Month: October 2010

The Bellingham Herald reports that the Whatcom Transit Authority (WTA) is one vote away from abolishing transfers:

On Oct. 6, WTA held a hearing on the proposed changes to the fare policy. Staff recommended eliminating transfers, which WTA has used since 2005, because they’re often abused as people use them for a free return-trip ride. Staff also estimates the agency would get a roughly $100,000-a-year revenue boost after eliminating them, and it would save about $10,000 in printing costs. Transfers also encourage payment of cash fares, which WTA wants to discourage in favor of bus passes.

There are also administrative savings to postpone (and shrink) WTA’s second round of service cuts from 2013 to 2014.

In a system as complex as King County’s, abolishing transfers altogether is probably not possible. In anything, there is too much emphasis on one-seat rides rather than a functioning, interconnecting network.

However, there is asymmetry in the way that ORCA transfers compare to paper ones. Paper transfers tend to be valid for longer than policy states, whereas ORCA enforces the actual transfer time limit. Moreover, Link’s location-based fares offer no round-trip discount.

I’m in general in favor of fare increases, since they mean more revenue for transit. But what about “abuse” for round trips? Is this a feature or a bug of the transfer policy?

• 

  Beacon Hill station a “marvel in engineering“. It’s certainly my favorite.

• Burien TC groundbreaking Saturday.
• East half of 520 bids come in well under budget.
• The feds promise $34m for the South Park bridge and $10m for freight rail in Vancouver, WA. Plus, $5m for TOD planning to PSRC.
• Transit drivers engaging in a little activism on the job, get slapped down by Metro.
• Another rough day for rail reliability. I’m not sure whether the frequency if these is a result of more failures or better reporting by ST.
• If you don’t pay your parking tickets, the city might boot your car.
• A new national database of TOD.
• The federal gas tax should be indexed to inflation.
• One reason STB doesn’t talk about other progressive issues is that we’d like this headline to be possible in Washington, someday.

This is an open thread.

Last week, the King County Council decided to cancel the portion of Metro’s planned 2011 25-cent fare increase that applies to seniors and the disabled, holding the fare at 75 cents. The cost will be partially offset by raising the monthly pass cost for seniors from $18 to $27, bringing the breakeven point to 36 trips, just like other passes. KCDOT Spokeswoman Linda Thielke says the net revenue impact in 2011 will be a loss of $160,000.

In other news, ST has deferred the planned $1 fare on Tacoma Link indefinitely, due to out-of-date study assumptions.

Recent talk of commercial parking tax (CPT) increases have been largely centered around where revenue would go, but have missed out on the broader implications for both drivers and transit users.  The benefits of the tax are generally twofold: more revenue and more disincentive to drive.  Ironically though, it is because of  increases in the City’s CPT over the past several years that blows have been dealt to the UW’s U-Pass, the University’s primary transportation demand management (TDM) program.

Over the past two years, the price of a quarterly U-Pass has nearly doubled from $50 to $99, largely due to an increased share of parking revenue going to the CPT.  Because parking fees help fund the U-Pass, the costs have drastically risen for both students and faculty.  The University’s student government, ASUW, has been lobbying the City for an exemption from the increase.  From the UW Daily:

Organizations such as hospitals and universities spend a significant amount of their parking revenue on subsidizing programs like the U-PASS, and if the CPT increases, it would make such programs more expensive, Lewis said…

The CPT increase for the UW alone is worth almost $2 million, and would be a huge loss of revenue during a difficult budget period, said Lewis, who has been in discussions with city council members and administration.

More below the jump.

Continue reading “The Case for UW’s Commercial Parking Tax Exemption”

Lindblom at the Seattle Times reports that the state has made the Highway 99 tunnel contract a bit sweeter:

As a bid deadline nears and pressure mounts, Washington state has sweetened its Highway 99 tunnel contract by offering a pair of bid teams $230 million in concessions.

The changes reflect a view by construction executives that the real costs are higher on this world-record project than the state projected several months ago.

The money can be shifted out of a large pool of risk and contingency funds, so the overall tunnel budget remains $1.96 billion, said Ron Paananen, state program administrator.

Why make these changes?

They’re designed to reduce the companies’ risk, so bids are more likely to meet the target price of $1.1 billion, published many months ago.

“Both teams, and maybe the two teams that dropped out, expressed concern the [state’s cost target] is too low. They couldn’t figure out how to bid the project at that amount or lower,” [one of the bidders] said.

