Today, Metro begins its second round of open houses to gather feedback on the revised Fall 2012 service change proposal. These open houses are a great opportunity to share your thoughts on these proposals directly with Metro planners. The schedule is as follows:
Monday, Feb. 13 – Ballard High School
Wednesday, Feb. 15 – Madison Middle School, West Seattle
Thursday, Feb. 16 –Chief Sealth High School, Delridge/White Center
Tuesday, Feb. 21 – Union Station, Downtown Seattle
Thursday, Feb. 23 – Queen Anne Community Center
Monday, Feb. 27 – Washington Middle School, Central Area/Mt. Baker
All of these open house meetings will be held from 6 PM–8 PM., except the Feb. 21 meeting at Union Station, which is from 12 PM–2 PM. There are also a raft of other, smaller presentations to neighborhood organizations on Metro’s calendar. If you are a resident of one of those neighborhoods, those meetings are another great chance to make your opinions known. If you can’t make any in-person events, you can submit feedback via the survey on Metro’s Have a Say website, and email Metro at haveasay@kingcounty.gov.
The spring ST schedule book is on the street, or at least on the web. Changes take effect February 18th. Nothing earth-shaking this time around, but a bunch more trips to Snohomish County:
Route 510: Five afternoon trips added and schedule adjustments
Route 511: Two morning trips added and schedule adjustments
Route 513: Minor schedule adjustments to make better connections with Everett Transit
Route 522: Minor weekend schedule adjustments
Route 532: Schedule adjustments
Route 540: Minor schedule adjustments
Route 542: Minor schedule adjustments
Route 545: Stop change in downtown Seattle
Route 560: Significant schedule adjustments; more trips running between Burien and West Seattle
Route 566: Significant schedule adjustments
As ambitious as Bellevue’s plans are for growth in the Bel-Red and Eastgate/I-90 corridors, investments will still need to be made to ensure that infrastructure to support development are up to par. As such, this means that there are a lot of transportation projects that need to be funded, and Bellevue, not immune to the recession, will have to figure out which ones to prioritize. Luckily the public can weigh in on the matter, which is a plus given the broad support for light rail and the Bel-Red plan in the city.
There will be four open houses in February along with a survey to solicit input on the Transportation Facilities Plan (TFP). According to the City of Bellevue, the prioritization of projects in the TFP helps inform the development of the capital budget, which will be critical in providing the funding needed to build major projects:
The public can weigh in on what should be funded in the future. Those interested can respond to an online survey, beginning Feb. 20, available atwww.bellevuewa.gov/transportation-facilities-plan.htm. Or, they can attend an open house, from4:30-6:30 p.m., on one of the following dates:
Wednesday, Feb. 15, at Highland Park & Community Center, 14224 Bel-Red Road
Thursday, Feb. 16, at Factoria Mall, 4055 Factoria Boulevard SE
Thursday, Feb. 23, at Bellevue City Hall, 450 110th Avenue NE, Rm.1E-108
Tuesday, Feb. 28, at Crossroads Mall, 15600 NE 8th Street, Community Meeting Room
This is a good opportunity to make sure Bellevue maintains a progressive attitude towards its transportation future. Even if you’re not a resident but still frequent the city, I’d encourage you to attend. Some of these projects will be making good on big regional investments, so it’s fair to say that a lot of people, both in and outside Bellevue, will have a stake in the process.
One of the most notable social interfaces that we make in the realm of transit is with the driver. Chances are there will be some kind of greeting when you board, maybe a “thank you” or “bye now” when you de-board, and occasionally you might find some passengers will strike up a conversation with the driver during the ride*. None of these verbal interactions are actually necessary; all they really do is foster politeness and social civility. Of course, there are instances that do require the driver’s speech**: announcing stops, rules, and answering passenger questions.
However, sitting on a delayed bus while the driver is answering the question of a passenger who’s standing outside the front doorway can be infuriating for passengers already on board. But beyond just the interests of the passengers, sometimes this can throw buses off schedule, cause bunching, and even break connections. To be sure, there are times when driver assistance is necessary– visually-impaired passengers, for example, might need the route number read aloud. Most of the time, however, the driver is asked information which is already readily available elsewhere.
