Foreign Policy has a nice piece on the importance of cities to the 21st-century.
The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built. This new world is not — and will not be — one global village, so much as a network of different ones.
From a U.S. perspective, this puts us at somewhat of a distinct disadvantage. Our cities are generally hamstrung by the presence of disparate, overlapping local governments, anti-city hostility in our state capitals, and a national political system that disproportionally funnels money to states, not cities or regions.
Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) 587, somewhat miffed at perceived attempts by King County to bargain through the media, relaunched their media relations with an informal press briefing yesterday, featuring the usual transportation reporter suspects and me. Erica C. Barnett was also there, and STB doesn’t pay nearly enough to do a writeup of the main points when there’s a perfectly fine one already available elsewhere.
I don’t think anyone who rides one of Metro’s more troublesome routes can dispute that driving a bus can be a difficult job with a fair amount of responsibility. Neither union solidarity nor union busting is part of this blog’s agenda, but it’s clear that the best personnel equilibrium from a rider’s perspective is one that pays the absolute minimum amount that still attracts quality personnel. That’s pretty vague, but I have to do some more deep thinking before saying more.
One simple yardstick is what peer agencies pay. I was gratified to learn that the ATU is not, by state law, allowed to strike, but instead go to binding arbitration that tends to compare proposals to what peer operators pay.
I also asked why neither Metro nor the ATU had brought up incentive pay for some of the more violent and undesirable routes in the system, in order to attract some more experienced drivers. The surprising response was that routes like the 7 are actually driven by fairly experienced staff, because there’s some pleasure in driving a trolley and serving a transit-dependent neighborhood.
Sound Transit’s second quarter ridership report out, which covers all of its services, is out. Sounder and Express Bus ridership is basically flat since 2Q 2009; Tacoma Link is way down; but the system’s overall ridership is up 47% because of the opening of Central Link, which now carries over half as many riders as the entire ST Express bus system.
On the other hand, all of ST’s modes aren’t meeting productivity targets set in the 2010 budget over the first half of the year. And ST is still using a pretty bizarre definition of reliability for Link, one that it’s failing with a miserable 77% on-time rate. The report points out that by a much more sensible headway-based metric (+/- three minutes) the performance was over 90%, not in my view good enough for rail, but much better than the headline number. See the 1st Quarter report for discussion of these reliability numbers.
Sound Transit announced plans on Tuesday to construct approximately 277 additional bicycle parking spaces over the next 16 months. Funded by federal grants, the 173 lockers and 104 rack spaces (13 racks, 8 spaces per rack) will be placed at selected park & rides, Link stations, and Sounder stations.
Cycling investments such as these are some of the easiest and most cost-effective means of combating the ‘last-mile’ problem, especially at far flung suburban park & rides. For a cost of $464,000 (or $1,675 per space) they’re not exactly cheap, yet they cost a tiny fraction of the same number of car spaces and they leave a small physical footprint on station areas. Anything that makes non-SOV multimodality more attractive has our support.
The locations are:
Auburn Station, 28 lockers
Columbia City Station, 7 lockers and 2 racks (2010), and 46 more lockers and 1 more rack (2011)
[UPDATE: Some P&Rs are actually owned by WSDOT, so those would require legislative authority to introduce fees. For county-owned P&Rs, the legislature doesn’t have to do anything.]
[UPDATE 2: Metro spokeswoman Rochelle Ogershok points out that $50m is a rough estimate of the annual deficit, after planned cuts, in 2012. The “long term” deficit, going out to 2015, is actually $100m. Corrected below.]
At tonight’s meeting of the Regional Transit Task Force, they’ll be looking at an executive summary of Metro’s various revenue options. It’s a treasure trove of information about what Metro collects now and what else is out there. Metro’s long term 2012 budget hole, after the various efficiencies applied, is still about $50m annually.
There’s still 1-cent-per-$1,000 of property tax authority, unfortunately worth only about $3m.
Theoretically, the County could create a Transportation Benefit District and levy a vehicle license fee of up to $100 — raising $125m! — but the cities have been busily taking this authority for themselves.
King County can tax parking in unincorporated areas only, where of course there isn’t a whole lot of paid parking.
