidy to be $180. Yes, divide the costs by the passenger trips and the taxpayer is paying $180 a day per commuter so that a bunch of choo-choo loving liberals can have their toy.
I’m sure he’s wrong on about the ridership. You’d see a lot more than 200 people on each train, probably at least 500, especially by twenty-one years from now. On the other hand, he’s not counting the cost of acquiring the rails, which I guess is the same whether a train runs there or not.
Though at what ridership would you need to justify the capital cost? The $4.4 billion 520 replacement will carry at least 115,000 cars, and thus at least 57,500 commuters, each day. At that price it pencils out to $14 a commuter. U-Link will carry 90,000 riders at $1.75 billion, or about $4 per rider. Central Link’s cost is about $7. Cost effectiveness is an important argument for transit, and that’s one of the reasons Link Light rail is a no-brainer.
Eastside rail doesn’t seem to be nearly as much a slam dunk as the last two, but with a large enough base it could pencil out to be as effective as the 520 bridge at least.
This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
For all the sins of the Bush Administration, this is the transit-fan equivalent of killing puppies for sport:
The bulk of funding for the federal Highway Trust Fund comes from the 18.4 cents-per-gallon federal gasoline tax. But revenues from the tax have flattened out, likely because people are driving less due to the price of gas and because cars have become more fuel efficient in the 14 years since the federal gas tax was last increased.
White House budget officials said the Highway Trust Fund will have a roughly $3 billion surplus in the current fiscal year. But by the end of fiscal 2009 it will be running a $3.9 billion deficit.
“There are challenges,” said Christin Baker, a spokeswoman for the federal Office of Management and Budget, which writes the president’s annual budget proposal. “We can’t spend what we don’t have.”
When Congress proposed raising the federal gasoline tax by 4 cents per gallon several years ago, President Bush threatened a veto and urged lawmakers to curb spending.
In its latest budget proposal, the administration suggested as a temporary solution that money from the federal mass transit trust fund account, which is running a surplus, be transferred to the highway account to cover the anticipated shortage.