ST News – Surely needed

Posted on by Brian Bundridge

Continuing onward with the ST gripes and such, I thought I’d give the people a comforting update.

Most of the rail is completed for Airport Link except along the roadway and at the final station. This is planned to be completed by this Summer. Wire installation of the entire route will be completed by the Summer of 2008. Beacon Hill Station building will start construction later this Summer with the structure being completed by the end of the year.

Sound Transit has put in an order for 20 additional LRV’s for University Link. This will be the third order and will be delivered in 2013. Sound Transit currently has 21 LRV’s on the property, leaving 14 of the initial order remaining which are all in Everett now for assembly.

Link operators are running 16 hour shifts, starting between 6am and going until at least midnight to get people accustomed to day and night operations. Metro staff will start training in February 2009.

Starting later this week or two, Metro and Sound Transit will begin bus and Light-Rail testing in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel. This will consist of 1 LRV and 6 buses. Next week will be 2 LRV’s and 12 buses. They will simulate a broken down bus, broken down LRV, emergency drills, etc, which will all be repeated in Feb-Mar for Metro operators.

Sound Transit is aiming for a JUNE 2009 opening though it may very well be July 2009. Either way, it will be a Summer launch.

The original concept was always at-grade and not elevated along MLK Way. It was the option that made the most sense and was least impact on the community.

Signaling along MLK Way will be timed with the train and traffic. At any given time, the E-W traffic will be delayed no more than 35 seconds, a typical light on MLK Way. Currently the grade crossing is timed for 23 seconds at Lander and Holgate Street. I timed both of these crossings today. This model is NOT the same as the South Lake Union Streetcar, the Streetcar does NOT have signal priority on any of it’s travel. It waits for it’s own light which is why it suffers being so slow. Central Link will have signal priority throughout the entire line and will travel at 40mph through the entire corridor. From Henderson Street Station, Link will travel at speeds up to 50mph and it’s maximum speed of 55mph on the elevated sections. Link also runs in a dedicated right-of-way and while it is paved over to Henderson, that does not mean vehicles will be on the tracks. Provisioning was left to allow a low yield fence along the right-of-way if pedestrian and vehicle incidents were to be expected.

Total travel time from Sea-Tac Airport to Westlake Mall is slated to be 39 minutes initially and as adjustments are made, will be down to as fast as 34 minutes.

Sound Transit is planning on operating 3 to 4 car trains during the baseball and football seasons, normal runs will be 1 and 2 car trains.

Sound Transit will be closing Pine Street next year to start boring on University Link. Two of the tunnel boring machines will start at Montlake to Capitol Hill, the third will start at Capitol Hill to the Pine Street Stub Tunnel. Sound Transit has most of the properly bought and will begin demolition early next year for construction staging.

Sound Transit will be installing CCTV cameras at all stations and Seattle Police along with security will be on-board trains. Fare inspectors will be present on-board Link at random times. Police will also start riding on buses at select times on the more vandalized bus routes, like the 554, 574, and 594. ST will also start ramping up inspections on Sounder Commuter Rail.

Sound Transit will have Mukilteo Station open in June 2008 with the Northbound platform starting after BNSF Railway finishes up construction for Boeing. Platform construction is scheduled to start in 2009 and open in June 2009.

I’m sure I left some stuff out but let’s just say that more goodness is going to be coming out much, much, sooner….

I am Generally Content with Sound Transit

Posted on by Ben Schiendelman

So, on this blog, sometimes, we disagree. This is a response to Martin’s post below. There are things about Sound Transit I gripe about (and who doesn’t have nitpicks about anything they’re interested in?), but what Martin wrote about are not gripes I have. Here’s why.

1) When an organization’s leadership is replaced, like an administration, there is no reason to continue to use the benchmarks set forth by an old administration, especially when we know they were faulty. It’s pointless to tell someone every day that they are late when there is no way they could ever have been on time, because they inherited someone else’s work. It is meaningful to measure them based on the job they were given. Sound Transit is not a person. There is no “they” who made a mistake in the original estimates for Link. The people who made those mistakes are no longer making decisions that will lead them into the same situations, so benchmarking the agency based on those mistakes, made more than a decade ago, does nothing but create an attitude of distrust rather and foul any recognition of progress made.

2) The choice was: Build the Rainier Valley at grade, or build nothing. Those were your options. And Portland’s MAX is on time, as is Tacoma Link. I do not see how Central Link should be any different, as it is built to higher standards than either of those for grade separation. Also, I’d be a lot more worried about the South Seattle crossings than the ones in the Valley – those are the ones with long trucks and heavier game traffic. I’m still not worried.

