Month: December 2010

Google Analytics says these have the highest number of unique page views this year, for whatever that’s worth. I’m excluding some 2009 articles that people continue to access.

10. “Who’s to Blame for the Tunnel Attack?,” by Sherwin Lee (2/11). Video of a beatdown. Everyone has an opinion.

9. “Bus vs. Rail, Again,” by Martin H. Duke (1/9). Only in a city so far behind the rest of North America could this still be a question on the main corridors. This is one of Norman’s early appearances, and he’s usually good to roughly double the comment thread.

8. “New Data: Two East Link Options Look Good,” by Ben Schiendelman (2/8). Ben breaks down the two Downtown Bellevue options to make it to the end. Still a useful reference post, although I can’t see where the money for C9T is going to come from at this point.

7. “Metro Service Change Retires Route 194,” by John Jensen (2/6). This wasn’t a new report, so much as a way to observe its passing. Pageviews were clearly driven by the comment thread.

6. “Bikeability Analysis: Portland and Seattle“, by Adam B. Parast (4/20). One of our finest pieces of scholarship, linked to by everybody and making an impression in some corridors of power.

5. “On Bicyclist Safety“, by Adam B. Parast (10/19). The bicycle hordes on the internet strike again.

4. “Ride Link Without Pants This Sunday,” by Sherwin Lee (1/5). There is hard-hitting reporting on STB, and then there is this.

3. “Bellevue City Council in Chaos,” by Sherwin Lee (9/29). Everyone loves video of politicians losing their cool.

2. “Build the Waterfront Up, Not Down“, by Steve Thornton (Fnarf, 9/14). Linked to by Slog. I was proud to host such a good piece of writing, that also advanced a totally under-appreciated part of the debate. Not that we’re going to win this one.

1. “The Damaging Effects of Cul-de-Sacs on Walkability“, by John Jensen (6/22). This got some links from the national media.

So, message received: next year, nothing but comment cesspools, video of sex and violence, and bike stuff.

Thanks to all our readers. Without you, we’re just shouting into an empty room.

A couple of weeks ago Jeff Welch had an informative piece about Metro security. He defends Metro security personnel and calls on passengers to take a more active role in policing behavior. That’s as good a prescription as any, because really no one is in charge of security on a Metro bus.

I found this tidbit about 911 procedures interesting:

Metro (and Sgt. Urquhart today on KIRO) encourages passengers to call 911 to report onboard incidents.  Problem:  911 tends to respond to such incidents DIFFERENTLY than if they were occurring at a fixed location.  In my experience (and it has happened), when a customer dials 911 to report an onboard incident that the driver may be unaware of, the response of the 911 operator is to contact Metro’s Control Center if they have enough information to identify the coach.  The Control Center then attempts to contact the Operator via radio to tell them that a passenger onboard is in touch with 911 and reporting an incident – asking in effect, “what’s up with that”?

Rather than waste time duplicating contact information or wasting time trying to get the (busy) driver to confirm the onboard issue, 911 should be in direct contact with local law enforcement (remember – Metro is County-wide and spans multiple jurisdictions), 911 operators responding to calls from passengers should immediately dispatch local law enforcment (as practical) to the bus’s location.

There really isn’t an easy answer to security problems because personnel cost money, and I think most people would be reluctant to give up service to pay for more patrolling. The best hope is probably more off-board payment systems like Link, Sounder, and RapidRide, which require fare inspectors. High-capacity vehicles like Link and Sounder also allow one guard to protect a larger number of passengers. I guess we’ll have to settle for that.

Due to demolition and utility work for the Alaskan Way Viaduct (AWV) Metro is rerouting some southbound buses off 1st Ave for the next month. In February Metro will completely reroute buses off 1st for the next few years to avoid construction delays and confusion related to the AWV project.

Metro’s press release after the jump. Continue reading “Metro Reroutes: Off 1st Ave”

(Update 12:30pm:  With a great sense of timing for this post, the Seattle Times reports that Crystal Mountain is turning skiers away for the remainder of the day because their parking lot is full.)

