Month: June 2009

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

While most major transit service improvements are dauntingly expensive, others are not.

Looking at King County Metro’s information presentation from a user-centered perspective reveals several immediate areas for improvement.

Here is the bus stop at 3rd and Union:

That yellow half-moon on the top of the stop is meant to convey information. You’d be forgiven for not noticing it, since it’s the same color as the sign directly below it. But, indeed, it’s a “Skip stop“:

In Seattle, WA, which has an extensive local and regional bus system operated by three different transit agencies, skip-stops are used on 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Avenues in the downtown area. Bus routes on 3rd Avenue are grouped into Blue and Yellow stops, while bus routes on 2nd and 4th Avenue are grouped into Red and White stops.

[Thank goodness for Wikipedia, incidentally, since this information does not appear to be available on Metro’s site.]

No where on the bus itself are the red, white, blue or yellow colors repeated, which makes one wonder what the point is. Maybe it’s a cue for the drivers.

Zooming in on that information kiosk, we see the downtown bus map:

Sorry for the poor quality. It would be nice if the map were available on Metro’s site, but alas, no (though one can view a map showing the borders of the ride-free area).

[Update: Joshua and Oran in the comments have pointed out that the map is available here.]

In any event, the map itself is rich with color (good!): we can see 1st Avenue routes in orange, routes up to Capitol Hill in green and purple, etc. Unfortunately, these colors are nowhere to be found anywhere else on the system. They’re not on the print brochures, they’re not on the website, and they’re definitely not on the buses themselves.

The next time a tourist walks up to me downtown and asks how to get to the Space Needle (assuming the Monorail’s out of service), it sure would be convenient to say, “any of the Orange buses will get you there” or “just get on any bus that pulls up at the yellow stop.”

The RapidRide routes are a good step in the right direction. But we don’t need 5 years and $100M to make Metro’s robust bus system easier for 1st-time riders. We can do it for the cost of printing new maps and signs.

I realize this is probably not a novel critique, and I’m sure that the nice ,well-meaning folks at Metro know exactly what I’m kvetching about, have heard it a thousand times, and don’t have the resources or authority to do anything about it. But as far as low-hanging fruit goes, it doesn’t get much simpler than this.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Phillip Langdon, writing about a Metro rail corridor in Arlington County, VA, notes, “the corridor, containing 7.6 percent of the county’s land area, generates 33 percent of its property tax revenue.” The corridor was transformed with the construction of the Metro.

Here’s why this is important: politicians love to increase their clout by increasing their tax base. Traditionally, this was done by annexing land further out in suburbia. But now, as gas prices increase and old-line, first-generation suburbs are increasingly boxed in, there’s no place to go but… up. Well, if you’re interested in increasing your tax base anyway.

This explains, in part, why Bellevue is so eager to develop the Bel-Red corridor in advance of light rail. It’s even more eager than Seattle, which faces NIMBY hurdles around the South Seattle light rail stations.

This point is buried in Knute Berger’s recent piece in Crosscut (which is worth reading despite its annoying trope of knocking down down strawmen).

As these old-line, inner-ring suburbs realize that the path to continued relevance is powered by an overhead catenary, they will densify. It’s already happening in America’s first suburb, Long Island (where I grew up), where county executives are pushing for revitalizing downtowns (thusfar on a skeptical public, though LI is in better shape than most, with a host of walkable downtowns and a robust commuter rail network).

(via GGW via MY)

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I have made my wife excited about ORCA by getting her a card and putting a bit of money on it. Instead of having to buy annoying little tickets all the time, she can just swipe her purse by the scanner, and she’s done. They even let her board free once or twice because the scanner was broken. She loves it.

However, her work just gave her a new stack of “Commuter Checks”. These are a benefit from her work to partially subsidize bus travel. But her administrator told her that she can’t use them for ORCA.

Confused, I called King County Metro to get the scoop. Apparently they have no way of keeping people from putting money in their e-purse using the Commuter Checks, then pulling real money back out of their ORCA cards. So in the end, my wife has to go back to the annoying little tickets.

One more thing. They’re planning on getting rid of the annoying little tickets. Asking the KC representative how they’ll deal with Commuter Checks then, he said he doesn’t think they’ve figured that out yet.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Mike Dukakis and Michael Moore both think GM should get into the rail business, a line of argument to which I’ve been sympathetic. Martin says it probably won’t work, and I think he’s probably right.

Building a efficient railcars means competing against manufacturers that have decades of experience, not to mention miles and miles of testing facilities. It”s a much more specialized field than it was, say, 30 years ago.

By the same token, one has to wonder why we need a domestic auto industry. Historically it was important so that we could re-tool the factories to build tanks and planes in the event of war. Is that even possible today? How many years would it take to re-tool an F-150 factory to start churning out F-35s, given the specialized computer systems and hardware found on each?

Photo of Japan Railway’s maglev test track via Wikipedia