It sort of blows my mind that the town I grew up in back East — some of the oldest suburbs in America, whatever that’s worth — is trying to embrace sustainability and new urbanism.
Of course, it makes perfect sense. Long Island’s got dozens of walkable downtowns that are just steps from a train station (grade separated, heavy rail) where trains leave every 20 minutes or so and get you into midtown Manhattan in less than half an hour. And, just like where Goldy grew up, people walk to the train station. The procession of men with trench coats and briefcases walking a mile or more home from the station at 6pm was (is!) quite a sight.
Today Sound Transit released the bids for the twin tunnels connecting the future Capitol Hill station with Central Link. The lowest bid is $153.6 million, $20.7 million or 12% under Sound Transit’s estimate of $174.3 million. These are much shorter than the tunnels that will connect the UW with Capitol Hill station.
This is good news, of course, but I want to talk about what’s going on here a little more. These estimates are generally quite accurate when they’re made – but most of these costs fluctuate with the construction market, as costs for materials like steel and concrete change over time.
There’s no way for Sound Transit to know what’s going to happen to these costs – if there were, they’d be the most effective commodities traders in the world! But this goes both ways. At the beginning of Sound Move, for instance, most materials and real estate were much less expensive than they are now – but during the late 90s and early 2000s, construction cost inflation was far higher than the consumer price index, the number we normally associate with inflation. Today’s estimates were largely made at the peak of the real estate boom, but as the markets have been rebounding, future contracts may not see double digit percentage savings.
I’m not sure of the timeline for the larger tunnel bids, I’d just caution that they may not see these savings. Regardless, this is great news.
Ben has editorialized before that ridership numbers at this point, even if accurate, aren’t much to get excited about one way or the other. And as Scott Gutierrez reports, they’ve recently had some technical problems with retrieving data from automatic passenger counters (though the counters themselves are still counting). Furthermore, these numbers are crippled by suffering from a small sample size. Lastly, when trying to compare this to any other transportation line, you have to strip out seasonal variations for things like special events downtown and school being in or out of session.
All that said, I can’t help myself but to watch these numbers, which must be reported monthly to the FTA (with a two-m0nth time lag):
July:
Mean Weekday: 12,357
Mean Saturday: 31,861 (obviously distorted by opening day)
Mean Sunday: 28,015
August:
Mean Weekday: 14,437
Mean Saturday: 15,089
Mean Sunday: 11,620
Sound Transit spokesman Geoff Patrick tells me the August numbers are likely to be revised, and that given the technical issues we’re not going to get reports quite as frequently in future.
To help make these numbers meaningful, Link trains make about 248 one-way trips a day, about 48 in the peak direction during peak hours, and there are 148 seats per 2-car train. You can do the division.
Last year’s Snowpocalypse introduced a problem that the Seattle area hasn’t had to deal with in a long time – frozen switches.
As temperature decreases, even rail can be affected. While trains themselves aren’t typically blocked by as little snow as we had, the switches that allow trains to change tracks can eventually freeze – keeping trains from switching direction or coming into and out of service at a maintenance facility.
The best way to avoid this is with switch heaters that melt snow and ice, keeping switches operational. They can come in a few different configurations – where there’s space, you can pull up a trailer to blow hot air on a switch, but in the city, or on an elevated trackway like Link, heaters need to be permanently installed. Link was built without switch heaters – they’re normally not required for our climate, but last winter indicates they may be necessary in the future, so Sound Transit intends to install them sooner rather than later.
The first delivery of University Link light rail vehicles is expected to be in October of 2010, and before that, the Operations and Maintenance Facility yard must be expanded to support the new trains. This expansion is planned already in a contract with Railworks (PDF). Our sources tell us that this contract may be amended to add switch heater installation in the key places Link would need it to continue operation during a major snowstorm – in the base, mainly, and at Airport Station. The switch in the stub tunnel north of Westlake is protected from the elements.
Keep in mind that last year’s snowstorm was a 20-year event. This winter is expected to be mild in comparison – and these switch heaters would be installed before October 2010.
The final $90m of the $501m, four-year Metro budget hole is covered by a 9% route-by-route service suspension. As we reported yesterday, any potential savings discovered by the ongoing audit are likely to reduce this figure to as low as 4%.
The first important point is that since these reductions are “suspensions” rather than “cuts,” restoring them when revenue recovers will not be subject to the 40/40/20 rule, thus allowing relatively quick restoration of the status quo.
With the recent news of Wisconsin approval of 2 new Talgo train sets with an option of 2 more and Oregon also looking at purchasing 2 additional train sets, Talgo USA has updated their website with information on what is available for the U.S. market.
Due to the economy, ridership on Metro and Sound Transit buses is down. Less riders means less farebox revenue, compounding the terrible financial situation that local agencies find themselves in mostly due to plummeting sales tax revenue.
King County Metro will help Seattle plow 3rd ave, a major bus corridor in the city, during severe snow storms.
The excellent Transport Politic blog does some research and concludes that turnstiles at rail stations are usually not cost effective. That’s why Link, for example, uses fare inspectors instead of gates.
If you want to keep yourself fashionable and store your ORCA card in a nice holder, you’ll be happy to hear that London’s Oyster card has the exact dimensions of our card — so any Oyster sleeve work great for ORCA. (Thanks litlnemo!)
Over the past week we’ve plugged $357m out of Metro’s $501m budget hole in County Executive Kurt Triplett’s Metro budget plan, which will serve as the basis for what the Council decides in November. Now comes the part that’s more painful to riders.
But first, those famed audit results. Aside from a $105m surplus in the fleet replacement fund, no findings have been announced prior to the September 1 release date. Unlike the Council and Phillips plans, Triplett has not included a guess on the savings in his plan. That is, any audit savings in excess of the fleet surplus can be used to offset some of the other sacrifices in the budget, presumably by bringing service suspensions from 9% to about the 5% range.
The other big revenue raiser is a 25 cent fare increase. Due to prior Council action, the fares are scheduled to go up in January 2010 to $2.75 two-zone peak, $2.25 one-zone peak, $2.00 off-peak, and 75 cents for youth, seniors, and the disabled. (This would mean that only the youth fare was unchanged.) Triplett is proposing an additional across the board 25 cent increase in 2011, bringing fares to $3.00, $2.50, $2.25, and $1.00 respectively. This will generate $12m a year, and $36m over the next four due to the delayed implementation. More below the jump. Continue reading “The Triplett Metro Plan (IV): Fare Increases, Audits”
I was tempted to write a detailed takedown of Philip Lucas’s absurd and condescending Route 7 travelogue (on the front page!) of the Times, but haven’t had a spare moment at work. And anyway, I’ve resolved to stop whining about the Times’s project to seek out each and every Rainier Valley resident who isn’t riding light rail.
The only thing I’d add to Ms. Barnett’s list of reasons people still ride the bus is that Link can be hard to figure out. If you’re not the kind of person that relishes figuring out complexity, especially if you don’t have strong English skills, sticking with what you do have figured out has very strong appeal.
On a related note, I’ll be interested to see how ridership changes when Metro becomes as expensive or more expensive than Link, which will happen for working-age adults starting in January.
In Part II of this report I covered $146m of the four-year plan to cover Metro’s $501m budget gap. Today, I’ll briefly go over some financial pieces of the puzzle before discussing the tax element, all below the jump.
