Gabriel Campaniaro aka the Seattle Sketcher, who I previously blogged about here, has a blog at the Seattle Times now, and is doing a Link Countdown of his own. The artwork is beautiful and that is a really great use of time on the bus.
This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
I may have mentioned this before, but Phillip Longman’s Washington Monthly article on freight rail infrastructure is fantastic. It includes this quote:
Another notorious set of choke points is in Chicago, Americas rail capital, which is visited by some 1,200 trains a day. Built in the nineteenth century by noncooperating private companies, lines coming from the East still have no or insufficient connections with those coming from the West. Consequently, thousands of containers on their way elsewhere must be unloaded each day, “rubber-wheeled” across the citys crowded streets by truck, and reloaded onto other trains. It takes forty-eight hours for a container to travel five miles across Chicago, longer than it does to get there from New York. This entire problem could be fixed for just $1.5 billion, with benefits including not just faster shipping times and attendant economic development, but drastically reduced road traffic, energy use, and pollution.
PBS’s News Hour had a short piece last week on the Chicago bottleneck that’s worth checking out:
PBS puts the costs at $2.5B, but either way, it’s a steal to fix such an obvious bottleneck in the country’s freight infrastructure
In 1978, the first major post-WWII light rail system in North America opened in Edmonton, Alberta. Like Link (since Joni Earl), it was under budget! Interestingly, it’s also high floor.
1978 also marked the year that the PCC cars were retired on MBTA’s D branch, and the horrible, awful Boeing light rail vehicles completely took over the line. They broke down constantly, despite being marketed by Boeing-Vertol as the “standard light rail vehicle“. That didn’t fly… so to speak.
Who’s excited? Should we try to throw a party on a train?
As reported on The Transport Politic, Portland’s new Eastside streetcar extension will receive $75 million from the feds. Since the project is expected to cost $127 million, the Obama administration’s contribution will pay for more than half of the project. Good news for Portland!
Back in Seattle, while we were just talking about the First Hill streetcar this morning (also able to receive Small Start funding), but ever since the Viaduct tunnel decision came down there hasn’t been much discussion about the 1st Ave/Central streetcar line. City leaders agree that now’s the time to invest in our infrastructure, but where’s the progress along 1st Ave?
Capitol Hill Seattle is arguing for a 12th Ave alignment for the First Hill streetcar. The post is a good argument for streetcars in general, but I’ve never found the 12th Ave alignment that compelling. Sure, 12th Avenue is an up-and-coming area with plenty of development opportunities on the Central District (eastern) side, and the streetcar could really anchor the district. And I agree with CHS that the Broadway alignment is not the best choice. But I see three big reasons why a First Hill routing, particularly, the Madison and Boren routing shown in Oran’s awesome map, is preferable.
Sound Transit originally had a station planned for First Hill, and the first “preferred” alignment for North Link in 2004 included a station on First Hill between Westlake and Capitol Hill. However, preliminary engineering found a ton of potential problems with such an alignment, mainly due to soil conditions under the hill and the close turn-around south from Westlake and back north toward Capitol Hill. The station was dropped, and Sound Transit added the streetcar to ST2 to ensure First Hill would retain a rail connection to the rest of the region. So First Hill is sort of “owed” the line, and the Madison-Boren routing covers the largest portion of area, providing the best replacement for a station there.
First Hill already has a ton of jobs at the hospitals there, and many more at the many clincs and the handful of medical office towers. If you take a look at Oran’s amazing map, you can see that most of the hospitals, as well as the huge office office on Madison, would be within a couple of blocks of the Boren-Madison alignment. Along with the high-rise apartment buildings in that neighborhood, there is already the potential to be all-day activity on the street that could make the First Hill streetcar get a ton of riders.
