Tonight at 5:30 at SvR’s office downtown on the harbor steps, Street for all Seattle is having a volunteer training event. From the Facebook invite.
If you are interested in volunteering for Streets For All Seattle, the campaign to approve Proposition 1 this November, this is volunteer training is a great first step. You will learn everything you need to know about the campaign, how we will communicate our priorities to the voting public, and how to tell personal stories about why passing Proposition 1 is important to you and your family.
This is our first – but not only – volunteer training. Please bring a friend or two, as it is a perfect opportunity to plug others into the campaign as well. If you can’t make it, there will be another one on September 29 – but this is the one to go to!
If you’re new to campaigning or it has just been a while since you worked on a campaign this will be a good event to get going again.
Tomorrow PSRC is hosting the kickoff event for the Growing Transit Communities project at UW’s Kane Hall starting at 9 and going until 11:30. The event will include presentations from ST CEO Joni Earl, PSRC President Josh Brown, and Mayor McGinn. Event program here. Below are details about the study.
With support from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program, PSRC will coordinate an innovative new regional partnership joining cities, housing authorities, counties, public health agencies, affordable housing advocates, educational institutions and development interests.
The 3-year, $5 million federal grant will support efforts to capitalize on the more than $15 billion investment in new high capacity
transit systems serving places where job and housing growth will be focused in the future. The new program — Growing Transit Communities: A Corridor Action Strategy for the Central Puget Sound Region — will support neighborhood planning for more sustainable communities around as many as 100 new transit centers that are expected in the region in the next 20 years. The new program will take a big picture approach, ultimately putting jobs and opportunity closer to where people live, while sustaining a healthy environment and a healthy economy in the decades to come.
This HUD Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities grant provides an opportunity to address some of the greatest barriers to implementing our regional plans — VISION 2040, Transportation 2040, the Regional Economic Strategy — and securing equitable outcomes. A significant goal of this program is to identify unique roles and opportunities associated with transit investments through the coordination and direct involvement of a wider array of stakeholders, both public and private.
The recent string of high-profile cycling fatalities has been really dispiriting. Seattle is killing people on bikes at the rate of 1 per month, and we seem more interested in discussing the behavioral problems of people driving and cycling rather than addressing the structural problem, the underlying safety of our transportation network. Given the fallibility of human behavior and the assurance of operator errors, we would be wise to reduce structural risk rather than rely on educational campaigns. I was a vehicular cycling advocate myself until a near-miss last December removed cockiness from my advocacy equation. (I landed on my head after a 20mph, over-the-handlebars crash on River Road in Puyallup, escaping with ‘only’ a cervical spine sprain and permanent neck pain.)
Rather than emphasize the vehicular status of bicycles and make a point of accommodating them on all streets, we should recognize that, wherever possible, separated facilities benefit us all. Even as a daily bike commuter I recognize the general incompatibility of non-motorized and motorized modes (including transit!) at anything approaching arterial speeds. In collisions below 25 mph the odds of survival are much higher. Why in the world would I want to ride on a 35 or 45 mph street if I had reasonable alternatives? Yes, we still need traffic calming measures throughout the city, but the need for separated uses persists.
When our government installs bicycle facilities, it implicitly vouches for the general safety of their use. In my opinion, in Seattle we dangerously overemphasize the need to accommodate bicycles on arterials. Many of our bike lanes (hello 2nd Ave!) leave people unnecessarily susceptible to injury and death at the hands of both cars and transit. I bike through Madrona and the Central District every morning, and for my own safety I rarely use 23rd, MLK, Cherry, and/or Union, streets that our Bicycle Master Plan seeks to emphasize. Rather, low traffic streets work perfectly well and with a bit of repaving could be optimized as safe bicycle boulevards. In my case, I’d happily trade Union for Marion, MLK for 27th, and 23rd for 19th/20th. Other substitutions could be King instead of Jackson, Federal instead of 10th, and many others.
