Ridership Patterns on Central Link
Update: Two clarifications: This data is per-train, and based only on weekday ridership.
I’ve had a number of requests to “do one of your charts for Link”, and so I’ve worked with the folks at Sound Transit to assemble the required data, and here’s the result. STB has presented similar data before, but this is more recent and more detailed. What I see in the data, after the jump. Continue reading “Ridership Patterns on Central Link”
Urbanized
This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Within the first few minutes of Urbanized, the new movie from Helvetica director Gary Hustwit, a voiceover lists the various forces that shape urban design, including architects, planners, zoning laws, and citizens. That last one is accompanied by a visual of an elderly woman ostensibly making a public comment at some sort of community input session. I saw the film earlier tonight at a screening in Seattle, in a theater full of designers and architects, and there was an audible snicker when the woman came on stage. Anyone who’s been in those input sessions can relate, but the snicker was interesting because in the end, Hustwit ends up more-or-less on that woman’s side, in favor of maximum community involvement in any urban project.
Urbanized, like Objectified before it, tells the story of the city through a series of vignettes in various cities. There’s a project to reduce violence in a Cape Town slum through urban design, new architecture in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, New York’s High Line, and several more. Some of these will be familiar.
The project that comes in for the most unsympathetic treatment is Stuttgart 21, an effort to build a new high-speed rail line through Stuttgart. It’s bracing to watch protesters getting beat up and sprayed with water cannons for opposing the project. Alex Steffen, who moderated a Q&A with the director afterward, compared the Stuttgart project to Seattle’s deep-bore tunnel project.
How could a new high-speed rail project be so hated in a film that’s otherwise a paean to all things urban and non-automobile? The answer, I think, is that the Stuttgart project is presented as an example of elite-driven, top-down approach to planning, which Hustwit seems to eschew in favor of an organic, bottom-up approach that draws on the wisdom and distinct natures of the communities in which they are involved. The protesters are the bottom-up story, fighting to preserve the 100-year-old train station and the 200-year-old trees around it.
The top-down vs. bottom-up argument surfaces repeatedly. The High Line story, for example, focuses on how the two men who spearheaded the project were just two guys living nearby who wanted to do something, and rallied the community around it. Brad Pitt’s efforts to build houses in New Orleans, by contrast, are treated skeptically as the work of an outsider.
This is something that many of us in the transit community should take to heart: listen to your community. Work with them. Approach grand projects with humility. Build grassroots support. Don’t rely on planners in ivory towers to create a perfect, rational design and expect it to get implemented. That concerned citizen in the community input session is a potential ally, or at least a rich source of information and local knowledge.
That said, there’s something simplistic about the way Hustwit approaches the top-down vs. bottom-up dichotomy. I wish he’d honed his film here a bit more. The bottom-up stories don’t seem to involve serious trade-offs. They’re either about providing new infrastructure to communities that have no money and no political power (in the slums of Santiago and Cape Town) or preserving things that already exist in wealthy communities (the High Line, the old Stuttgart train station). What we didn’t see was an example of a bottom-up, grassroots effort to take something away from a relatively powerful or wealthy* community. I have no doubt that such examples are few and far between. But that in a nutshell is the dilemma for the modern new urbanist: they always seem to be taking things away from first world people and communities: parking spots, highway lanes, cars.
Is it possible to engineer a bottom-up, grassroots effort to re-prioritize the urban fabric of a developed nation away from cars? That’s the question I’d love to see answered.
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* when I say “wealthy” I simply mean “lives in a house with running water and electricity in a country with where they have the right to vote and organize.” In other words, a citizen of a developed nation.
RapidRide B Line Opening Day Ride
In honor of our spirited tradition of gathering to ride RapidRide lines on their inaugurations, we will be hosting an informal group ride to try out the B Line this Saturday. The B Line will actually be fare-free all weekend, the first day of revenue service starting on Monday. If you’d like to join us, we will be meeting at Bellevue Transit Center at 10am, this Saturday, October 1st.