WSDOT’s expert panel and the Seattle city council’s risk consultant say that reducing the amount of contingency funds is fine, and perhaps some of that contingency money exists for exactly the type of bid inflation we’re witnessing. But it’s slightly concerning that the engineer’s estimates are already unrealistic in a period where construction bids routinely come in under budget. Imagine what happens in 2014 or so, when construction is beginning in earnest and the change orders come pouring in.

Regrettably, the Pierce Transit sales tax increase is not on the ballot with their sales tax increase until February 8, instead of in the high-turnout general election. Regardless, there is now a Yes-on-Prop-1 website, Facebook page, and donation site.

PT is hoping to avert a 43% service cut by increasing the sales tax rate from 0.6% to the state maximum of 0.9%, a level where Metro, Community Transit, and Sound Transit already are. That level would actually fund a service increase of about 5%, rather than merely avoiding the cuts.

You can get detailed by-route information about the proposal here.

Link ridership continues to decline slightly from its summer peak.

Weekday: 23,007 (down slightly from August)

Saturday: 18,063

Sunday: 16,051

I don’t think there’s anything new to be said about this.

There are a bunch of inaccuracies in Erica Barnett’s rant on Publicola Monday:

As Seattle Transit Blog has noted, the distance between stations on the south end of the line is much longer than in the central, north, and (planned) east portions of the line: Nearly two-and-a-half miles from station to station, compared to just over 1.5 miles for the north section and just over a mile for the central portion.

Erica is quoting the station spacing on South Link, Seatac to Federal Way, not “Central Link”, which includes long, stationless stretches outside Seattle. The actual station spacing is reproduced below:

Onward:

[Sound Transit] eliminated or indefinitely “deferred” two at-grade stations in South Seattle—the Graham Street Station between Columbia City and Othello Station, and the Boeing Access Road Station, between the Rainier Beach Station and Tukwila—in part so it could build the costly underground Beacon Hill station.

This isn’t a fact-check, but I think it’s a bad argument. First of all, BAR would be an elevated station, so it’s far from clear it would be cheap. Second of all, Beacon Hill is the highest ridership station in Southeast Seattle, so it’s reasonable to assume that Graham St. would perform worse than Beacon Hill. BAR, at the base of a runway, has poor ridership potential unless freeway express buses are terminated here to force a transfer.

Moreover, a tunnel station would be very difficult to install after the fact, whereas Graham St. should be relatively inexpensive.

Lastly:

Although Sound Transit initially estimated 3,000 people a day would board at Beacon Hill, currently, only about 1,000 do—about two percent of the total number who board the train over the course of the route on weekdays.

The link provided is broken at the time of this writing, but the 3,000 figure is for 2020, not today. The station data was taken when daily ridership was about 20,000, making it 5%, not 2%.

More on infill station possibilities here. Beacon Hill Blog also made many of the points above.

Last week Grist had a great article about “safety in numbers” for cyclists. Research within the US and around the world has shown that as bicycling rates go up, the total number of crashes stays flat, resulting in a significant decrease in bicycle crashes per trip. While this might initially sound counterintuitive, the premise is pretty simple. The more cyclists a city has, the more drivers expect cyclists, and drive accordingly. Similarly, as bicycling rates increase, drivers are more likely to be cyclists themselves, causing further behavioral changes that improve the safety of bicycles.

The phenomenon, dubbed “safety in numbers,” was first identified in 2003, in an academic paper by public health researcher Peter Jacobsen [PDF]. After being asked by officials in Pasadena, Calif., if their city “was a dangerous place to bicycle,” Jacobsen began looking at crash data from various communities where bicycle ridership had fluctuated over time.

What he found surprised him: The number of crashes involving bikes correlated with the number of riders in a community. As ridership fluctuated, so did the crash rate. More riders, fewer crashes; fewer riders, more crashes.

This happened too abruptly, Jacobsen decided, to be caused by slow-moving factors like infrastructure development and cultural change. Bicycling becomes safer when the number of riders increases, he concluded, at least in part because the number of riders increases.

The inverse happens, as well. One data set Jacobsen looked at covered 49 years of biking history in the United Kingdom. Those numbers showed that cycling became safer during the oil crisis of the 1970s, caused by the OPEC oil embargo. Once the crisis ended, both ridership and safety dropped.

