June 2009 – Page 2 – Seattle Transit Blog

20 Days

June 27, 2009June 26, 2009 by Martin H. Duke

Link at Night, by Steven De Vight — "Link at Night", by Steven De Vight

In 2020, Sound Transit is projected to open light rail service to Northgate, Downtown Bellevue, and Highline Community College.

The elevators in the Beacon Hill Station are supposed to take 20 seconds to travel between the platform and the surface.

Link will operate 20 hours a day every day but Sunday.

Some random flotsam from the internet:

Hugeasscity gets just a little bit suggestive about the Link opening. And they say we at STB love rail too much!
Trimet wants to exempt Portland’s buses from the Fareless Square. They figure the free rail options downtown are good enough.
Sound Transit CEO Joni Earl is spreading the light rail gospel in Honolulu. Attention Hawaii light rail boosters: STB staff speaking fees are extremely reasonable.

Delaying The Transpo Bill

June 27, 2009 by Frank Chiachiere

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

An interesting disagreement has broken out between The Obama Administration and Congress over the next transportation bill. The 5-year bill is due for reauthorization in September. Obama (and Secretary LaHood) want to extend it 18 months, presumably to take a more comprehensive look after the elections. We discussed this on my weekly podcast, for anyone who’s interested.

Congressional Leaders on the transpo committee — Democrat Jim Oberstar and Republican John Mica (a rare pro-rail Republican) — don’t want to wait.

We don’t know exactly why the administration is keen to wait. All they’ve said is that they want to take a more comprehensive look at the bill in 18 months time.

18 months, of course, takes us to December 2010, which is conveniently right after the 2010 midterm elections, which might make it politically easier to raise the gas tax. Theoretically, the economy should have picked up some steam by then, so the idea of raising taxes could be more palatable.

Paradoxically, though, if the economy picks up, the price of gas will pick up with it. It’s already back to $2.65/gal nationwide, and over $3/gal here on the West Coast. By 2010, we could be back to $4 territory, as increasing demand pushes up against supply. I’m skeptical that Congress will be able to find that exact sweet spot, when the economy has improved enough to make raising taxes possible, but hasn’t improved so much that the price of gas makes raising the gas tax in particular politically feasible.

One final point on this: the U.S. government is now the majority shareholder of General Motors. GM is pinning its comeback on the electric Chevy Volt. The easiest and most effective way to sell the Volt is through high gas prices. If you’re Obama, and you want to sell thousands of Volts, there’s really only one way to make that happen: higher gas prices.

Update:The Transport Politic notes that, according to Sen. Boxer, the new bill is probably DOA in the Senate anyway.

What It’s Come To

June 27, 2009 by Frank Chiachiere

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I understand that it’s really hard to rent apartments or sell condos in this market, but has it really come to this?

This is the ad for the Chloe Apartments at 14th & Union. Chloe is a dog. QED, you should rent this apartment. Or something.

Actually, I think it’s more like, “rent this apartment or the puppy gets it.”

Could AIG Have Impacted DC Metro Maintenance?

June 26, 2009June 26, 2009 by Ben Schiendelman

Last October, we discussed the fact that AIG’s failure cost some transit systems huge amounts of money. In agreements between transit agencies and banks, the banks would purchase transit vehicles, and the agencies would pay regularly in lease agreements. AIG insured the transit agencies’ payments – so when they failed, some of these banks used a clause in their contract to ask for immediate payment of the full vehicle costs.

In March, PBS quoted Carol Kissal of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority on the potential of these payments: “So this would mean, you know, no maintenance on track, delay, cuts in service. Repairs would go to the wayside.” It’s unclear if any payments to banks have been made as a result of AIG’s insolvency, but there is a question here – could last week’s accident be an indirect effect of our financial system’s mess?

The NTSB has said a test train at the location of the stopped train last week wasn’t detected by the automatic train control system. It’s not clear yet that maintenance money was an issue here, but it’s clear WMATA doesn’t have the money they need to keep running at their current capacity – they say they need $12 billion over the next ten years for maintenance, and they have nowhere near that available.

In good news for us, Sound Transit plans for operations and maintenance somewhat indefinitely. Part of the funding for Sound Transit 2 is operations and maintenance money, and even if we didn’t expand our system again in several decades, when the Sound Transit 2 taxes were rolled back, the Sound Move portion would continue to fund maintenance for Link.

22 Days

June 25, 2009June 25, 2009 by Martin H. Duke

Municipal Street Railway Opening, Ballard Bridge, 1918, c/o Seattle Municipal Archives

In 1922, GM President Alfred P. Sloan established a unit to investigate replacing streetcars nationwide with GM-manufactured buses, cars and trucks – GM was losing tens of millions at the time and felt this was the only way to expand their market. The same year, Electro-Motive Engineering Company was founded, which later became GM’s division for the manufacture of locomotives – including those used on Sounder today.

