As Bruce wrote yesterday Metro will be holding its first public meeting related to elimination of the Ride Free Area (RFA) this Thursday from 4:00 -6:30 at Union Station.
Operational Problems of the DSTT
We have written fairly extensively on this operational impacts of this change. A study done by Metro shows that the operations in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel (DSTT) would see significant and unacceptable negative speed and reliability impacts from elimination of the RFA. The report concluded that none of the operational improvements suggested can fully close the gap between the current peak usage and the reduced peak capacity.
Additional, travel time data I obtained from Metro shows that travel time speed and reliability in the tunnel has progressively deteriorated since it reopened for joint operation with Link in 2007. This trend has been most prevalent in PM peak hours, which will also be the most negatively impacted by a pay-as-you-enter fare policy. My purely personal experience indicates that speed and reliability have further deteriorated since this data was collected in Spring 2010.
The existing speed and reliability in the DSTT, in my opinion, is already too poor, and further deterioration is completely unacceptable for riders and is a waste of Metro and Sound Transit resources.
When I read the headline “Parking fees drive diners away” in Seattle’s largest car-loving paper, I expected some sort of evidence to back this claim up. But it turned out to be an opinion piece without adding any facts to the debate. Skimming past the usual logical but flawed argument of higher parking rates = fewer customers, I came to the final argument. That employees are having to pay more for street parking.
For those who must drive, the additional two hours of paid parking require them to spend another $6 to $8 per shift. This amount is not trivial to our employees.
Let me be very clear: street parking in retail areas is not for workers. It is not for residents. It is for retail customers. If your business relies on a substantial amount of business from people that drive, parking space that’s less than a block from your business is very valuable resource. The greater number of people you can get in and out of that space within a day will directly translate into more business for you. Having your employees parking in those spaces the entire time they’re working in your restaurant is a terrible idea. Charging for parking encourages people to move their cars quickly. Charging more than private lots encourages people to park in private lots if they need to park for a long amount of time. If your employees are encouraged to switch to a private lot, this is good for your business.
King County Metro, Sound Transit, Community Transit and the City of Seattle are hosting an open house on Thursday, 4:00-6:30 PM, at Union Station, to discuss their plans for the elimination of the Ride Free Area and obtain feedback from the community. Done right, RFA elimination could boost Metro’s revenue, reduce casual fare evasion, and eliminate Metro’s arcane “when to pay” and “where to exit” rules. Done wrong, RFA elimination could make buses even slower and less reliable on the surface through the CBD, and dramatically reduce the peak capacity of the downtown transit tunnel.
Metro has studied RFA elimination extensively, but it remains to be seen whether the agency has the time and money to get this right by September. In addition, as I’ve pointed out before in comments, one way to mitigate bus congestion downtown is to run fewer buses downtown, by requiring riders on underutilized radial routes to transfer to frequent, high-performing trunk routes, thereby ensuring that every bus entering or leaving downtown is a full bus. What we’ve seen so far in this respect with the Fall restructure process is not encouraging.
UPDATE: Metro’s Linda T. notes that if you can’t make the meeting, you can also provide feedback and learn more at this page on the Metro site.
Transit agencies and city host open house on elimination of
Ride Free Area in downtown Seattle
Metro also moving to pay-on-entry system countywide in September
The Ride Free Area for buses in downtown Seattle is scheduled to be eliminated on Sept. 29, 2012. At the same time, riders will begin paying when entering the bus for all trips.
These changes will help King County Metro Transit save money and preserve bus service. Sound Transit and Community Transit are also preparing to act on similar changes for their bus operations in King County.
The three agencies and the city of Seattle are hosting an open house to update the community and get feedback:
Thursday, March 29
4-6:30 p.m.
Union Station Great Hall
401 S. Jackson St., Seattle
Metro is currently working with Sound Transit, Community Transit, and Seattle on an implementation plan for the Ride Free Area changes. This includes options to address transportation needs of low or no-income people who use the Ride Free Area to travel to essential services in the downtown area.