Though I mostly enjoy my car-free life, I do wish I skied more.  When I lived in Idaho I thought nothing of 100-mile drives to support my season pass at Schweitzer, and when I lived in Colorado there was always the Ski Train to Winter Park.  Our wilderness legacy in Washington has kept our spectacular mountains fairly well-preserved, with the caveat that the relatively few access points that do exist must be accessed by car.   Here we have resorts surrounded by emptiness (whether wilderness or clearcuts), whereas places like Colorado have ski towns, many of them served by comprehensive (and free!) transit service.  Though Washington has an impressive amount of rural transit, very little of this serves our resorts. Our decision to under-develop our mountains comes with environmental benefits that I genuinely appreciate, but this particular tradeoff – lack of transit access – frustrates my attempts to enjoy winter sports and still live car-free.

Though Zipcar, traditional car rental, and Craigslist rideshare are good options in a pinch, I thought I’d write a post laying out our options for getting to our ski resorts car-free.

More after the jump…

Continue reading “Skiing and Transit”

[UPDATE 2:29 – Sound Transit will be extending hours of operation. More updates as we get them]

[UPDATE 3:12 – ST will add two southbound departures, leaving from Westlake at 1:00am and 1:15am]

Yesterday Sound Transit sent out a press release reminding riders that all ST service New Years Eve (Friday Dec. 31st) will operate on the normal weekday schedule while service on New Years Day will operate on a Sunday Schedule. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see that Sound Transit will not extend Link’s hours of operation beyond the normal last departure at 12:41 12:37 from Westlake, just 20 minutes or so after fireworks at the space needle ends. I find this absolutely ridiculous and an oversight on Sound Transit’s part.

First look at Metro’s core routes. Most of them will operate till around ~1:30am with the last trip of the night on high ridership routes like the 49 and 7 leaving downtown at 2:12am and 3:30 respectively. Even the monorail is operating till 1am. Or look at our neighbors to the north and south. Vancouver is extending skytrain operations by an hour to ~2:15am in addition to its extensive, easy to understand, and well branded night bus network. Not to be outdone Portland is running MAX untill 3am. And in both cities all night service is free!

And it makes perfect sense why Vancouver and Portland are taking these steps. First off New Years Eve is essentially the biggest and latest party night of the year, tens if not hundreds of thousands of people will be drinking, hundreds of thousands of people will be out watching firework displays and it will be essentially impossible to get a taxi. To me the the correct decision is obvious. In fact in a perfect would Metro would add late night runs to it’s routes as well.

My hunch is that last year when ST extended service not that many people took the trains, likely due to lack of knowledge, not demand. If Sound Transit announced service today, tied it to the fireworks at the space needle, points out the horrible traffic, got Mother Against Drunk Driving to encourage people to take transit, and made all rides after 8pm free I’m sure a few news sources would pick up the story and get the word out.

Sound Transit is building a multi-billion dollar regional mass transit system and it needs to complement that capital investment with an operational investment in the highest level of service.

I intended to write about late night transit service in more detail later.

It’s a month late but it’s finally here. Sound Transit updated the design of the schedules posted at Central Link stations, both graphically and physically (example of old style). Many schedules were torn off by vandalism or left outdated. Some schedules date to before Airport Link opened. On October 7, Sound Transit via its Twitter account responded to a question regarding the missing and outdated schedules: “We’re working on a new signs. Old ones were too easily vandalized/ripped off. New ones up by Nov. Thanks for riding.”

The new schedules still show only headway and first/last train times but in a different format. The design is reminiscent of the style used in London. I made mockups of that style for the 70-series buses last year and recently for a headway-based timetable in One Bus Away. I’m not sure about the order they chose. It follows a natural sentence structure: the day, then “trains leave every”, followed by the headway, and then time periods. However, the way I typically read schedules is to look at the clock for current time, then find the time period on the schedule, and read the headway. Either way this is a minor issue. Another issue is the periods that span from a.m. to p.m. The weekend schedule shows trains leaving every 10 minutes from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., or is that from 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m? Just add an “a.m.” behind the 8:00 to clarify.

The schedule is now printed on the same sheet as the fare table. The larger surface should make removal more difficult. Since the schedule is now integral with the fare table instead of a smaller add-on sticker, why not take advantage of the increased space? They don’t need to have a box any more. Perhaps in future iterations they will redesign the combined fare/schedule table. Overall, I see this as a small step forward.