News Round-Up: VMT Down

Posted on by Andrew Smith
AVE
Ave train in train, photo by beco.
  • According to the DJC and confirmed by Sound Transit, the Mountlake Terrace Station project has received nine bids, all under the engineer’s estimate. That’s one good thing about a terrible economy, especially for construction: projects are cheaper. The lowest bid was from a company called “Mid-Mountain Contractors”, who bid $17.7 million, the original estimate was $21.9 million.
  • Streets blog notes that vehicle miles travelled (VMT) was down 3.6% nationwide in 2008 compared to 2007. That’s a huge decline, but even larger than that decline is the decline in congestion: about 30% nationwide and 24% in the Seattle area. You can see the actual DOT data here. I bet the majority of the fall has to do with the dramatic fall in employment, which explains why congestion has fallen faster than VMT: congestion is worst during commute trips, and commuters needs jobs to go to.
  • On that same topic, Matt Yglesias believes the large reduction in congestion caused by a small reduction in trips shows that even a little congestion pricing can go a long way toward a reducing congestion. However, he goes one step farther and makes the claim that congestion pricing shouldn’t be something that drivers care more about than transit users:

    I live in a walkable, transit-accessible neighborhood in a central city. I don’t own a car and get around on foot, on bike, on bus, or on Metro. Consequently, it doesn’t really bother me if other people have unnecessarily long commutes. Ultimately, neither drivers nor non-drivers benefit from bad policy that causes unnecessary traffic jams and inconvenience, but it’s regular car commuters who are paying the highest price.

    I’m not sure that it’s completely correct to say that car commuters are paying the highest price. Both bus commuters and drivers are paying for congestion with their time, but congestion drives up the cost of bus service, meaning fewer buses.

  • NPR’s Morning addition had a story about how Spain’s AVE high speed rail is faster than an airplane, and how Spain built the system so quickly. I wanted to write “The Trains in Spain are faster than a Plane”, but I the npr broadcaster beat me to it. (H/T to tresarboles).

This is an open thread.

King Street Station Updates

Posted on by Brian Bundridge
King Street Station
King Street Station, Photo by Fußgänger

For those that don’t frequent the City of Seattle’s website, Seattle has been posting monthly updates on the progress of the King Street Station Renevation.

King Street Feb 2009 Update

King Street Jan 2009 Update

On a visual level, they have installed the new glass clock faces all around the tower. It is much cleaner and you can see through the glass, visually a nice effect. The station track improvements are almost completed with power switch machines soon to be installed on tracks 4-7.

Stimulus funding that would have accelerated the restoration project fell through, however it could be re-applied via the passenger rail investment stimulus (either the HSR or Amtrak portion).

Interior work in the passenger section will start in Spring 2009. Passengers will be moved outside to a temporary portable “office” to purchase tickets and baggage.

For more information on the station and its restoration, check out the website!

Interview with Kevin Desmond

Posted on by Martin H. Duke

Metro is continuing their media campaign to plead for some revenue help.  In 2010, we could be looking at cuts of 800,000-1m annual service hours, or about 75,000 riders per day out of approximately 400,000.

And the campaign’s going multimedia!

Kevin Desmond doesn’t break a ton of new ground in the interview, but it’s good to hear it straight from the top.

There’s reason to hope the PSRC allocation will at least plug the $29m hole in 2009 and prevent service cuts in September, but sales taxes aren’t supposed to recover to 2008 levels till 2013.  It’s pretty clear that the current Metro business model is unsustainable, since its solvency depends on robust growth coupled with low fuel prices.

Canada Line Opening in August

Posted on by Andrew Smith
South end of the Canada Line at Richmond-Brighouse Station
Richmond-Brighouse station, photo by indyinsane

The Vancouver area’s newest Sky Train addition, the Canada Line, will open a couple of months ahead of schedule: August instead of late November. The Canada Line was built in two parts, the first is a mostly cut-and-cover, partly deep-bored subway from Downtown Vancouver to almost the Fraser River, with seven new subway stations and one new subway platform at an existing station. The second part is a mostly elevated segment from the Fraser River toward the Vancouver Airport and Richmond, with eight more stations. The total line length is 19 km (11.8 miles).

All-in-all, it’s been pretty impressive how the line has gone from approval to near completion in just over four years, but obviously the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics have helped the project get quick approval. The $1.5 billion price tag for the line is mind-bogglingly cheap. For comparison, the University Link project has a $1.8 billion price tag.  However, the line’s construction has not been without controversy, especially because the cut-and-cover construction for the subway line has much more invasive on the surface than the deep-bored solution that Sound Transit is using for our subway tunnels.

The Canada line is also a lower-capacity system compared to both Link and to Sky Train’s Expo and Millenium Lines. Canada Line’s station platforms are only 40 m (131 ft) long, and can only accomodate one long car at a time. For comparison, Portland’s Max has platforms that are 60 m (200 ft) long, and Link’s platforms are 110 m (370 ft) long. Portland’s stations and trains feel short, I anticapate that the Canada line will run into capacity problems in the future.

