Community Transit is set to adopt its February 2012 service cut plan on September 1st. There were three original alternatives on how to cut 20% of the system. Based on public comment, they created a hybrid alternative, which has no Sunday service. Like alternative III, it aggressively restructures local service with emphasis on high-demand corridors and straighter routing. Like alternative I, it preserves the commuter one seat rides from everywhere to Downtown Seattle. There are some changes that appear in neither alternative, listed here.
Of course, you can’t get something for nothing: keeping all those different peak routes means less frequency throughout the system.
About ten months go, Zach wrote a post asking whether the southern tail of Metro’s Route 4 is redundant in the context of Metro’s current bus network:
I have a distinct impression that it no longer serves any unique transit market and in fact diminishes the performance of Routes 3, 8, and 48, all of which serve unique destinations. From 3rd/James to 23rd/Jefferson, the shared 3/4 provide 7-15 minute headways until 1am. Once the 4 turns south on 23rd, it duplicates the 48. From its turn at Dearborn it runs in a couplet on 24th and 26th, needlessly threading the needle between 23rd (Route 48) and MLK (Route 8).
In this post I’ll drill down into the stop-level data to answer a complementary question: Are people using the unique part of Route 4 to Judkins park and beyond? I’ll also examine stop-level data for Route 3, and suggest an inexpensive capital modification to the trolleybus network that could dramatically improve the reliability and almost double the capacity of these workhorse routes. Continue reading “Is Route 4 Redundant?”
Although the timestamps and threading are not what they were, I believe I’ve recovered all the comments in various threads that weren’t about Disqus.
If you believe I’ve goofed and your eternal wisdom has been lost in the ether, let me know. Better yet, just write a new comment in the appropriate place.
You may resume regular commenting without fear of losing anything.
[UPDATE from Martin: Apparently we’re going to have to restore lost comments manually. It’ll take a while, but eventually most of your comments should reappear here, although timestamps and threading may be lost.]
Apparently Disqus isn’t quite ready for prime time on our blog, and was causing many people’s browsers to lock up. We’ve reverted back to WordPress comments.
Longdiscussed by transit wonks, and prominently included in the recent $20 CRC deal, the elimination of the ride-free area is now just a matter of time—about 13 or 14 months. There are pros and cons to to the elimination of the RFA, but perhaps the biggest concern to many in the transit community is the effect on on travel times and reliability at the extremely busy stops on 2nd, 3rd and 4th Avenues and in the DSTT. Over the last year, Metro has simulated the increased boarding times due to RFA elimination in those locations, and the results of that study presumably fed into Metro’s decision to acquiesce to that demand. Earlier this week on STB:
“We tested this at several locations in downtown, including Third Avenue and it didn’t really create a serious problem,” Jim Jacobson, Deputy General Manager of Metro, said in an interview. “There are times when it creates problems, but that usually goes away after one signal cycle.” There will certainly be an increase in dwell times, Jacobson said, but there wasn’t much reason for alarm.
I have obtained an internal document from Metro that lays out the methodology and results of the study for 4th Ave and the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel (DSTT), and includes a summary of the results for 2nd and 3rd Avenues, along with staff suggestions for mitigation of the increased congestion that will result.
According to the report, if the RFA were abolished tomorrow—without mitigation or service changes—bus operations on 2nd Ave, 4th Ave and 3rd Ave northbound would be slower but still acceptable; 3rd Ave southbound operations would be borderline acceptable, with no additional capacity for new service (such as the RapidRide C/D slated to start next year) and liable to tip over into failure in the event of DSTT closure or a traffic disruption downtown; and the transit tunnel would be hosed. From what the report says, Metro will have to deploy a suite of mitigation measures (suggestions include TVMs, better scheduling, lengthening bus zones, more traffic restrictions and enforcement on 3rd) on the surface streets and move some peak routes from the tunnel to 2nd/4th in order to make this work.
We have switched our comments system over to Disqus, a third-party comments host that supports logging in with Facebook, Twitter, and other services. Users can still post “anonymously” with the name of their choosing.
Disqus brings some unique features to the table. For example, commenters can now have avatars to show their faces. My favorite feature is that commenters can “like” comments and commenters with a Disqus account will now be able to edit their comments after posting.
One change we’re making is that instead of comments nesting deeply, they will only be able to nest one level deep, like comments on your Facebook wall. The goal is to make it so conversations are easier to follow and we hope that the commenting culture changes slightly to create new threads rather than having a deep reply chain. We hope to simplify things without hurting the ability to have the hardcore, nerdy conversations that make our comments work so well.
With change, there will always be kinks to work out. Please give our new comments system a chance and let us know what you think in this thread.
Update: We made it so the default sort order ignores “likes.”
Sometime this month, the RPZ (restricted parking zone) permit rules will be put into effect for Zone 31 around the Rainier Beach Link Station. To clarify, the RPZ and its rules have been there since 2009 when Link first opened, but residents will now have to start paying a $65 biannual fee for up to two permits (one for each car) per household. The RPZ fees were waived for the first two years by the City to help neighbors transition into the RPZ.
If you want the negative slant on this, then you’ll want to see the article put out by the South Seattle Beacon, which, unfortunately, contains some inaccuracies worth pointing out:
This fee, enforced upon residents who live near the Martin Luther King Jr. and South Henderson St. intersection — or Residential Parking Zone 31 (RPZ 31) — will pay for the operating costs of the Henderson light-rail station.
The Henderson light-rail station has not generated the level of riders and revenue needed to operate, according to Sound Transit, since the city doesn’t have park-and-ride lots.
The Beacon notes that the enactment of the RPZ fee was initiated to help plug up funding for operating the Link Station, when in actuality, the money goes to fund municipal parking enforcement, not Sound Transit coffers. There’s also no indication of the true nature of RPZ 31– an agreement publicly formed years ago after extensive public outreach, not some deal struck overnight.
Some of those quoted in the article imply that Rainier Valley residents are being unjustly singled out to bear the brunt of RPZ costs. But not only are RPZs not just limited to the Valley, they’re prevalent across the city, even in neighborhoods that supposedly get the preferential rock-star treatment. The Beacon also doesn’t any mention of an important component of the RPZ program–a discounted $10 permit available to low-income households — less than 2 cents a day over two years.
Both Adam and SDOT’s Rick Sheridan left some worthy comments on the story tackling more of the article’s misinformation, so I’ll let their words do the work. It’s just unfortunate how many inaccuracies were produced by the story’s slant. It needlessly creates a trap that a lot of community members and social justice advocates fall into by rhetorically alienating transit/social service providers like Sound Transit and the City, who, at the end of the day, would be doing a greater injustice by not the fighting hide-and-riders hogging parking in Rainier Valley neighborhoods.
*Disclaimer: The author is currently employed by Sound Transit. However, all opinions expressed in this article are completely his own and may not reflect the views of anyone else.