Some news items from the last few days:

Construction on Second Ave. in Downtown Seattle is rearranging many bus stops there.
There’s a serious effort to turn all but one lane of Bell St. into a linear park.
LA broke ground on their BRT Orange Line extension.
There’s a meeting in Tacoma tonight about extending Sounder to Lakewood, specifically on some crossings in the Dome district. Opponents demand a more expensive bridge option that preserves parking. (H/T: Douglas)
Photographer Joseph Songco, who is chronicling the “path of destruction” of light rail construction, is part of the free Artopia exhibition, Saturday, in Georgetown. Via Damon Agnos at Seattle Weekly. Preview Songco’s work here.
Mayor Nickels has proposed that, effective January 1st, the $25-per-employee head tax be repealed. It generates about $4.7m per year for roads and sidewalks, including transit-friendly road improvements, although it had not been allocated to any particular project.

Although driving jobs out of Seattle to less transit-friendly places is always a problem, there are two things to really like about this tax. First, it is waived for any employee that doesn’t drive alone to work, discouraging the commute mode that generates the most external costs. Secondly,while it may be true that higher-than-expected parking tax revenues offset the revenue loss, there’s a huge sidewalk backlog in North Seattle that could use that money. Seattle is the level of government where generic transportation funds are most likely to be spent progressively, and it’s a shame to take money out of this fund.

Editorial: Why Not Electric Cars?

June 24, 2009June 24, 2009 by Ben Schiendelman

I hear a lot about electric cars. There’s the Tesla Roadster already, little “neighborhood electric vehicles,” and a lot of “soons,” like Aptera. With those in mind, why even write a transit blog? What’s the point, technology is advancing so fast, we’re all going to have cheap electric sports cars as they’re mass produced, right?

Simply put: I doubt it.

I’m not going to get into the urban planning issues here, and I’ll just point out quickly that we aren’t presented with anything like the full costs of cars today: in everything from the real estate costs of the land reserved for parking, to the funding of our highways (and most of it wasn’t gas taxes, something we’ll write more about later), to the innumerable environmental and health costs.

What I’m interested in is helping dispel the idea that affordable electric cars are around the corner. I’ll keep it short. Continue reading “Editorial: Why Not Electric Cars?”

Route 7 Stop Consolidation

June 24, 2009June 23, 2009 by Martin H. Duke

Metro is gathering comments on the Route 7 stop consolidation. To accelerate the crawl that is Route 7, at all times of day, Metro wants to cut from 107 stops to 76. Route 7 will otherwise be untouched by the sweeping Southeast Seattle service change.

They’re collecting comments through the end of July and seem to be targeting the September service change. It’s a change long overdue.

What other routes could use a stop diet?

Life and Death on 23rd Ave

June 23, 2009 by Frank Chiachiere

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I’ve recently moved back to the CD after a few years away, and I’m riding on 23rd Avenue more, both in my car and on the bus. 23rd has been beaten up pretty badly by the buses over the years (buses distribute all their weight to a few points of contact with the road, and thus tend to beat up the street worse than cars). As you can see, the city recently made the outer lanes concrete instead of asphalt to help ameliorate this:

View Larger Map

(Incidentally, this is a nice example of why we need to look at transportation holistically — the buses are running on SDOT’s right-of-way, but SDOT needs to spend extra to maintain the road so buses can use it. We’re all in this together, in other words.)

Still, 23rd is kind of a mess. As hugeasscity recently pointed out, the right-of-way is way too narrow for a 4-lane street. It should be like MLK Way, with one lane in each direction and a center turn lane. the nice thing about Central Seattle is that, Rainier aside, it’s actually a very nice grid layout, meaning that traffic can very efficiently re-flow to other N-S arterials: 12th, 14th, MLK, 31st, etc.

[Yes, it would be slower on 23rd, but that’s not a bad thing. I have to sheepishly admit that I often drive a few MPH over the speed limit on 23rd, and judging by the speed indicator signs set up there, I’m not the only one.]

A narrower 23rd with wider sidewalks would be a huge boon to the pedestrian life in the are (as hugeasscity notes). It would probably make it more attractive for someone to buy the old Philly’s Steak building , or for someone to open up a corner grocer at 23rd and Cherry, either of which would be great for street life.

Art Brut Loves Public Transportation

June 23, 2009June 23, 2009 by John Jensen

European indie rockers Art Brut don’t live in the fast lane, because they take the train. Check out this fun song sent in by reader Josh Mahar. We need more indie rockers singing about transit!

Some fun riffs on how transit is often slower than driving. But hey, I like browsing the Internet with my phone while busing to work. What do you do when you’re riding?

Good and Bad: Point Defiance Bypass Gets $6 Million, but FlexPerks Amtrak Discount Cancelled

June 23, 2009June 23, 2009 by Ben Schiendelman

Transportation Choices Coalition’s blog has noticed a motion (PDF) for the next Sound Transit board meeting about Point Defiance Bypass. Apparently, WSDOT and Sound Transit jointly applied for a $6 million federal grant to help fund work to extend Sounder to Lakewood. The project is still short quite a bit, but this gets them closer.

Update: I wonder if we’ve written about this before. I don’t see anything about it, but it looks like this has been expected for a while.

In less pleasant news, we’ve learned that the FlexPerks program no longer offers a 15% discount on Amtrak Cascades travel for U-Pass and FlexPass holders. The program offically ended at the end of the year, but the coupon code continued working through the end of March. According to Metro, their reduced staffing no longer allows them to administer the program, and they let it quietly die.