More after the jump. Continue reading “On Bicyclist Safety”

Metro and Sound Transit conducted a targeted rider survey immediately before and after the February 6, 2010 service change. There were a number of findings, some interesting, some not-so-interesting, and some deeply flawed.

Most interesting were the Link-only questions. Ridership has increased substantially since February, partially due to people new to transit, so these numbers may not still apply.

How did you pay?

How did you get to the Link station? “Other” is huge, but the bike share is tiny.

What did you do before you rode Link? These numbers add up to well below 100%, so I believe non-responses are included in the computation. In February about half of Link riders came over from the bus.

Some other findings below the jump. Continue reading “Metro Rider Survey Results”

I have to admit, I’m a sucker for these when Sullivan puts them up:

inter // states from Samuel Cockedey on Vimeo.

That a city that vast can work at all is a triumph of… what? Engineering? The ingenuity of individuals figuring things out for themselves? An accident of a city arising from rubble as the people rapidly get richer?

A lot of things that can be said about the struggle for wages and benefits for drivers can be taken the wrong way. After all, there are several different audiences here and their imperatives are different. It’s also hopelessly muddled by both sides’ appeals to what’s “fair”, a loose term that will never yield a clear answer to what to do.

The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU). The sole responsibility of the union is to its members, and they are absolutely justified in pushing for as large a share of revenues for labor as they can get.

Due to a desire to maximize service delivery and a vague preference for social equity, I’d prefer if they valued avoiding layoffs over preserving compensation, and focused more on improving conditions and opportunities for part-timers, rather than more overtime and prerogatives for the most senior employees. But it’s not my place to tell them what their priorities should be.

The larger danger is that labor inflexibility creates the narrative that Metro revenue increases will simply go into the pockets of drivers. It’s a narrative that anti-transit writers like Michael Ennis are willing to reinforce by cherry-picking misleading statistics and removing them from their explanatory context, and one that threatens future revenue measures that all transit stakeholders support, including the ATU.

Metro and King County. Conversely, the responsibility of managers and politicians is to deliver the most service for the lowest cost, which means clamping down on wages and benefits among other savings measures. That’s as it should be in the fundamentally adversarial process of collective bargaining.

There are two constraints on this, one legitimate and one not. The first is that you don’t want to antagonize your ambassadors to the public (drivers) so much that service suffers, or lose talent to other agencies.

The second, less good, reason is that politicians are fundamentally in the business of getting votes. Regrettably, sometimes it’s more plausible to do that by winning the support of the union electoral machine than by being a responsible steward of public funds. Not that (I repeat) I somehow expect unions to not use all the legal means at their disposal.

I want to emphasize that this a big-picture argument and I can’t assert that this is going on, or not going on, with the people in charge for either the last ATU contract or the next one. It’s just a common dynamic with public-sector unions.

Voters, taxpayers, and riders. So where does that leave the rest of us? Well, I think our interest is in making sure that politicians and their representatives at Metro respect their responsibilities as described above, to keep labor costs as low as possible.

The last time I made this point, there was a lot of pushback in the comments to the effect of “how would YOU like it.” First of all, as a private sector employee I have no doubt that if my senior managers thought they could cut the pay and benefits of people like me without repurcussions for performance and retention, they would do so in a heartbeat.

However, I think that retort really comes from a misunderstanding of for whom the statement is intended. The union is pursuing its interests of its members as they understand them, and that’s fine. But I’m not sure, as riders, that we should be “rooting for them”, to the small extent that matters, because they’ve selected objectives largely counter to our interests.

Transportation Choices Coalition Policy Director Bill LaBorde is leaving to work on Seattle City Council Transportation Chair Tom Rasmussen’s staff. With ST fleshing out the details of ST2 and Metro well on its way to figuring out what needs to be done about the budget, a lot of the action is moving to the City level. So I think LaBorde’s move is a good one for people concerned about Seattle’s transportation mix.

However, it does leave a big hole at TCC. I think STB, among other organizations, has been a  pretty good focus for activism, but there is no substitute for full-time professionals that can hang around centers of power to make sure that transit is an integral part of any project.

More specifically, it’s going to be a big session in Olympia. The rumor is that Senate Transportation Chair Mary Margaret Haugen spiked last year’s transit funding bill in order to make transit advocates come to the table when the subject was road funding in 2011.

This is all a long way of saying that if you have some experience in this area you should consider applying for LaBorde’s old position. The deadline is November 12th.