The State has a local option tax for HOV systems, which by applying an MVET or a head tax could top off the capital fund. A lot of Metro’s federal money is already restricted to capital expenditure, so it’s unlikely that this money would free up cash to spend on the operations gap.
Each quarter you raise fares – not listed as an option in the report – generates about $12m.
There’s then a discussion of taxes that would require legislative action to authorize. For reasons unclear to me, charging at park-and-rides is listed as requiring this, and would generate between and $850,000 and $2.3m annually. There’s a strong case Metro and ST should do this anyway at high-demand park & rides, so in my view the revenue is just a bonus.
Aside from that, my favorite proposal is eliminating one of the state’s biggest (and under-appreciated) subsidies to drivers: the sales tax exemption for gasoline. Without any special dispensation for transit, simply applying existing transit taxes to gasoline would raise $28-40m annually for Metro, patching more than half of the hole. It would generate an even larger amount for Sound Transit, which has revenue problems of its own, to say nothing of its positive impact on state and local general funds, and other strapped agencies like Community Transit. We spend a fair amount of money in this region encouraging people not to drive, and it’s senseless to simultaneously subsidize the opposite.
Weekday ridership on Central Link improved on June’s record with a new average of 24,145 boardings per day. We’re still about 6 months away from having meaningful year-to-year comparisons.
Saturday and Sunday ridership also set non-opening-weekend records of 22,098 and 17,127, respectively. Saturday ridership that approaches weekday boardings is unusual in our region. It’s easy to speculate but there’s no data on why Link is a special case.
Image from "the transport politic" (click for full size)
A while ago the transport politic reported that Shanghai has passed London and has the world’s largest metro.* Shanghai started from zero in 1995; not yet satisfied, they plan to add roughly a New York City subway equivalent to that by 2020.
You can always count on China for an absurd superlative. It’s clear that in the United States we couldn’t possibly build so much as quickly, thanks to both property rights and environmental law.** But it’s also worth noting that China has made this a national priority of sorts.
The nation’s budget situation hasn’t been good for a decade or so, but governments of both right and left have, on several occasions in that time, come up with trillion-dollar-plus lumps of funding for their priorities. Sometimes it was deficit-funded, at others they found offsetting revenue. The point is that if we want it enough they find a way.
Don’t let anyone tell you that vision is impossible.
A team of representatives from the state, city of Seattle and transit agencies will meet again to discuss design refinements for the new State Route 520 at a workgroup meeting Aug. 19. The public and the media are welcome to attend…
Thursday,Aug. 19
Location: Puget Sound Regional Council Board Room, 1011 Western Ave., Suite 500, Seattle
Time: 3 – 5 p.m. technical presentation to the workgroup (includes public comment)
5 – 6:30 p.m. public information session
Several topics will be discussed, including:
Bicycle and pedestrian connections.
Traffic movements and operations.
Bus stop locations and connections.
Traffic calming and management in the Washington Park Arboretum.
The workgroup will accept public comments at the end of their meeting.
Recommendations come out October 1st. I’m most interested in there being transit or HOV lanes from the interchange to Husky Stadium, though much of our readership will be more fired up about the Montlake Flyer Stop.
I’m not sure if anyone cared enough to dive into the details of yesterday’s subarea equity post, or if the writing was clear enough to follow, but there was a mistake that doesn’t really change the key point. Check out the revised post to see what’s changed.
Perhaps a graphical way of looking at this is better. There are three basic kinds of cuts: those that Metro classifies as “efficiencies” (square pattern), which are either non-service hours or extremely unproductive trips; cuts that are offset with new service for RapidRide or SR520 (shaded), or cuts that represent pure pain (solid color).
The question here is what genuinely counts as a cut. In the conception of Butler (and the Metro staff), service that is reduced but replaced by a like amount of service elsewhere in the same area (shaded) counts as a cut. By that measure the East has a disproportionately large cut and the West gets off relatively easy.
Alternately, if you just look at the “pure pain” cuts or “pure pain” plus efficiencies, the West area cuts are almost exactly in proportion, while East absorbs some of the South’s share of cuts.