First Hill also has one of the best opportunities for transit oriented development in the city. Outside of the low-lying areas in and around downtown, it’s the only area in the city with high-rise zoning. A number of fairly serious high-rises went up in that district during the last development boom, and a streetcar there could drive more development for the next cycle. Since First Hill is currently about half-filled with parking lots, there’s still a ton of space for new TOD and with the higher zoning – some areas as high as 300 feet – the potential development in square footage terms is vastly higher there than on 12th Avenue. The 12th Ave line would also barely touch the massive re-development of Yesler Terrace that will put thousands of units of housing along with a million or so square feet of office space, but going up Boren would ensure connectivity to most of that neighborhood.
First Hill is just too important a part of Seattle to not have a rail connection to the rest of the city. With high-rise zoning, the TOD opportunities are huge, and the area’s already a major employment center. Veering a bit West of Broadway can help the First Hill Streetcar get more bang for the buck and fulfill Sound Transit’s promise for the neighborhood. 12th Avenue can wait.
Once again, our meetup will be at the Ocean City Restaurant in Chinatown (609 S. Weller St.) We’ll start at 6pm on Monday, May 4.
We will once again have surprise guests.
And again, to reserve a spot toss in $5 / head via paypal (button below) and let us know at seattletransitblog@gmail.com. That money will be used for appetizers and any other expenses related to the function. We also ask that you actually get dinner there while you’re at it, since they were nice enough to get us the space for free. It’s inexpensive and delicious.
If you really don’t want to go the advance payment route you can pay $10 at the door.
Deadline for registration is Saturday, May 2.
In 1979 Pierce Transit was formed when Pierce County voters approved a 0.3% sales tax increase for public transit. PT currently levels a .6% sales tax and operates more than 50 routes, paratransit, and vanpools as well partnering with Sound Transit to operate Tacoma Link and some Sound Transit Express buses.
Also in 1979, Amtrak introduced the Superliner rail cars on the Empire Builder from Seattle to Chicago and later that same year, Amtrak discontinued the North Coast Hiawatha from Seattle to Minneapolis.
I posted on this before, and I just want to remind folks that on Friday, TCC is hosting a town hall on the future of Puget Sound’s transportation landscape. This is part 1 of a three part series – visioning first, then examining the options, and third meeting with federal, state and local leaders who can help us get there. You definitely shouldn’t miss it! This is a great opportunity to stress the importance of sustainable transportation.
Part 1 will be in the Bertha Knight Landes room in City Hall, from 12:00pm-1:30pm. That’s the really big room right off the lobby. I hope to see you there!
There’s been a lot of discussion around the House amendment that puts Seattle taxpayers on the hook for viaduct-replacement cost overruns. The Senate did carry the amendment through to the final bill, though it may not be possible for the state to enforce that provision. Some even wondered what it would mean if other municipalities had to pay for their overruns, as of course they don’t. The whole thing had me wondering, how is it that “most projects” have overruns?
It seems like if you know that most big transportation projects have overruns, you would make a plan for the likelihood of overruns and factor that into the cost. We do exactly this in the software world, and Office, the product I work on, takes as long to complete (three years) and has far more people working on it than a tunnel under downtown, so it seems madness to me that “most projects” could come in over budget if planning for likely overruns was built in to the cost early. Well here comes Danny Westneat:
[A] professor at Oxford University in England has done a compelling series of studies trying to get at why big public-works projects such as bridges, tunnels and light-rail systems almost always turn out to be far more costly than estimated. “It cannot be explained by error,” sums up one of his papers, matter-of-factly. “It is best explained by strategic misrepresentation — that is, lying.” … It started seven years ago, when he published the first large study of cost overruns in 258 mega-transportation projects. He found that nine out of 10 came in over budget, and that the average cost overrun was nearly 30 percent. Rail systems had an average cost escalation of 45 percent.
Emphasis added. It’s worth reading the whole thing.
At least in the case of the this SR-99 tunnel, we have a decent idea of what exactly needs to be done. Bored tunnels have become very common, and the technology for building them is well developed. The price tag of the overall project went down not because of “value engineering” but rather because the streetcars and bus improvements were dropped off, so its not exactly like the politicians changed the estimate to fit the budget, but rather they changed the project. So I don’t know how likely overruns are, but this might be worth thinking back to if they arise.