3) Signal timing can only happen in one direction without completely impeding the flow of cross-traffic. Unless you have a fantastic new theory that transportation managers the world over would love to see, this is simply impossible to implement. You’d end up with wildly varying signal lengths. Sure, with a long section and only a couple of crossings, you can time trains to avoid this. You cannot do that with a dozen or more crossings in a handful of miles.

4) Critics can’t kill U-Link. We’re not voting on it again. I do agree I’d like to see some obvious work so people have something to look forward to, but I’m not that worried about it.

Things I don’t like about Sound Transit

Posted on by Martin H. Duke
I believe the STB crew to be universal in its support of the general direction and competence of Sound Transit. Since we spend almost all of our time defending it against criticism, I thought I should, in the interests of fairness, level a few criticisms of my own.

1) Stop saying LINK is “on time and on budget.” Sure, the new management has righted the ship and met its new, internal benchmarks. As someone who’s been in a lot of large organizations, I know that that’s not nothing. But it doesn’t win over any skeptics when you promise one cost and timeline when you’re going into the vote, do a faceplant soon afterward, come up with a new timeline where you have every incentive to be conservative, and then trumpet your success as if the initial promises never existed. It just adds to people’s cynicism about the process, and has probably been counterproductive politically.

2) They really, really should have grade-separated the Rainier Valley segment. Ben S. has repeatedly told me that this only costs riders two or three minutes, and I have no doubt that it’s true. Nevertheless, the whole point of rail is reliability: by running at-grade you’ve introduced the possibility of idiot drivers and pedestrians gumming up the whole system. Inattentive drivers have already seriously disrupted the SLUT on some days, and I hate to think that they could do the same for a regional backbone.

Furthermore, speed is as much about perception as the stopwatch time. Even without a disruptive emergency, a train sitting at a stoplight tells the people riding it that the train is slow. A train whizzing by cars stuck at a stoplight tells them it’s faster than driving.

Looking forward, now that we’ve built the system there are ways to minimize these problems: pedestrian overpasses, arterial underpasses, crossing gates, fencing, etc. ST and the City of Seattle should energetically look into these solutions. As a bonus, this kind of stuff is substantially cheaper than elevating or burying the line in the first place.

3) Use signal acceleration in both directions. A corollary to the other point is something else Ben S. told me: that the signal acceleration will be only used in the peak direction through the Rainier Valley. I repeat my argument from the bullet above.

4) Start Digging, Dammit. Nothing ensures completion like facts on the ground. Transit projects have their near-death experiences when they mess around for years without turning a spade of Earth. For that reason, it would have been a great idea if they’d found the money to start in on U-link before the critics have a chance to kill it, even at the cost of a few months of extra delay in Central Link, which is now a fait accompli.

*****

So that’s my wish list for what they would do/have done differently. However, like any political process, the actual ST program is a mix of various interests, so that the result is not perfect from any one person’s viewpoint.

Opposing a system because it uses the wrong kind of rail car, or because its initial segment doesn’t run from your house to your workplace, or because it’s bundled with some other stuff you don’t like, doesn’t get us any closer to having a decent rail system; those decisions were made for a reason, and you ignore those reasons at your peril.

It’s with hesitation that I open this post to comments, because it invites a scattershot of random gripes. I ask that you focus on what I’ve suggested, or look forward to tactical changes that could still be made, as I’ve done.

And if your gripe is “go to Ballard and West Seattle before anywhere else,” we’ve already had that thread, several times. I wield my “delete comments” button as necessary.

VMT

Posted on by Frank Chiachiere

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I’ve been remiss in not linking to Sightline’s widely-discussed report on gas consumption in the Northwest. The upshot is that gasoline consumption per capita in the Northwest declined 11% since 1999, despite the fact that it’s been holding steady nationwide.

Three factors are cited for the decline: increased fuel economy, increased transit ridership and the decrease in total vehicle miles traveled (VMT). What we don’t know is the relative impacts of these factors. For example, Sightline cites the fact that fuel economy increased 5% in just the last few years. And since fuel-efficient cars sell better in the Northwest than anywhere else in the country, we could chalk up a good chunk of the 11% decline to increased fuel economy. That’s all well and good for global warming, but it doesn’t make for a more transit-friendly region, just a more gas-friendly one.