After a period of intense lobbying and pressure from a variety of interest groups and stakeholders, Canada’s federal government announced Thursday that the second daily Amtrak Cascades trip to Vancouver will continue to run for another year, at least until October 2011.  Last month, we reported that the Canadian government would start charging WSDOT an annual fee of $550,000 to cover border security fees; that stipulation would have led to the cancellation of the second train by the end of this month.  To absorb the costs, Amtrak would need to add $20 to each passenger fare.

Several public officials took the lead on saving the train, including a collaboration of regional mayors (PDF).  According to the Globe and Mail, even Janet Napolitano got involved:

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. ambassador to Canada David Jacobson pressed the [Canadian] federal government to extend support for the train, put in place to accommodate a surge in tourist traffic during the Olympics. The reprieve means that Amtrak and its supporters will have a year to demonstrate that the economic benefits – estimated at $11-million for Canada – justify the added inspection costs borne by the federal government.

The news is very welcome for those of us who’ve pushed for more Cascades service.  While the CBSA extension allows the trip to run for another year between Portland and Vancouver, the current schedules still require lengthy layovers that don’t make the most out of the Cascades fleet.  Zach last opined that interlining service could allow for more efficient use of the Talgo fleet, leading to a comment thread that yielded some fairly thoughtful suggestions.

• Think the Wallace v. Balducci spat was bad?  Don’t try speaking at a Vancouver WA city council meeting.
• Robberies in the Rainier Valley.  Link must be the cause, right?
• Three injured in close call on ST 522 at Lake City Way and I-5.
• Stolen car flips onto MLK, disrupting Link.
• Once again, please don’t walk on the tracks.  Also, looking both ways helps too.
• TriMet operators plan ‘sickout’ to protest healthcare contributions.  Imminent chaos or just a rumor?
• Anti-density forces lose one.
• Cycling has doubled on Dunsmuir St in Vancouver BC since the construction of separated bike lanes.  More lanes to be constructed soon.
• 13 northwest mayors co-sign a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper trying to save Amtrak 513/516.  Governor Gregoire drafts a similar letter of her own to Vic Toews, Harper’s Minister for Public Safety.
• Spokane Transit releases an updated plan to cut suburban and rural routes next year.
• With new Gold Line service up and running, WSDOT delves deeper into intercity bus service.
• Kingston-Seattle foot ferry launches Monday.
• Tuesday’s horrific day on the Coast Starlight.  Minutiae for the nerds here.
• BNSF construction to close W. Main St. in Auburn October 18-22.  Pedestrians will use the Sounder station overpass to cross the street.
• Bellevue Councilman John Chelminiak leaves the hospital after recovering from bear attack.  He lost his left eye but will otherwise make a full recovery.
• A meditation on sprawl and housing busts, with stunning aerial photos from Florida.  Be grateful you live here.
• Yonah Freemark breaks down the census mode share data every which way.

This is an open thread.

by MIKE ORR

I attended Sound Transit’s North Corridor public workshop in Lynnwood on Tuesday. ST divided us into focus groups to discuss (1) which are the most important transit “access points” (stop locations) in the area; (2) what routing would best serve them, keeping in mind that not all points can have stations; and (3) is light rail the best mode for this corridor? Federal grants require a mode-neutral EIS that covers all high-capacity transit (HCT) alternatives; i.e., bus and rail.

Overall

Most people focused on commuting to Seattle or to the airport. Nobody mentioned intra-area trips. They see Swift and RapidRide as adequate for that. I-5 is clogged and they need something better. They like light rail better than a bus solution, and they especially like the airport station even though it’ll take an hour from Lynnwood. That’s better than fighting traffic, and much better than their existing bus service (two transfers and two hours to get to the airport).

I brought up reverse trips; as someone who lives in Seattle and comes to Snohomish County mainly to attend evening and weekend events, I think it’s important the route should support off-peak and contra-peak trips.

Corridors

There are basically three route choices: I-5, Aurora/99, and 15th NE/44th W. However, mixing corridors would also yield some intriguing possibilities. For instance, Aurora in King County seems to have more pedestrian/TOD potential than 99 in Snohomish, so maybe Aurora + I-5 would be best. Or 15th + I-5 or 15th + 99. 44th gets closer to the center of Mountlake Terrace. The Mountlake Terrace station is not very accessible from the main part of Mountlake Terrace; only two small roads connect them.

More after the jump… Continue reading “North Corridor Meeting Report”