Good transit systems actually minimize driver-passenger interaction, which does two things: 1) information about the route/system is clearly conveyed, either online, in paper, or posted at stops, requiring less reliance on the driver; and 2) precious minutes on the schedule can be saved to boost system reliability and efficiency. And it’s not like we don’t already do this– train drivers and engineers, for example, are hidden away from public view entirely on our rail modes, simply because you can trust passengers to know what they’re doing without needing assistance.
As mentioned at the top of the post, there is also social component of driver-passenger interface, which can be good or bad. Driver attitudes, for one, tend to rub off on passengers. Any regular transit rider will know that a sour driver is more likely to inflame your own tempers, while an amiable one can spruce up your day. While the trade-off is there, I’m a big believer that we shouldn’t have to intertwine drivers into our social lives, and that it’s best to just let them get on with their jobs.
*King County Metro actually discourages its drivers from casually conversing with passengers. This rule is often broken.
**Many of these functions are disappearing as Metro installs its new on-board system with automated announcements.
I love this Slate article so much I wish I’d written it myself, but the fact that it was written by Matthew Yglesias makes it even better. Even better than that, I have written posts just like it here, here, and, especially here in my “Density is People” series. The article makes a point I’ve made over and over again, we need a party of growth and development:
If U.S. cities had regularized party systems each city would probably have something like a “growth and development party” that pushed systematically for greater density. Its members and elected officials would, of course, have idiosyncratic interests and concerns that would sometimes cut across the main ideology. But the party leaders would be able to exercise discipline, the party activists and donors would push for consistency and ideological rigor, and it’d be off to the races. Instead, most big cities feature what really amounts to no-party government in which each elected official stands on his or her own and overwhelmingly caters to idiosyncratic local concerns rather than any kind of over-arching agenda. But different institutional processes could change this, and create a dynamic where growth, development, and density are more viable.
That sums up Seattle, a city with “no-party government,” catering to “idiosyncratic local concerns rather than any kind of over-arching agenda.” Some of tried to buck this at the end of 2009 by organizing something called “The Party of the Future,” even raising funds for a poll that grabbed headlines for a while.
I threw together a sort of an open memo to the development community called “Toward an Ideology of Growth.” I used it as the basis for Density is People. Organizing a sustained pro-growth and pro-density political movement is what we need.
If successful the outcome of this effort wouldn’t simply be a few taller buildings here and there, but a true transformation of local culture. Remember, this is a part of the world that still hasn’t gotten over being screwed by the railroads in the 19th century; memories are long, necks are stiff, and the politics are passive.
But it’s worth the effort. Otherwise we will truly become the Mossback City, locked post World War II land use patterns favoring an entitled single-family class of land owners with no financial interest in change.
Occasionally as a writer I feel like I am one of those people we see from time to time on our busy streets talking to themselves. “Are they using a blue tooth headset,” we wonder, “or are they crazy?” The same, I guess, applies to bloggers. We can often measure ourselves by whether anyone is listening—or in our case reading—to what we spew into the interwebs. I am not crazy. We need a Party of the Future and we need it yesterday.
A related thought I had while attending last night’s meeting is that Baumol’s cost disease is a killer for bus service in the long run.
If you’re not familiar, Baumol basically says that the cost of wages in unproductive sectors of the economy go up because those works are living in the same world as workers in other sectors whose productivity has increased. The famous example is orchestras. An orchestra takes the same amount of time to perform Beethoven’s Ninth that it did 100 years ago. Meanwhile, an auto worker can make the same car in half the time it took in 1970. So the auto worker’s wages go up. But the auto worker and the violinist rent from the same landlords and shop in the same grocery stores. So the violinist’s wages need to go up, too, even though he/she is no more “productive” than 100 years ago.
Most sectors of the economy that are afflicted by Baumol — performing arts, education, health care, transit — tend to end up with government subsidies for precisely this reason.
(Recorded music, has, of course, made the violinist more productive in the sense that the same performance can now reach millions of people. This is exactly the increase in productivity necessitated by Baumol. Baumol doesn’t predict the increasing costs of music in general, but specifically live performances of music.)