The Sound Transit Board is scheduled to vote in June on charging fares for ST Express bus trips within the downtown area, consistent with current policy for Link light rail.
North Link Capital Committee Presentation (March 8th)
As a followup to last week’s post with the presentation from the North Link Open House, click the image above to see the slides from the presentation that Sound Transit staff gave to the ST Capital Committee earlier this month, covering similar information but in more detail; tomorrow, I’ll have a post discussing the parking issues at Northgate at length. Below is is a video shown in the public meeting, that gives a sense of the broad outlines of the construction process and the finished product.
Mike Lindblom has a good scoop about a new design option for Link in Downtown Bellevue. It’s about saving some money.
The boldest new concept would abandon the 2011 proposal to excavate a huge underground station downtown, perhaps 70 feet deep with a mezzanine, beneath the intersection of Northeast Fourth Street and 110th Avenue Northeast. Instead, Sound Transit would look at a shallower Bellevue Transit Center Station for the East Link route.
Builders could exploit the slope that descends from the financial district to Interstate 405 — where tracks are supposed to emerge from the tunnel anyway, then become elevated near Meydenbauer Center. One layout involves a so-called “diagonal” station that cuts the corner where there’s now a City Hall parking garage and vacant King County land. The second concept is oriented east-west along Northeast Sixth Street.
Engineers are also looking at ways to save money at the 110th Avenue Northeast location by making the station shallower or narrower.
If you’re a bit confused, the article has a useful diagram.
I have mixed feelings about this concept. First of all, broadly speaking I’m not a fan of ST’s station designs, or the DSTT stations they inherited. I have significant complaints about 8 of the 13 existing stations*, even only considering things that wouldn’t have taken much money to get right. Anything that brings the platform closer to the surface makes the train that much closer to everything in every direction, simultaneously. That it saves money is gravy, so three cheers for shallower stations.
Moving it a half-block or block eastward, however, starts to move it further away from the downtown core that it already skirts the edge of, and towards the interstate that we know is the death of walksheds. Here’s hoping that they make it shallower, but keep it as far west as possible.
* In case you’re wondering, I have no major problem with Chinatown, Beacon Hill, Columbia City, Othello, and Seatac. The rest have significant usability flaws.
There is a remarkable front-page piece in the Times today rather unsubtly titled “Parking around Seattle may get worse as city planners favor transit.” My first thought was Seattle was taking away street parking for transit lanes (Ha!) but in fact it’s just eliminating parking minimums in certain areas.
I was all set to write a takedown but Erica Barnett at PubliCola seems to have covered the main points. Apparently a top-down command-and-control economy is the only way to save local business, especially since local auto shops are worthy of protection but “developers” are something to be fought.
Like many political issues, I think this gets rather unfortunately wrapped up in identity politics. Urbanists try to discourage driving, partly for environmental reasons, partly for aesthetic ones, and partly because car dependence is simply unworkable at a certain level of density. Admittedly, among some there’s an added sense of “screw’em if they refuse to stop driving.” The other side opposes these measures, thanks to a combination of fear of losing their current quasi-free, low-effort car access, the abrasion of the less tactful urbanist edge, and a general sense that their lifestyle is being labeled as immoral. That said, the impact is likely to be either beneficial or small. Either people will switch from driving, in which case we’ve just created affordable housing with few negative externalities, or people won’t, in which case the market will demand parking in accordance with the old minimum.
Anyhow, I think moral condemnation of people’s choices isn’t helpful. Except for those of us who are simply too poor to consume anything, most of us have at least some indulgences that have significant environmental consequences. Some of us drive the SUV when there’s a suitable express bus, some of us eat lots of meat, and some of us fly all over the place for leisure. I’ve been searching for a syntax that says “it would be good public policy to stop encouraging people to do these things” without the added connotation of “people who do that thing are morally wrong.”