Still, the increase in transit ridership and the decrease in per-capita VMT are great news for transit and density advocates and cannot be denied. Oddly, WSDOT’s VMT forecast, also used in the study, shows per-capita VMT declining between 2003 and FY 2008, but then inexplicably trending back up in the future. Check it out in chart form. Current data is in blue, projections for the future are in red:

vmt.png

You’d think with a Growth Management Act in place, gas topping $4/gallon and likely to increase, and a huge increase in transit investments, per-capita VMT would continue to decline. But WSDOT thinks the past four years are an abberation, and the figure is going to go back up. This doesn’t make sense to me. In fact, it reminds me of this chart (below) from Gen. Petraeus’ testimony before congress last week, showing U.S. expenditures in Iraq taking a whopping 90-degree turn. It doesn’t pass the straight face test, does it?

projector.png

Update: only a couple of hours after publishing this, I see that Clark Williams-Derry, the author of the report, has a strikingly similar post up at Sightline’s blog. His blog post is datelined Friday (in my RSS reader), but it didn’t show up in my RSS reader until 20 minutes ago for some unknown reason. Anyway, read his post because he has better data and prettier charts, which comes with being a full-time researcher instead of a lowly blogger. Still, it’s reassuring that even he doesn’t know what’s going on!

The cost of driving

Posted on by Martin H. Duke

Yesterday’s New York Times has a piece by Steven Dubner and Steven Leavitt (of Freakonomics fame) about the external costs of driving:

Which of these externalities is the most costly to U.S. society? According to current estimates, carbon emissions from driving impose a societal cost of about $20 billion a year. That sounds like an awful lot until you consider congestion: a Texas Transportation Institute study found that wasted fuel and lost productivity due to congestion cost us $78 billion a year. The damage to people and property from auto accidents, meanwhile, is by far the worst. In a 2006 paper, the economists Aaron Edlin and Pinar Karaca-Mandic argued that accidents impose a true unpaid cost of about $220 billion a year. (And that’s even though the accident rate has fallen significantly over the past 10 years, from 2.72 accidents per million miles driven to 1.98 per million; overall miles driven, however, keep rising.) So, with roughly three trillion miles driven each year producing more than $300 billion in externality costs, drivers should probably be taxed at least an extra 10 cents per mile if we want them to pay the full societal cost of their driving.

The piece goes on to argue for pay-as-you-drive auto insurance, which is a good idea. Had I worked on that study, I might have tried to quantify the foreign policy and defense costs of securing oil supplies, but I can imagine the methodological problems there.

At any rate, although I’ve learned to be skeptical of “cost to the economy” figures, it’s clear that there are very large implicit subsidies to driving. The difference for public transit is that the subsidies are explicit.

Via Ezra Klein.

Party Tram?!?

Posted on by Brian Bundridge

Only in Prague where you can lease a tram (Streetcar for us U.S. folks) wire it up with lights, DJ’s and 2 wet bars with some music… Call it TRAMix…

What are the chances of something like this happening in the States – Slim to none but talk about a fun way of getting around town.

Note:: I posted this to aim at the younger gen readers that are on this blog and may read it. Myself probably being the youngest on this blog would love to see something like this. Sure we have the Party bus but really, it’s just a bus =P

Stanwood to join Amtrak Cascades

Posted on by Brian Bundridge

The City of Stanwood has started construction on the new Stanwood station platform which is slated to open in June 2009. This platform will serve North and South bound passengers to Vancouver, BC, Everett, Wa and Seattle, Wa.

The platform was originally scheduled to open in the Summer of 2008 but due to issues with platform height and extending the siding at Stanwood to allow freight trains to pass trains that are doing station stops and a slight relocation of a grade crossing.

More information is available from the Everett Herald and WSDOT.

Light Rail in the Valley

Posted on by Frank Chiachiere

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The Seattle Times has a front-page story on the changes light rail is bringing to the neighborhoods along MLK Way. It’s a fine read, but I wish it had dug a bit deeper into the underlying reasons why the neighborhood is changing.

Pivoting off of daijimin’s post on the subject, I think there’s a much more complicated story to be told here. We know that light-rail was a disruption, and that many of the Asian immigrants who lived in the neighborhood moved away because of construction. But much of that was going to happen anyway. And anyone who thinks those communities won’t thrive outside of the Rainier Valley has obviously never been to Renton…or Federal Way…or Lynwood…or…

The story of immigrants to America first living in urban areas and then migrating out to the suburbs as they prospered is almost as old as America itself. After all, New York’s Lower East Side is no longer a bastion of Italians, Irish and Jews. And as an Irish-Italian descendant of those immigrants, I’m glad they made their way out.