Vancouver BC does this very well. While justly famous for its separated cycle tracks downtown on Burrard, Hornby, and Dunsmuir, I am more impressed by Vancouver’s western neighborhoods. Take a look at Vancouver’s official bicycle map (full PDF):
Between Cambie St. and UBC, the main east-west arterials for cars and transit are 4th, Broadway (9th), 16th, King Edward (25th), 33rd, 41st, and 49th. Looking at the official bicycling map you’d hardly know it! Bicycles are directed instead to use 3rd, 8th, 10th, Nanton (29th), 37th, and 45th. Bikes don’t ride in high traffic, and they rarely interact with transit except to cross north-south arterials. The same pattern holds for north-south streets.
In Seattle we may lack many things, but we have an abundance of quiet, low-traffic streets directly adjacent to our busiest arterials. We should put them to better use and save a few lives.
Event Notice: On September 22nd several grassroots community groups advocating for neighborhood greenways (aka bike boulevards) are hosting a presentation at the UW with Mark Lear and Greg Raisman who are experts on the subject. Facebook event here.
I happen to own a copy of Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I was several wonderful chapters in when I lost it, and only recently found it again (it was zipped away in the pocket of my suitcase). As I work through the other 4 books I’ve started, it has sat on a shelf. Even the few chapters I read expanded my understanding of what makes a great neighborhood.
But I’ve found a great reason to pick it back up: the City Builder Book Club. The Center for Urban Projects, the same group that created The Gondola Project, is starting up an online book club specifically for those of us that wish to understand cities in greater depth. And just my luck: their first book is The Death and Life of Great American Cities. If you’re a reader here I highly recommend signing up and reading along.
Sydney Street, photo by Flickr user Mark Sanderson
You can always learn a lot about where you’re from by travelling to somewhere else. Sometimes visiting a place where the way of life is very similar to the place you are from will let you learn more about where you’re from than would visiting somewhere very different (this will make sense shortly). I experienced this second phenomenon when visiting Australia recently.
While in Sydney I noticed there is significantly less on-street parking than there is in most America cities. In the CDB, there is nearly no on-street parking where a car can linger for more than an hour or two. Thinking about this made me realize that in Japan – where I have lived and visit at least once a year – for the most part on-street parking isn’t a thing that exists. There, if you want a place to put your car, you need to either build a spot for yourself on your property or pay some one to let you leave your car on their property.
Both of these are significantly different from the United States where the default situation is that the right-most portion of the public roadway is a fine place to leave your car for as long as you’d like unless otherwise noted. As an encouragement for driving, this is massive. In this study prepared for Transportation Alternatives looking at two similar neighborhoods in New York City, showed a marked increase in driving for residents who lived in the neighborhood that had more on-street parking.
As a data point, according to a parking “census” performed by the city last year, there are 525,000 on-street parking spots in Seattle. Of these, 490,000 are free, unrestricted spaces.
This week SDOT released its initial study on the new, demand-based on-street parking rates in several Seattle neighborhoods. These new rates target leaving one or two spaces available per blockface all day, so drivers spend less time searching in exchange for a bit of money. Key findings:
In the four neighborhoods where rates increased in early 2011 (Commercial Core, First Hill, Capitol Hill, and Pioneer Square), the June 2011 data showed parking occupancies came down within the target occupancy range, though occupancy varies with subareas of each neighborhood. Data generally showed improved availability of on-street parking, although use of disabled parking permits continues to be high in the Commercial Core and First hill (as well as Cherry Hill.)
For the eleven neighborhoods where rates were lowered, results were mixed. Parking occupancy actually dropped in six of the eleven neighborhoods compared to last November. The data showed that decreasing rates by $0.50 per hour did not consistently generate increased parking demand, and where occupancy increased, the amounts were relatively modest.
The seven neighborhoods where rates stayed the same also had mixed results, illustrating that parking pricing is likely not the prime driver for parking demand compared with other factors such as the quality of neighborhood attractions, hours of operation, and willingness to use alternative modes.
Of course, this is one month of data (from June), and this is going to be a continual, iterative process of fine tuning, as conditions change and more demand management techniques are brought to bear. If anything, the lessons the report is drawing from one month of data are too definitive. More after the jump.