The Seattle Department of Transportation posted a reminder on its blog about letting buses go first, a good idea but also mandated by law. Buses should go first—but who or what comes before buses, and whom should bus drivers be “letting go first?” The answer is pretty obvious, bikes and pedestrians. But in practice, sometimes, it feels like bus drivers could use a reminder of this. Fortunately, giving pedestrians the right of way is also written down in the Seattle Municipal Code and Washington Administrative code as well. The bottom line is that with more people in the city, everyone needs to be on the look out for everyone else if we’re going to make this density thing work.
Awhile back on Seattle’s Land Use Code, I wrote a response to Dan Bertolet’s posting of a video about riding bikes (or not riding bikes) called “Why People Don’t Ride Bikes.” Bike posts always generate a lot of hullabaloo for some reason from both cyclists and drivers irritated with cyclists. I felt a little left out being a pedestrian. I gave up my bike riding because I found that the distances I was commuting were too short for riding a bike. It took less time to get from point A to point B on foot than it took suiting up for the rain, unlocking and locking the bike, and, as Dan pointed out, it seemed like I was risking my life to get to work.
I wrote a response that included a video as well. I took some phone video of running through Capitol Hill in which I braved people blowing crosswalks, had to run around cars and trucks parking on the sidewalk, and a series of other horrors. My point was to argue for an explicit hierarchy for modes of transit. This isn’t anything really new, but our laws and codes tend to put a lot of weight on protecting cars from people rather than the other way around.
Wednesday night at the Link Northgate station meeting, Ron Endlich of Sound Transit told the audience that they plan to weigh all the options to mitigate lost parking during and after construction at Northgate station. I, others who live in the Northgate area, and the Seattle Transit Blog editorial board urge Sound Transit to invest in a pedestrian bridge over I-5 and in increased local transit service – not a new parking garage in the middle of a Seattle urban center.
Currently, there are 1,522 Park and Ride stalls at Northgate. 428 of these stalls will be displaced during station construction, but the new station will permanently eliminate only 117 stalls. Sound Transit is currently bound by the Federal Transit Administration to replace those 117 spaces. Sound Transit could seek an exemption from the FTA – with abundant private parking and the potential for Metro to re-purpose much of their Northgate-Downtown service to feed into the station, we don’t feel forging ahead with parking replacement is a good use of transit dollars.
Instead of a parking garage, Sound Transit has other options on the table:
A pedestrian and bike bridge over I-5 between the station area and North Seattle Community College (NSCC). This would provide station access for students, open up further parking options, and bring Licton Springs residents to the station. It is our preferred choice.
Temporary or permanent bus service improvements, which could help guide Metro’s service hours once the station opens.
Leasing additional Park and Ride stalls from adjacent property owners.
Northgate is an urban center. While it has been auto-oriented in the past, its future can be brighter. The Northgate Stakeholders Group and other discussions about the future of Northgate have focused on increasing the walkability and bikeabilty of the urban center.
Northgate neighbors have long asked for a bridge over I-5 connecting the transit center with NSCC and Licton Springs. King County Metro research has shown that many Licton Springs neighbors choose to drive to the Park and Ride rather than walk, as the distance around I-5 is long and transit connections are poor. Simply adding a bridge will decrease the number of residents driving to the station and increase transportation options to NSCC. In addition, at $16-20 million, the bridge should be cheaper than a parking garage, freeing up money to improve sidewalks around the station.
Scarce transit dollars would be better spent on pedestrian access that connects the Northgate community and that promotes active modes of transportation. With new parks, better sidewalks and crossings, library and community center investments, improvements to zoning and ironically, removal of parking minimums, we have already started down the right path. Building a parking garage on scarce station-adjacent land commits Northgate to a continued focus on cars and takes away space to grow an urban center. We can do better for Northgate, and we can do better for our investment in mass transit in Seattle.