On the other hand, if they’d held on to the real estate, I’d be sitting pretty right now! Which gets us to the other side of the coin: if you believe, as I do, that the cul-de-sacs of today could become the tenements of tomorrow, then it’s problematic, from a public policy perspective, to consign the poor folks to the auto-dependent suburbs at a time when auto-dependent lifestyles are on the wane.

Still, the newly-middle-class still seem more interested in movin’ on out (to the suburbs) than movin’ on up (to, say, a deluxe apartment in the sky). And not just in the U.S. Thousands of gated suburban communitites are going up in China to house that country’s newly mobile middle class. It’s mostly those of us who’ve lived for a generation or two in the suburbs who want to try living in the city for a change.

All of this is to say…. it’s complicated!

TOD in the Rainer Valley on Central Link

Posted on by Andrew Smith


The Times today talks about TOD in the Rainier valley caused by anticipation of Central Link opening next year. There’s a little widget to show what exactly is going in.

Mike Hlastala has seen the future. And it runs on rails.
His year-old company plans to build more than 700 apartments and 40,000 square feet of shops a few steps from Sound Transit’s Othello Street light-rail station on Martin Luther King Jr. Way.

A trip from Othello to Pioneer Square should take just 17 minutes when trains start running next year. Hlastala figures lots of downtown workers — tired of traffic, $4 gas and $300-a-month parking — will be interested in apartments like his.

Exactly. The number of units is astounding, “more than 1,500 condo and apartment units within a 10-minute walk of a rail station” by private developers and a large number more places like New Holly built with Housing Authority funds and right next to Othello Station. The image above is a rendering of one of two private developments built on the other side of MLK from New Holly.

There is a risk that the new residents will push out the current, diverse, relatively low-income residents of the valley. Though I guess this is a problem throughout the city from South Park to Jackson Park.

What Rossi Wants to Do with Sound Transit Dollars

Posted on by Andrew Smith

This Seattle PI talks about what Rossi wants to do with the Sound Transit dollars. Rossi wants to spend $690 million of Eastside Sound Transit dollars on HOV lanes for 405. The article fails to emphasize a key point. Sure, Sound Transit currently has a $560 million dollar or so surplus in the bank that has been saved for Eastside rail, but it’s unconstitutional for the state to repurpose that money. Article XI, section 12 of the state constitution reads as follows has been interpretted that the state can’t redirect local taxes without a vote. The vote would have to pass in the entire Sound Transit district, not just the Eastside, and the vote could only be brought on by the Sound Transt board. Why the board would want to spend the money on HOV lanes I’m not sure.

The piece also calls the Coalition for Effective Transportation and the Eastside Transportation Association, both of which love the Rossi plan, “pro-bus organizations”. That’s barely true, a much more appropriate name would be “anti-rail”, a quick look at either organizations site proves this.

“The general idea of spending Sound Transit’s transit money on cross-lake infrastructure (for) making buses work better across the lake is a good one,” said John Niles, the coalition’s technical chairman.

I’m not too worried about Rossi getting elected and moving the money toward roads.

Eastsiders, of which Rossi is clearly one, feel that a widened 405 was promised to them by the state in the mid-nineties.

But How Will They Taste It?

Posted on by Frank Chiachiere

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Dan Savage writes:

We may not get more light rail on the ballot this year, but once Sound Transit’s light rail line opens to the airport and people around here—people that don’t travel or don’t pay attention when they do, or the folks that are convinced that Seattle is perfect in every possible way just as it is (or was in 1964)— get a real taste of real mass transit, voters will be clamoring to approve and pay for more rail lines.

You hear this argument often, that once people get a taste for real transit, they’ll clamor for more. You hear it especially from folks who want to wait until 2010 to put another light rail measure on the ballot.

I take such sentiments at face value, but Dan’s comments got me thinking: how many people, exactly, are going to “taste” it between when it opens in mid-2009 (or December 2009 for the Airport Link) and a vote in November of 2010? Certainly it will be popular among a certain slice of the Seattle population — residents of the Rainier Valley, for example — but will folks who live in, say, Green Lake and commute to the Eastside even notice? Not to mention people who live on the other side of Lake Washington, people we’ll need to convince if we’re going to pass a measure that goes across the water.

To be sure, they’ll get glimpses. Hopefully there will be a raft of great PR for Sound Transit following the opening of the line (the rinky-dinky Streetcar even got a ton of ink, after all). And plenty of people will get a look at the train coming into the Airport as they drive down I-5 or SR 518. Maybe that will be enough to tip the balance. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that, for a large slice of the electorate, light rail will be just as theoretical in 2010 as it is today.

