Running up to Thursday’s Central Waterfront kickoff event I wanted to share a video (H/T Ed Cox) that is a good primer on what waterfronts need to be successful. The videos was a presentation given by Fred Kent, founder for Project for Public Spaces, to a business group in San Diego. If you already know what place making is you can probably skip to minute 12:00. He touches on a lot of the issues that we have discussed already, most predominantly, ensuring an active waterfront, not just pretty open space.
Some of my favorite quotes:
“What you are beginning to do is thinking less about what the design is, but more about what you do in that place, and then bringing it back to how to design that place”
“Parks have become more open spaces, places to look at, but not be engaged in”
“Everywhere we look roads kill activity”
“Major destinations and active areas should have limited or no residential uses to allow evening uses”
“The best waterfront are 18 or 20 hours destinations”
“Parks should not be major destination, except in rare circumstances, because our idea of parks are very passive, not really the active kind of squares and plazas”
“Seasonal activities should be integrated into each destination”
Below are 8 questions the Central Waterfront design team would like you to answer. Go here to fill out the survey. This Thursday, 6:30 at the Aquarium the James Corner Field Operations team will hold a kick-off event. So far their facebook status says over 600 people have already RSVPed.
Portland MAX Map Anagrammed Originally uploaded by Major Clanger.
Whatever you think of the system itself, it is obvious Portland has had huge success building light rail. In 25 years, they’ve managed to build 84 stations and lay 52 miles of track with a relatively small tax base. What may be a fairly under appreciated fact is that Portland residents have paid a small fraction of the cost of their light rail system. All told, Portland has spent just under $600 million on the six completed projects in their area, with the feds chipping in $1.7 billion, or nearly 74%. How has Portland been able to gain so much advantage from the Federal Transit Administration?
Following recent outreach with community members, businesses and property owners, Sound Transit staff concluded that the agency will move forward with the “Single Entrance” design option for North Link’s Brooklyn Station in the University District. The design meets long-term passenger needs with lower construction impacts, risk and cost. North Link is currently in final design and the Brooklyn Station 30 percent design will be presented to the public later this spring.
Background on the options (and possibly the best STB comment thread ever) here.
I don’t feel equipped to say whether this is good stewardship of resources or excessive risk aversion. I do feel equipped to say it’s a shame. Two entrances means a bigger walkshed, which incorporates many more people in a dense neighborhood. There will be zero bus trips that come right up to the station entrance, and several that involve walking couple of blocks and turning the corner.
No one wants to bring down the whole project with reckless risks, but like the Mt. Baker Transit Center, this configuration will provide minor inconvenience to riders forever due to short-term considerations. Incidentally, with 12,300 projected boardings in 2030, as many people should use Brooklyn (on or off) as the entire Central Link system today.
I suppose it’s possible the board could overrule staff, but that really would be a sign of poor governance and decision making.
This session the state legislature is looking at moving forward the idea of “Express Toll Lanes” on I-405 and SR-167. More commonly referred to as High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes, HB 1382 would start a process of expanding the HOT lane system, starting at the north end of I-405 and working southwards, eventually connecting to the existing HOT lanes. This would create a continuous managed north-south corridor from Puyallup to Lynnwood.
The idea behind managed lanes is to preserve the travel time reliability of the HOV network while maximizing the throughput of those lanes. Transit and some carpools would continue to use the lanes as normal but solo drivers would be able to buy into the lanes. As the lanes fill up the price for solo drivers to enter the lanes increases.
A major change, that will certainly be controversial is a move away from 2+ HOV lanes to 3+ HOV lanes. This is necessary for the lanes to pencil out financial and for WSDOT to meet HOV performance standards in the future. Today many regional HOV facilities are already failing WSDOT’s 45 MPH, during 90% of rush hour performance standard.
While the SR-167 HOT lane pilot has been somewhat of a disappointment, especially with regards to revenue, it has shown that a system like this is feasible and has potential. Last year the legislature directed WSDOT to complete a study of the idea, which they also had reviewed by an expert review panel. The proposed legislation builds off the expert review panel’s recommendation.
The expert review panel recommended moving forward with a two phase implementation of Option 4. They identified two generations of HOT lanes systems, the first which requires less capitol is targeted a maximizing the efficiency of the road system with second generation systems having an added focus on revenue generation to pay for HOT lane related capacity expansion.
Last week it passed out of the House Transportation Committee. It will be interesting to see where this bill goes.
[This is part of the “TransitReportCard” series, in which writers generalize wildly based on short and limited experience with another city’s transit system.]
Segments ridden: Yonge-University-Spadina (Yellow) Line: Glencairn – Union Station; Union Station – St. Clair
Bloor-Danforth (Green) Line: Landsdowne-Victoria Park
Various Street cars and buses.
