Month: March 2012

As great as the House transportation bill was, the Senate refused to concur with it and sent the legislation to conference committee. In my view, the end product is actually an improvement for transit advocates.

According to the TCC website this is going to both chambers in a matter of hours, so tell your legislators to support this bill. Even if they’re a lock to vote for it, it’s always useful for them to know that it’s very important to their constituents. The bill number is SB 6582.

In the conference report, most points are unchanged from the House-approved version: Transportation Benefit Districts other than Seattle can raise their vehicle license fee to $40 without a public vote; counties can levy a 3 cent fuel tax, and Seattle a one cent fuel tax. There are also provisions to allow some TBD funds to be spent on affordable housing.

The new bill does modify and clarify the authority for a 1% Motor Vehicle Excise tax. In counties other than King with more than 400,000 residents, the authority rests with Transportation Benefit Districts. In King County, it rests with the county, and there’s an additional very important provision:

The proceeds from a motor vehicle excise tax imposed under this section may only be used to support the operations, maintenance, and capital investments for public transportation.

This removes the possibility that King County’s MVET would be used for roads.

• Safe streets bill is dead.
• State supreme court rules that local voters can’t ban red-light running cameras.
• 3rd & James stop gets its own OneBusAway display.
• Nickerson St. road diet “reduced speed and collisions.” Full report here.
• 2011’s Rate of mudslide closures on North Sounder was a 20-year high.
• Chinatown restaurants argue that higher parking rates are, in fact, hurting business.
• Senate does not concur with awesome House transit bill; headed for conference committee.
• C-Line construction update.
• TCC is hiring for a new position in Pierce County.
• Water Taxi fares went up last week.
• Seattle/Portland comparisons. The crucial insights come at the end.
• Peer to peer car sharing bill looks likely to become law.
• Seattle’s transportation agenda is underwhelming.
• Oregon DOT getting new Talgo trainsets.
• Mitt Romney in 2006 sounded like Dan Bertolet.
• New studies on light rail and traffic congestion. It’s never been the point for me, but it’s important rhetoric in campaigns.
• Time to love the bus.
• California cellphone driving ban saving lives.
• Transportation bills flailing in Congress.
• Train fans might enjoy the Whatcom Easter Train.
• A garden on a bus roof?

This is an open thread.

The Gondola Project has responded to d.p.’s claim that Seattle should not want to be the first North American city with a gondola system, because of the effort and expense required to be a first mover.  They make the case that:

1. If it’s rational for Seattle to wait for other cities, it’s just as rational for other cities to wait for Seattle.  The result is that nothing gets built.
2. It’s arrogant to dismiss the heavy lifting done by places like Caracas, Medellin and Rio de Janeiro (and I’d add Algeria) simply because they’re poor.
3. Seattle has already placed itself in the extremophile position (sorry, my fault).  Other cities will look to us to be the first mover.

Read the whole thing here.

Great arguments.  But I think they missed one point.  Sometimes it’s great to be the first mover.  The Pacific Northwest, and Seattle in particular, is very good at being cutting edge.  And we profit from being first.

Let’s take the example of green buildings.  The Pacific Northwest leads the US in green buildings, specifically LEED buildings though we’re going much beyond LEED into net-zero and Passivhaus.  Being on the leading edge has grown our architects, engineers, and construction firms into sustainability experts.  This expertise is highly valuable, and our services are in demand throughout the US and the world.  There are now 1.8 billion square feet of LEED certified commercial space in the world and as early adopters we’ve been one of the go-to cities for expertise.  Similar examples can be found in airplanes, software, and even coffee.

Sure, gondolas may not go anywhere.  It might just be one weird system that Seattle has that nobody else wants to touch – perhaps it may even fail before we get that far.  Or it can be one more symbol that Seattle is still an innovative city that’s not afraid to be out in front of the pack.