All aboard the SMART

Posted on by Brian Bundridge

Another DMU corridor that is being closely looked at for lightly used or abandoned railroads is SMART – Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit, which in a interesting twist will be a joint rail/trail for the entire 70 mile, 14 station corridor. It’s last cost estimate in 2006 was $385 million dollars and around $6.8 million per mile with an annual operating cost of $14 million

The system itself will look at the Siemens Desiro Classic, same vehicle which is used on the Sprinter however will seek to have the FRA look at the vehicle to allow it to go it’s full potential speed of 90mph though the corridor will only be good for 79mph but it will open up a vast market of cheap, easy to maintain, rail transport instead of just seeking Bombardier coaches, cab cars, and expensive, loud, huge diesel locomotives.

What does that have to do with the Pacific Northwest? Well, we have an lightly used rail corridor – the BNSF Woodinville Subdivision which runs from Renton to Snohomish which is also very similar to the Sonoma corridor.

The Sonoma corridor will rehab all of the track with 136lb rail and concrete ties with connections to multiple transit agencies, including the Larkspur Ferry which would shuttle people to Downtown San Francisco, build 14 key stations, add a few additional sidings, and service will run every 30 minutes each direction.

As for the trail, it is expected to host 7,000 to 10,000 walkers, bicyclist, joggers, and others every day.

This should be very interesting to see what happens regarding this…

The Rossi Plan

Posted on by Frank Chiachiere

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Laura Onstot at the Weekly has the best rundown of Dino Rossi’s “transportation plan” that I’ve seen all week.

Jet skis for everyone! With John Edwards also angling for a jet-ski on last night’s Colbert Report, I think we can say this plan has broad bipartisan support:

Cell Phone Wars

Posted on by Frank Chiachiere

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The battle for silence on public transit is just getting started:

France’s SNCF rail company, determined to spare travelers cell phone cacophony, now operates “zen zones” in select compartments aboard intercity TGV bullet trains. The railway asks passengers seated in those areas to turn off their phones so everyone can “travel in a totally relaxing environment.”

Denmark, Germany and Finland – home to mobile phone giant Nokia Corp. – offer similar “quiet compartment” sanctuaries on trains.

That strategy didn’t work out so well in Sweden:

Last May, Sweden’s Stockholm Transport did away with “cell phone free zones” on subways, buses and commuter trains just 10 months after launching the spaces.

“It relied on people showing respect, but it didn’t really work,” spokesman Bjorn Holmberg said: Too many passengers wanted to use their commute to catch up on work calls, and some just felt safer with cell phones in hand.

Next up? Airplanes. The EU is getting closer to allowing cellphones in flight. Yikes.

Things that Make Me Happy

Posted on by Andrew Smith

On a per capita basis, Washington, Oregon and Idaho residents are using less gas than at any time since 1966, according to this Sightline study. We are using more in total, mostly just because there are so many more of us now. Of course, transit plays a part, as do more efficient cars:

Public transit ridership is up, Williams-Derry said. There’s a continual growth in compact urban developments or villages that discourage driving. And more people are opting for fuel-efficient cars. The Prius was the second best-selling new car in King, Snohomish, Kitsap and Pierce counties last year, according to Experian Automotive’s AutoCount Reports.

Are you driving less than before?

Things that Annoy Me

Posted on by Andrew Smith

Erica C Barnett at the Stranger wrote a piece lauding the Sierra Club for fighting against Prop. 1, and then turning around to lobby Sound Transit into put “station access funds” in place of park-and-rides for suburban stations. Station access funds could be spent on anything, including parking, but the use is decided by the local government and not prescribed by Sound Transit.

Nice idea, but I find this piece extremely self-congratulatory and completely off-mark, Erica wrote the piece as if Sound Transit 2 had passed already:

Environment Washington program director Bill LaBorde, who appeared alongside TCC’s regional policy director Rob Johnson at last week’s Sound Transit board meeting to praise the agency’s change of heart, agrees that “the Sierra Club has definitely been the most vocal” in pushing for improvements to Sound Transit’s plan.

Mike O’Brien, chairman of the Sierra Club’s Cascade Chapter, says the Club is “very encouraged” by Sound Transit’s statements at last week’s board meeting and is leaning toward getting behind a 2008 ballot measure, pending the actual release of a plan. Sometimes, it would seem, standing your ground is a better option than capitulating to the forces of “compromise”—even when your entire movement is lined up against you.

Most vocal of whom? Improvements? This could end up a complete waste of time, since it’s looking ever less certain we’ll get a ballot measure this year. In fact, I think the odds are slipping past even as I write this, if they haven’t already. I’ll congratulate the Sierra Club when they actually endorse a plan that passes.