Today Pierce Transit resumes its “not on our bus” program, involving uniformed personnel increasing their presence on buses and around bus stops. It is designed to cut down on “unlawful and disruptive conduct on bus routes, at transit centers, and at bus stops near certain high schools.”
This is the second time they’ve done this. Last year’s effort yielded 750 “contacts” with 68 riders receiving 90 day bans from Pierce Transit. Banned riders are posted in the operator’s lobby and the historical recidivism rate is only 3%.
Tacoma has been kicking around the idea of adding a Link stop at Commerce & 11th, which would cut the stop spacing in that stretch from about 1/2 mile to about 1/4 mile. The Tacoma Daily Index has lots of detail on this project, which would cost about $135,000.
You can watch the Council Study Session on this subject right now (scroll all the way down to “Tacoma City Council Study Session”).
After a Metro audit recommended doing away with the trolleybus system to save money, there’s been a lot of anxiety about its future and questions about the conclusion that the system is, in fact, more expensive. In response to these concerns, the King County Council commissioned a detailed study on the cost/benefit tradeoffs associated with trolleys. Last week Dow Constantine’s office transmitted a plan to conduct this study.
In this kind of thing assumptions and ground rules are all-important. After considering a wide array of technologies, Metro has narrowed down the comparison to diesel-electric hybrids vs. trolleys. Conventional diesels, battery electrics, compressed natural gas (CNG), and fuel cell systems were dismissed for various reasons.
The evaluation criteria fall into five categories: environmental impacts, likely to favor the trolleys; scheduling impacts, likely to favor the hybrids; cost advantage, which the audit gave to hybrids but is disputed by trolley proponents; and both the impact on both state/federal grants and existing legal agreements, which I can’t even begin to assess.
Importantly, the cost study will include a sensitivity analysis of energy costs, which will capture the benefits of relatively stable-cost electricity. The study is expected to begin this fall and release a draft report early next year. Some other thoughts about the trolley argument here.
If you last checked this blog Friday around lunchtime, you should go and read the substantially revised SR520 post from Friday afternoon. It’s of great interest to anyone interested in effective transit over the new bridge.
City Administrator Rich Conrad said Metro has agreed to supply a van and assist the city with the task of searching for a securing parking. So far, the city has agreed to provide volunteer drivers…
The need for a north-south shuttle stemmed from lack of parking at the two-story Park and Ride, which was expanded more than two years ago in an effort to add more parking. Parking spots increased from 250 in 2006 to 447 in 2008 after a two-year, $19.1 million expansion project.
What’s curious about the article, an earlier article on the subject, and a related editorial in the Mercer Island Reporter, is the failure to even mention existing Metro bus service. The 204 provides mid-day and weekend service in that corridor, while the 202 covers both directions in the peak and goes on to Downtown Seattle. In either case, headways are roughly a half-hour. Both are middling routes by Eastside performance standards, a little below average but by no means dogs.
I suspect that making the shuttle distinct from Metro may save money by not having to pay into Metro’s relatively high cost structure. It’s elsewhere referred to as a “vanpool experiment” and there’s talk of volunteer drivers, so it’s clear they’re looking to do it on the cheap. On the other hand, not integrating with the network is only going to make it harder for people to find out about it and make it less reliable.
According to Beacon BIKES! representative Dylan Ahearn, the group thinks the bike master plan is too focused on creating a neighborhood-to-neighborhood bike network that caters primarily to the commuter crowd. His group wants to create an intra-neighborhood network that helps people (especially children) ride safely between Beacon Hill destinations.
“When I’m biking around the neighborhood, I try and imagine whether it’d be safe my five-year-old daughter to ride on the road,” said Ahearn. “If we can [create facilities that] accomplish that, we’ll have succeeded.”
As mascot of the casual cyclists, I have to say “Bravo”. I don’t begrudge the regional trails and other improvements that serious bicyclists have won for themselves, but improvements to one- and two-mile trips can open up a whole new population to bikes. That builds the political coalition, but more importantly makes bicycling safer for everyone by building the presumption of drivers that there are bicycles around.
In my feeble experience cycling, I’ve found that it’s that one-to-two mile threshold under which it’s faster than taking transit, give or take the specific circumstances of the trip. That kind of mobility is important for people looking to go without a car, or a family going to one car. Long trips and long commutes are about recreation and exercise; the shorter ones are about practical mobility. There’s nothing wrong with the former, but it’s the latter where the masses are.
[Note: This post is a substantial revision of two posts that were accidentally written based on outdated materials and taken down. If you did read those, you’ll find that the situation for SR520 buses has gotten substantially worse.]
Last week’s SR520 meeting had lots of pictures of how Montlake Blvd is to be configured when the project is done. The plan includes a transit lane in each direction to improve connectivity between the interchange and the Husky Stadium light rail stop, absolutely critical if the Montlake Flyer Stops are removed to save money and reduce the overall width of the interchange. The bad news is that some compromises in the project, made with good intentions, will make this connection not quite as smooth as it might otherwise be. You can find the meeting materials here, especially the key presentation.
Proposed Cross-Section at Hamlin St. (WSDOT)
Note that there is no Southbound HOV lane in the picture above. More after the jump.
It’s come to my attention that I somehow managed to pull the materials from the July 22nd SR520 working group meeting, instead of the August 19th one. I’ll be doing a complete rewrite and getting something correct up shortly.
Candidate for the best symbol of man’s short-sighted greed over the past century:
We are running out of helium. The stuff is rare, useful, irreplaceable, and once used makes its way to the top of our atmosphere and is blown off into space. The US is getting rid of its massive supply at bargain basement prices, making it too cheap to recycle, while scientists say each balloon should cost $100. In about 25 years it will all be gone.