One of Metro’s most thankless efforts to preserve neighborhood service on low-ridership corridors in the fall restructure proposal is the proposed route 50. The new 50 would replace route 56 between SODO and Alki, and route 39 between SODO and Othello Station. The downtown portion of the 39 would go away, with the savings reinvested in increased off-peak frequency on the 50, or elsewhere.

Route 34, which shadows the 39 from S Othello St and Seward Park Ave S to Rainier Ave S and S Genessee St, but then expresses downtown with stops by the Mount Baker Transfer Center and the I-90/Rainier freeway stop, is also scheduled to be eliminated in favor of the new 50. The 34 has three northbound runs in the morning and three southbound runs in the evening. It has a unique tail continuing down Seward Park Ave S to S Henderson St, turning west at Rainier Beach High School, and terminating at Rainier Ave S and S Henderson St. Due to being one-way only, it is of no use for anyone commuting to or from Rainier Beach High. It is about 200-300 feet away from Rainier Ave S for most of it’s tail’s length, but access to Rainier Ave is limited by hills and dead-ends.

One of the proponents of the 34 recently laid down the challenge to Metro at the final open house for the restructure: She didn’t need a one-seat ride downtown, necessarily, and didn’t mind transferring to Link. However, she did mind having to make the long walk to Rainier Ave S, and did not feel safe waiting on Rainier Ave S for the 7.

Proponents of the 39 laid out similar concerns: They didn’t mind transferring to Link, but did mind waiting a long time in the dark and rain at Columbia City Station, and that, furthermore, they never knew when the bus would finally show up.

The proposed route 50 is an opportunity for Metro to gain the confidence of one-seat commuters that a smoothe train-to-bus transfer can happen, without an excessively long wait at a bus stop, so that future efficiencies involving transfers to Link can become politically viable.

Three steps would help facilitate the success of the 50, should the county council decide to create it:

1. List the departure times from each Link station. Currently, Columbia City Station and SODO Station are not mentioned in the printed 34/39 schedule.
2. Make “Connection Protection” a policy at Columbia City Station and Othello Station. Metro’s new On-Board System will let operators know the estimated time of arrival for key connecting buses at timed-transfer bus stops. Adding southbound Link trips to that list should eliminate the painful miss of having an eastbound 50 take off from Columbia City Station a minute before a slow southbound Link train arrives.
3. Time train-to-bus connections so that the eastbound bus departures are spread out among the southbound Link runs. This is where scheduling math comes in.

I’ll leave it to the pros to determine whether the third and fourth steps are truly viable, but for purposes of this post, let me offer some fun armchair math, below the jump:

Continue reading “Route 50 is a Chance to Show Train-Bus Connections Can Work”

Update: Yglesias responds here.

Matt Yglesias‘s ebook, The Rent is Too Damn High,  tells the story of how high housing costs have profound negative impacts on our society. Yglesias explains how current attempts to deal with the issue are inadequate, and how restrictive zoning laws and regulations are severely restricting housing supply in America’s coastal cities, thus driving up housing costs, and hampering the economy by limiting the number of people who have access to high-productivity locations. Long-time readers will be familiar with the arguments against NIMBYism and zoning, and I won’t re-tread that territory here. The Rent is Too Damn High is a thorough walk-through of the arguments in favor of urbanism, and is a great companion to Ryan Avent’s take on a similar subject in The Gated City.
Continue reading “Book Review: The Rent is Too Damn High”

SDOT is holding a First Hill Streetcar open house tonight at the Silver Cloud Hotel from 4-7 pm.

Wednesday, March 7
4:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Silver Cloud Hotel
The Broadway Room
1100 Broadway
Seattle, WA 98122

Every transportation technology has both inherent and perceived strengths and weaknesses. With this in mind, and the talk about urban aerial trams and gondolas getting new attention in Seattle, both from long time blogger Matt Gangemi (Matt the Engineer) and two weeks ago from Matt Roewe at the City Builder happy hour, I wanted to start the discussion on STB by talking about the basics, strengths and weakness of aerial trams and gondolas. I’m not an expert on design or construction, but their characteristics can be defined along the same metrics as other modes of transit.