Two Views of M Street: the people entrance and the parking entrance
I appreciate Roger Valdez’s straight-up acknowledgement that yes, there is “social engineering” going on in American cities:
Yes, we are social engineers, but no more so thanRobert Moses and his followers, who built “free” highways and subsidized, auto-dependent single-family communities that ate up land, fuel, and energy for more than half a century. That kind of social engineering has run out of (cheap) gas. The answer is to engineer more wisely, not to return to the Wild West or mimick South American shanty towns.
Shortly after I read this article I found myself walking home past the recently-closed M Street grocery on First Hill. Though M Street was popular with the locals, it couldn’t make ends meet after the building’s owners doubled the rent on them. While doubling the rent seems extreme, keep in mind that the property’s new owners, the Ohio Teachers’ Retirement System, bought the development for $75M back in 2006. Gotta recoup that investment somehow.
The reason I bring up the M Street grocery is that urban living (and suburban living) is all about choices. The choices we make necessitate other choices. Developers on First Hill are required to provide parking (this requirement was mercifully reduced to 0.5 spaces/unit, but only after the M Street building was completed), which increases the costs of development, and thus the amount of rent that needs to be collected on the building’s tenants. Furthermore, requiring parking makes it easier for M Street’s residents to own a car, which makes it more likely that they — and their neighbors — will be able to patronize grocery stores further afield. Especially if those grocery stores, are, say, the nearby QFC or Whole Foods, both of whom offer free customer parking.
Thus, only certain kinds of businesses can afford to stay open in neighborhoods like First Hill — and apparently grocery stores are not one of them. Which is a problem, but it’s a problem that results directly from car-centric “social engineering.” We may wish to take a “ducks unlimited” approach to urban planning: “sure, give them parking spots, we’ll offer them such awesome retail that they’ll choose not to use them!” In reality, however, choices and constraints prevail. By choosing to have parking minimums, we’re directly limiting the type of retail that can exist at the ground level. Fortunately, we’re making the right choices in First Hill. What about your neighborhood?
When I wrote up all of the Transit Master Plan’s High Capacity Transit corridors, many of which the Council has killed for now, I tried to make the point that there is no one super-metric that is arbiter of which corridor is the most important one. On the other hand, I spilled many words explaining one metric, ANC/NR, that may have given people the impression that it was the truly important one.
ANC/NR is basically a measure of how much you’re spending to get another person to ride transit on one of their trips. While that’s a really important consideration, a simple thought experiment illustrates its limitations.
Imagine there are two lines. Both have only two stops, at each endpoint. One is 1 mile long and will attract 10,000 riders. Another is 2 miles long and will attract 16,000 riders.* As they are technically almost identical, line 2 costs the same per mile, or twice as much overall.
Congestion pricing has long been one of my pet subjects: with it we can simultaneous reduce wasted time for drivers and riders and raise much needed revenue for transportation projects. Win-win, really. The Evergreen Point Floating bridge is one of the most congested roads in the state, and also needs to be replaced soon. A new state study shows that congestion pricing works for this project:
Traffic next year would drop to 52,000 vehicles per day as drivers divert to Interstate 90, avoid trips or shift to transit, according to an “investment-grade” study by Wilbur Smith Associates, meant to assist in the future sale of construction bonds.
Vehicle trips wouldn’t rebound to the current levels of more than 100,000 a day until the year 2032, the study predicts.
While traffic would move faster, with fewer cars on the road, the state needs a certain level of traffic to generate enough tolls to help pay for a new six-lane bridge.
Despite a traffic drop-off, state Treasurer Jim McIntire is confident that tolling can support at least $1 billion in bonds for the $4.65 billion crossing, as the state Department of Transportation has assumed for years.
Tolls would exceed yearly debt payments by roughly $5 million, according to a new chart issued by McIntire’s office.
I don’t have much to add. Drawn out long enough, the tolls might support more than the $1 billion, and certainly if we were to toll I-90 as well we could raise double that. Of course no one wants to pay tolls, but no one wants to pay for anything. And certainly no one wants to sit in traffic. I wish congestion pricing were more popular.