Keep in mind that this is pretty informal so there won’t be a venue or speakers or anything like that. Depending on general sentiment, the group can get off for a food/coffee stop – in other words, there’s no itinerary either. Anyone coming from Seattle can board a 550 at International District Station at 9:32a, which gets you to BTC at 9:56a. Try not to be terribly late because last year, the group ended up being split between two coaches.
News Roundup: Pierce Transit Armageddon
- CenturyLink Field parking lot deal finally cinched. Executive Constantine provides a useful assist.
- It’s a downtown count, with impacts on the results that aren’t clear, but Seattle bike commuting is making great strides.
- Pierce Transit armageddon comes Saturday.
- Inside the new street parking rate adjustment.
- Is the VLF really regressive?
- In not-surprising-at-all news, many B7 proponents haven’t given up. But “Move Bellevue Forward” has gotten organized enough to get turnout to these meetings too.
- SDOT finding out how you visit Capitol Hill businesses.
- A few weeks ago I explored some downsides of passenger miles as a metric, but of course Yglesias did a better job.
- Frank at Orphan Road reviews Urbanized.
- New bus platform at Edmonds Station.
- South King County’s revenue continues freefall, threatening South Link even more.
- SoundRunner ferries (North Kitsap) looking to join ORCA.
- There are huge flaws in the entire concept of the ranking, but the Texas Transportation Institute thinks our traffic is bad.
- The Washington State Transportation Commission wants your opinion on transportation funding.
- A private UW/SLU ferry is operating.
- Silly subsidies for air travel.
- Seattle’s streetcar system is 127 years old.
- The internet is not the end of cities.
Streets For All: Ongoing Volunteer Events
For those that would like to get involved in the Streets For All Campaign (Yes on Prop. 1) here are two weekly events that will help out the campaign and get you plugged into the campaign.
- Phone banks four nights a week (Monday through Thursday) from 5:30pm to 8:30pm at the Futurewise office (814 2nd Ave, Suite 500) from now until Election Day. Anybody is welcome to attend and refreshments are provided.
- Volunteer happy hour at Fado Irish Pub (801 1st Ave) from 4:30pm to 6:30pm Friday. Come check in about the campaign, share stories, and blow off steam. Everybody is welcome, including those that haven’t yet volunteered. This is a good opportunity to get involved and meet others that are working hard for a better transportation future for Seattle.
Phone banking can be nerve-racking at first, but once you’re in the grove it’s a very effective use of your volunteer time. If you haven’t done it for a campaign before I would strongly encourage you to try it. It’s the bread and butter of campagins.
Also, today from 5:30 to 7:30 the campaign is hosting another volunteer training event at the SvR Design office (1205 Second Avenue, Suite 200 Seattle). This is a great opportunity to learn how to effectively tell your story about why approving Prop 1 and funding transportation improvements are important to you.
The Future of the D2 Roadway
At last week’s Sound Transit Board Meeting (video here), one of the more interesting reports was the staff analysis of the D2 roadway, which runs between I-90’s Rainier Freeway Station and the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel. There are also PowerPoint slides.
No matter what, these lanes will be closed to all traffic during track construction later in the decade. But afterwards, Sound Transit has always assumed that the 554 would terminate at either Mercer Island or South Bellevue Station. Metro has five peak-only routes that serve the I-90 corridor: the 212, 214, 215, 216, and 218, which together amount to about 18 trips per hour in the peak, that it might prefer to keep running into downtown. In 2010, these added up to about 1 million rides a year, or about 4,000 per day*. For these routes, there are four main options:
- Run joint operations on the roadway, as is currently done in the DSTT. This doesn’t necessarily mean buses would still run in the DSTT itself, but will create similar reliability and schedule impacts to both buses and trains. This is the baseline assumption in the ST budget.
- Run trains only on the roadway, forcing buses to access downtown via Rainier Avenue and S. Dearborn St. This speeds up the trains a bit but makes the buses slower and much less reliable. It saves on capital costs but Metro will pay more to operate buses.
- Terminate Metro buses at Mercer Island or South Bellevue. This creates at least some transfer penalty for bus riders, but keeps trains fast (carrying the bulk of the riders) and saves Metro about 15,000 service hours annually, or around $1.5m, that could be invested in more service on these or other routes.