I see this as a critical starting point for any serious discussion about these technologies, because (let’s be honest) most people find the idea of urban aerial trams and gondolas far fetched.

I’ll start off with the basics about the technologies. First, while there are technical differences between aerial trams and gondolas*, the importance of these differences from a rider’s perspective comes down to two things, frequency and stations. There are differences in speed, but I’ll explain why this isn’t very important.  Continue reading “Aerial Trams and Gondolas”

With the failure of Pierce Transit’s Prop. 1 at the ballot last February, the agency has been scrambling to find non-cut options, the most promising one being a redefinition, or shrinking, to be more precise, of the current service area.  While Prop. 1 received rather generous support in Tacoma’s core urban areas, the vote was largely dragged down by anti-tax suburban communities.  As such, shrinking the boundaries is being sold as a win-win for everyone: more political support for PT, and no taxes for cities that don’t want to pay for transit.

At last, Pierce Transit’s Public Transportation Improvement Conference has come up with ideas for a new district boundary (PDF), with a bold purge of suburban communities like Buckley and Sumner.  Before the new district can be improved, however, the PTIC will host a hearing to solicit public input.  As usual, our friends at Transportation Choices Coalition are at the helm of organizing turnout.  The hearing is 6pm this Thursday, March 8th, at the Pierce Transit Training Center in Lakewood:

We are never going to have decent bus service in Tacoma and Pierce County unless Pierce Transit secures additional revenues.  The current map proposed in front of the PTIC will align Pierce Transit’s taxing district with where there is bus service, paving the way for more efficient service in the future and allow voters in Tacoma, Lakewood, Gig Harbor, and Puyallup to vote for transit revenue (again) and restore their bus service.

Voters in Bonney Lake and rural areas should NOT decide the fate of transit service in Tacoma and its suburban neighbors. Please attend this hearing and tell the PTIC to PASS THE MAP! Due to the schedule to get on the ballot, we need to this to pass at this meeting!

Of course, the biggest concern with excluding cities like Sumner and Bonney Lake, in particular, is the elimination of connectors that feed Sounder stations.  But given the existing momentum for that to happen anyway, PT doesn’t seem to have anything to lose with a contraction of its service area.  For more information on the boundary issue, Chris Karnes over at Tacoma Tomorrow has already provided excellent coverage.

Seriously.  Maybe gondolas as transit will seem a little more boring and sane now.

Progress toward sustainable land use in Seattle will be measured by whether our land use laws and policies spur innovation, not the height of buildings. Even though contentious discussions about density for Roosevelt centered on building height—with proponents of sustainable growth pushing for 65 feet on the Sisley properties and growth opponents wanting to cap the site at 40 feet—winning that argument only got us 25 feet of progress in what is a 10,000-mile journey toward sensible land use around light rail stations.

The answer isn’t about height at station areas like Beacon Hill; it’s completely getting rid zoning around light rail stations.

I’m guilty, as most of us are, of obsessing about height. Let’s not do it when it comes to Beacon Hill, where the City Council is again considering rezones. If the Council does what I expect, what Beacon Hill will get is some kind of mix of heights that respond to political and neighborhood concerns—including the concerns of people like me who think we need to put more growth in density (density is people!) around light rail stations. That wouldn’t be the best outcome. Councilmembers Tim Burgess and Mike O’Brien should team up to so something different on Beacon Hill.

The obsession with height is understandable, because people like a number to compare one option against another. We pro-growth people tend to push for the bigger number, the anti-growth set, push for the lower number. It’s the closest we’ve come to actually being party-like about growth in this town. It reminds me of the anti-British slogan from the 19^th century, “54° 40′ or Fight!” Our version is “NC-65 or fight!” More after the jump.

Continue reading “Beacon Hill: The Revolution Won’t Be Measured in Feet”