Similarly, Seattle’s buses likely take the same amount of time and carry roughly the same number of passengers that they did 50 years go. But the cost of living has gone up dramatically. So drivers need to be paid more. They have to live and raise families in the same city with software developers whose productivity has gone through the roof in the last 20 years. Which means one ore more of the following:
Buses need to get bigger and carry more people per driver (i.e. turn into trains)
Fares have to continue to go up faster than the rate of inflation
Public subsidy has to rise, also faster than the rate of inflation
Buses need to get faster – do the same route in less time (while not losing any passengers)
I’m not the first to make this connection, of course. There’s a great op-ed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune from last July by Steve Elkins that makes exactly this point. But it’s worth keeping in mind as you see agencies like Metro struggle to stay solvent. In many ways they’re swimming against the tide, and that’s before you get into all the efforts in recent years (I-695, etc.) to actively cut transportation funding.
Incidentally, this is also why the suburbs are fundamentally doomed in the long run. But that’s another post entirely.
It was an impressive turnout of residents, overwhelmingly in opposition. Hats off to the folks opposed to the changes who organized en masse. Over 50 people crowded into the Madrona field house to give Metro’s planners an earful about why they thought the proposed change was the worst idea since New Coke.
A couple of thoughts, as someone who designs systems for a living and has listened to my share of irate user feedback:
Change is hard. People come to expect the bus to be there, and they work those assumptions into their daily lives. When someone tells you they’ve been riding the #2 since 1965, it’s hard to just say “well, sorry, it’s going away.”
Explaining why a change is better than the status quo is surprisingly difficult. Metro’s planners, I think, struggled to articulate the benefits of the proposed change. Telling people that their route will get shortened to benefit the overall system doesn’t really get you very far.
User feedback is important, but it isn’t the be-all and end-all. People make contradictory demands. They want the bus to be more reliable, but they don’t seem willing to make the trade-offs to make it so.
People don’t understand the difference between SDOT and Metro. This is obvious and long-running, but it’s especially problematic when Metro moves a bus to Madison Street under the assumption that Seattle’s Transit Master Plan calls for improving bus service on Madison, but people don’t make the connection because the changes aren’t made in sync. You have to be paying very close attention.
The suburban-ness of Seattle exacerbates the issue. Seattleites expect frequent bus service in relatively low-density neighborhoods, and older riders need to get on the bus just to get groceries. The QFC on Broadway seemed to be the go-to. Shockingly, no one in the meeting shops at the nearby Grocery Outlet on MLK and Union. One obvious solution would be to put a grocery store in Madrona proper, maybe with some apartments above it. Apartments would mean more people, and thus justify more transit service. But I’m pretty sure you’d get ridden out of that meeting on a rail (pun intended) if you proposed anything like that.
The residents of Madrona are quite scared of downtown, despite living just 2 miles from it. The idea of transferring to get to Queen Anne was a terrifying prospect, especially at night. I wonder how much of that is based on downtown today, versus how they might remember it from 10-20 years ago.
For many riders, speed is not an issue. The slow “milk run” routes are not really a problem for riders who aren’t in a rush to get anywhere. How do you balance the needs of a transit-dependent person who needs to go to the grocery store once or twice a week with a downtown worker who rides 10 times a week?
As for me, I can see the benefits of the changes detailed by Bruce @ STB and I support them overall, even though it’ll mean I have to walk an extra two blocks to and from work. But I still feel like we’re doing something wrong by pouring all our bus service through a few East-West corridors (like Madison) rather than amping up the grid across the city with more transit-only lanes. But maybe that’s wishful thinking.
I’d encourage everyone to take the survey and tell Metro what you think. They’re listening.
Last night, the Waterfront Seattle Project held their second open house, and it’s the one many of us have been waiting for. The topic was Mobility and Access: all about improving connections between the city and the waterfront, and of balancing the needs many different transportation modes that must coexist on the rebuilt waterfront: pedestrians, bikes, transit, freight and cars. Along with the waterfront team, staff from the city and Metro were present in force, and the meeting was well attended (a lot of cyclists, in particular), with vigorous conversations at each table for the duration of the meeting.
The event began with a presentation discussing the background and general considerations and goals of the project, along with a segment by segment discussion of the right-of-way cross-sections, from Belltown to Pioneer Square. The presenter noted that a streetcar had not been eliminated as a possibility within the roadway, although it wasn’t included in the cross-sections. After that, everyone was turned loose to five discussion tables to share their opinions with staff taking notes.