Time ridden: Four days.
Scope: A- The Toronto Subway has very good service where it does go, but that covers a fairly limited area. There are twomain lines, one that goes north-south in a “U” shape, and another east-west. There are also two short spur lines.
This Google maps overlay shows the area the subway covers. Each subway station has bus or streetcar routes that travel perpendicular to the line the subway station travels, forming a wonderful transit grid. This map shows the overall coverage, including buses and streetcars. If there isn’t a subway station or a streetcar line where you’re going, you’ll have find the nearest station, and then take the bus that travels perpendicular to the line and to your destination.
Service: A
Service is very frequent. Most buses had frequencies under ten minutes except late at night – many ran 24 hours – and the subway comes every few minutes. Most stations had electronic signs to tell you when the next train was coming, but they were a mix of new LCD screens and some 30 years old or older, and many of the older models didn’t seem to work. Major bus locations also had next bus signs.
Routing: A
As far as I could tell (feel free to correct me in the comments), there are really only four major highways in Toronto (401, 427, 404 and “the Gardiner”), and those are mainly served by “bus rapid transit”, a service similar to ST express buses. Many of the rest of the bus lines are oriented around the subway, and the subway is mostly oriented in cardinal directions (N-S, E-W).
Grade/ROW: A The subway is entirely grade-separated, and the streetcars have their own lanes in some places, as do some of the buses.
TOD: B Downtown Toronto is a sea of modern skyscrapers, and there are many older, dense neighborhoods. Some outlying areas have become densely urbanized, such as North York. However, I was surprised single family homes with yards across the street from stations such as Ossington, just five stations from Bay station in the heart of downtown.
Culture: A
A surprisingly large number of people live in Downtown Toronto itself – apparently most of the over 2,000 skyscrapers in the city are residential – and the Toronto subway the beats the DC Metro for the 2nd most ridden rapid transit system in Anglophone North America at 910,300 people per day. The buses carry another 1.25 million, with streetcars carrying 300,000. Most commuters in the city either take transit or carpool. In the greater Toronto area, 22.2% of commuters take transit, according to the Canadian Census, compared to around 7.3% here in the Seattle area.
Nothing like a slow news Friday to do some self-interest blogging*. If you’re looking for a good and somewhat unique dining experience to pull you into the South end, I recommend St. Dames, a vegetarian place one block north of Columbia City Station.
I’m by no means a vegetarian, nor do I know much about other vegetarian places, but this place is pretty creative about tasty meat substitutes. If you’re reluctant to accept food criticism from a transit pundit, and you should be, here’s The Stranger‘s pretty good review. If you’d like to cancel out the health benefits of vegetarian cuisine, there’s also a full bar.
They’re open for dinner Tuesday through Saturday, and have an interesting brunch menu on weekends starting at 9am. I’ve tried both and have been impressed.
* My self-interest is in plugging a good restaurant in my neighborhood, so that I continue to have good restaurants in my neighborhood.
I don’t think anyone who uses Metro or Sound Transit services doesn’t have some kind of complaint about how they run operations or allocate service. Sometimes that’s based on a selfish view that one’s service is needed while someone else’s service is obviously wasteful, but usually there are legitimate principles at stake.
The natural reaction is to assume that the agencies in question are stupid and/or ignorant if they don’t see it your way. However, a good general rule, on any issue, when critiquing the work of professional organizations that if you think it’s simple stupidity you probably don’t understand the forces at work.
There is a lot of change that I’d like to see. But the first step to realizing change is to properly assess the obstacles. The stupidity explanation really doesn’t survive initial contact with most agency planners. In reality, we have to look at the institutional incentives.
For instance, one continuing theme at STB is that there should be better service on key transit arterials even if it means a smaller geographic service area. This idea is not unknown to Metro staff, and its spirit is evident in documents like the Regional Transit Task Force final report. The fundamental obstacle is that you’ll get a much larger crowd of angry voters when you remove service, whatever its merits, than when you elect to not expand other service. And that goes back to a County Council that collectively will not back Metro when a few dozen people organize a complaint.
One way around that dilemma is to throw money at it: provide both the intensive and sprawling routes, and when the next round of cuts comes the interest groups will be more balanced. Of course, more funding is not a plausible course of action at the moment. The last good chance we had to do this was Transit Now, which included a lot for high ridership corridors but also spent significant resources on sending buses to even farther flung exurbs. Metro deserves some amount of credit for upholding RapidRide to the extent they have.
Why was service spread the way it was? The obvious answer is 20/40/40, which for the time being is still in place. Even in its absence, however, it’s arguable that voters wouldn’t have voted for a package perceived as disproportionately benefiting Seattle. Perhaps the true villain is the ability of many voters to see beyond narrow subarea interests. There’s plenty of that going around everywhere in the County.