Even having said all of that, it’s remarkable that Translink, Vancouver and BC have been able to build a line that’s mostly underground and elevated with 16 stations with a price tag in the $100~$150 million per mile range. Shows that they are definitely doing something different up there than we are here.

The Microsoft Garage

Posted on by Frank Chiachiere

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Thousands of years from now, anthropologists will excavate the new, giant Microsoft garage, and assume that it must have been some kind of temple or burial chamber of some kind. After all, why else would a civilization build such an immense, underground structure out in the hinterlands, miles from the city center.

And, of course, it is a temple of sorts — to the internal combustion engine.

Comment Policy

Posted on by Martin H. Duke

In response to some really ugly threads the past couple of weeks, we’ve decided to institute our first (brief) comment policy, which you can read here.

With startlingly few exceptions, our commenters all bring something intelligent to say and tend to do it with class and erudition.  Even our “trolls” like to give us a bit of a hard time, but at the same time offer smart critiques.

That’s not something you can say about, for instance, Horse’s Ass, where the quality of the posts is not at all matched by what goes on in the threads.  We’d like to keep the tone of our threads the way it’s been historically.

PSRC Transit Projects List

Posted on by Andrew Smith

The PRSC has released the preliminary list of projects that will receive FTA grants from the stimulus bill in our area. Here’s a map of the projects, and here’s the pdf of the list. There’s a lot of money for new buses, $1 million for the monorail (!!!) and even $341,000 for preventative maintence on the SLU streetcar. There’s $4.6 million for North Link acceleration and $4.6 million for track and signals on the M street to Lakewood line that Sounder and Amtrak want to install as part of the Point Defiance Bypass.

Funding by agency and project below the fold.

Continue reading “PSRC Transit Projects List”

Taxing Authority for Transportation Agencies

Posted on by Andrew Smith
At capacity
Metro Buses Queued in the Tunnel, Photo by Oran

One of the topics current King County Council Member Larry Phillips discussed in the Q&A that we had with him last week at our meet-up was the possibility of finding future funding sources for King County’s Metro. Metro, like many other state and local agencies, faces a massive budget crisis and may be forced to cut service in order to make up the future revenue deficit. Metro is without any way to raise new money: Metro, along with Snohomish’s Community Transit has currently reached its state-allowed limit on its taxing authority: nine-tenths of one percent sales tax collection. Even if the people of King County wanted to tax themselves to provide more bus service, state law wouldn’t allow them to.

At first it seems bizarre that Olympia wouldn’t allow voters to tax themselves to provide more bus service, but it makes a little sense when you think about it. Until very recently, no transit agency had reached the nine-tenths of a percent allocation, and before I-695 passed in 1999, these agencies were allowed to collect the motor vehicle excise tax (MVET). And it’s only now that any transit agency has faced a potential service cut.

Phillips mentioned two additional funding sources Metro could potentially go after if the state allowed. The first is the MVET that Ron Sims was pushing around the time the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel plan was announced. The second option would be to allow some or all of the taxing authority given to county ferry districts – a property tax of 75¢ per $1000 assessed value – to be used for transit by the voter’s approval. The MVET has been a wildly unpopular tax, and attempting to use that for transit might be a disaster, but the property tax seems reasonable.

Currently the King County Ferry District collects 5.5¢ per $1000 assessed value, worth a little more  more than $18 million a year for King County, and it looks like the Ferry District in King County couldn’t ever need the entire 75¢. There are counties where ferries are crucial transportation connections, such as Island County, where state Senate Transportation Chair Mary Margarett Haugen (D-Camano Island) lives, and they may use the whole allotment. But doesn’t it make sense for the state to allow counties to use that 75¢ taxing authority on any transportation project they need? King County may not want a lot of ferries, but the voters may decide they could use more roads, buses or rail. The ability to implement a levy to build a specific project or pass a permanent tax increase to fund transit service seems like something the voters should have the right to do. Fortunately there is a bill going through Olympia right now that would enable exactly this: letting the county use some of the ferry taxing authority for transit.

The transportation leaders in Olympia, Rep. Judy Clibborn (D-Mercer Island) and Sen Haugen among others, have made it very clear that they expect the Greater Seattle area and it’s outlying communities to fund their own transportation improvements. The state relies nearly entirely on gas tax revenue to fund roads proejcts, and with people driving less, choosing more efficient cars and taking transit more, the revenues are far short of paying for all the needs across the state. That’s one of the main reasons why they pushed RTID, the now-defunct regional roads agency, so heavily and why they are fighting for “governance reform”, also known as stealing transit money to pay for roads. If Olympia expects Seattle and its neighbors to solve their own transportation problems, it needs to stop trying to push their preferred plans down onto us. I would have hoped in light of Prop. 1 first failing by a large margin with roads and transit and then passing by an even larger margin with just transit, Olympia would realize the voters here don’t agree with their vision of what our region’s transportation system should look like. Instead, they ought to provide tools to the local governments here, and allow the voters to approve the transportation plans that they want in their own communities. The 75¢ per $1000 property tax set aside for ferries seems like great tool for this purpose.