- Squeeze the tracks on one side of the roadway, allowing a one-lane busway for peak-direction trips. ST staffer Ric Ilgenfritz testified that this is likely cheaper in capital expense than the joint operations option. See the illustration, along with some discussion, below the jump.
SLU / UW Ferry
This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
FYI: There’s a mini-ferry running between South Lake Union and the University District (near Agua Verde). The trip is $5 and takes 20 to 25 minutes. They leave UW on the hour and SLU on the half hour, every day from 8am to 6:30pm, with an extra three hours on Fridays and Saturdays. The boat carries 14 passengers and two bikes.
They’ll run the ferry through October (weather permitting), and will start back up next year in May. They’re also planning on connecting SLU to Fremont.
(via The Sun Break)
To Deviate or Not to Deviate?
Deciding whether or not to have a bus deviate into a transit center/park & ride loop or simply keep the route on a main arterial can often be a thorn in the side for transit planners. On one hand, you’d eliminate transfer penalties for people connecting from route to route by turning into these transit hubs, and on the other, you’d lose any savings that you can get from keeping your buses from making all those slow turns.
There are cases when one approach will seem more advantageous than the other but sometimes there do come across opportunities for reconciliation that don’t always get taken advantage of. Other times, they do. A real simple and basic example of implementing smart deviation procedures is at Edmonds Station*, where, in the fall, CT routes 110 and 116 will pull into the station loop, but routes 131 and 416 won’t:
- Having the 110 and 116 deviate into the station is really a wash in terms of net changes to operating costs, because Edmonds Station hub is the terminus for both routes anyway, which means no increase in travel times for through travelers because there aren’t really any. The one true caveat, in this case, is that
there will no longer be service toneither route will serve the Edmonds Senior Center down the road, so anyone traveling to or from the center will either have to transfer to a 131 or walk to the station. The big benefit, of course, is that riders connecting from local service to Sounder will have but a few hundred feet to walk to catch a train. - Having the 131 and 416 continue by the station on Railroad Avenue, on the other hand, is the better option. The 131 is a through-route that goes through Edmonds on its way to either Edmonds CC or Aurora Village, so a deviation could increase through travel times and operating costs. The trade-off is roughly a 1000-foot walk for connecting Sounder riders from the stop on Railroad to the station platform. And because the 416 is a peak-direction only commuter route, there’s no real advantage to pulling into the station bays.
While this case certainly isn’t reflective of a solution for much more complex situations in other locations, it’s encouraging to see agencies like CT move in the direction of evaluating route-specific trade-offs for this kind of thing.
*[Update 9/29 – 8:38am] In this case, I’ve learned that the Edmonds Station deviation saves time since buses won’t have to contend with the rail crossings and ferry traffic. So while the opposite is the better bet for CT in this example, the question is still one to be asked, especially of other park-and-rides were costly deviations sometimes occur.
UW Students: How to Ride the Bus
Happy first day of school to all the UW students out there! If you haven’t taken the bus before the video above will give you a good rundown of how it’s done, with fare payment being a notable exception (see below). UW Commuter Services has reference information here and for anyone that rides or is planning on riding the bus on a regular basis OneBusAway, created by UW students no less, is a must. It can be used online, by phone or SMS and of course smart phones.
For new and continuing students please note that all Husky Cards now have an embedded ORCA chips in then, no more quarterly U-Pass stickers. This means that you now have to “tap” your husky card on the bottom half of the ORCA card readers when paying your bus fare.
A proper “tap”, seen in the photo above, involves holding your card centered over the bottom half of the machine until it beeps and a green light comes on. Don’t wave it in front of the reader, tap the upper part of the reader, or very quickly tap the reader. It won’t work and you’ll have to do it again. For those of you that rather not take your card out of your purse or wallet you can usually just push them against the reader and it will work assuming the card comes close enough to the reader and you don’t have other contact-less technology cards like security badges (although it might still work).
Please leave any other helpful tips in the comment thread below.