Month: April 2012

by DAVID SEATER

On Wednesday Sound Transit hosted the Roosevelt Station 60% Design public meeting at Roosevelt High School. The purpose of the meeting was to show the updated plans for Roosevelt station, present the concepts for the exterior and interior art programs, and get feedback from the community. For those who aren’t familiar with Roosevelt Station, it is part of the North Link project, scheduled to open in 2021 and add 62,000 daily boardings to Link in 2030 (of which 8,000 are expected at Roosevelt).

The station design has undergone significant changes since the initial 30% design concept, which was presented at the first open house. The large glass structures from that design have been scaled back significantly to much more modest forms, though there is still a significant emphasis on the use of glass to promote natural light. Rather than the large lobbies seen in the early concepts, there are now smaller lobbies with covered “porch” areas just outside the entrances. These areas will include bike racks for riders who prefer not to use the lockers or bike cage that will be provided in the bike storage area just off of 66th Street.

Another significant change to the design is the increase in size of the plaza on the corner of 66th Street and 12th Avenue NE. This space was created by shifting the escalators in the North Entry further to the north. The plaza will include some “informal seating” on small walls and blocks, and is adjacent to the bike storage area as well as a covered waiting area (the curb in this area will be a 3 minute loading zone). Parking along 12th Ave was also removed and replaced with a “green edge” and wider sidewalks. The sidewalks meander slightly, which the architect says helps to lessen the slope of the hill along the station to improve ADA access. Continue reading “Roosevelt 60% Design Open House”

OneBusAway has become a useful tool to many transit riders but recently the arrival predictions have become more erratic and unreliable since Metro’s program to equip its bus fleet with GPS began. Eastside buses like the 255 have been giving wild estimates like 100+ minute delays or fluctuating between schedule data only and real-time data. And there was a case where the next Route 26 bus was predicted to be over five hours away. Incorrect information is worse than no information since repeated mistakes eventually undermine people’s confidence in real-time information. At the very least it is good for nothing; at the worst it could mislead and create trouble for those who trust it. OneBusAway is only as good as the data provided by the transit agencies.

The problem with King County Metro’s real-time data is a complex one. It involves the combination of two vehicle location systems (the old odometer based system and the new GPS based system) and the translation of data from those systems into a format that OneBusAway understands. I asked OneBusAway’s S. Morris Rose whether the problems would go away once all of Metro’s buses are fitted with GPS. Rose told me that they now think the problem is related to the GPS-equipped buses. Rather than wait for the GPS transition to be completed, work is underway to address the problem with meetings between OneBusAway and Metro engineers. Given their limited resources, I hope that is a sign that Metro is taking data accuracy seriously; if not they really must, because customer trust is hard to win back once it is broken.

Matthew Yglesias, joining Publicola in responding to a recent Seattle Times editorial, pointed out on Tuesday that:

parking mandates are a regressive subsidy. The 16 percent of Seattle households with no car are a disproportionately low-income slice of the city’s population.

Let’s expand on that a bit.  I think it’s fairly clear that the main beneficiaries of parking minimums are those with more vehicles, which would tend to be citizens with a higher income.  On the other side of the equation, who do these minimums harm?  I would group the carless as either urban types that don’t care to drive, the elderly or disabled that can’t drive, or the poor that can’t afford to drive.  Yet these groups are currently being forced to pay higher rents, to make sure if they do ever buy a car they will be less likely to use up “free” street parking.
Continue reading “A Tax on the Poor, Benefiting the Rich”

Senate Bill 6582, which made it all the way through both houses and a conference committee, is now likely to never get final approval from the Senate, reports Jerry Cornfield. As is so often the case, it’s been blocked by Senate Transportation Chair, Mary Margaret Haugen (D-Camano Island):

Rep. Marko Liias, D-Edmonds, [in the House version of the bill] proposed allowing counties to charge residents an excise tax of 1 percent on the value of their vehicles with the approval of voters. And if a county chose not to do this, a transit agency would be allowed to seek voter approval of a half-percent MVET of those living within the boundaries of their district…

Haugen didn’t like this idea. She preferred only transportation benefit districts be able to impose an MVET. Her opposition didn’t soften and by March 23 — the 12th day of the month long special session — Haugen forecast its fate.

“In my mind, I don’t see how we can move it,” she said.

The bill originally passed the Senate by a 1-vote margin, so there may be other Senators with veto power that aren’t speaking up.

Given successful public votes, the bill would have restored Community Transit’s mid-decade level of service and prevented deep Metro service cuts after the CRC authority runs out in 2013.

John Niles and I definitely disagree about the significance of current Link ridership to the project as a whole, but I’m for adding more people and this is a constructive question:

If Sound Transit were to have an incremental 50 million dollars (pick a number) to invest in either (1) additional parking at Tukwila Station or S 200th Station, or (2) TOD at any light rail stations of its choosing from Husky Stadium to S 200th, which investment would provide the largest increase in light rail ridership?

Follow-up question, which investment would most meet the intent of regional public policy?

Additional follow-up question, which investment would be best for the sustainability of the region and the planet?

and in a later comment:

I’m pretty sure that providing as much parking as possible at Tukwila or the new S 200th station with giant promotion of its availability would drive up Central Link ridership more than anything else Sound Transit could do. But let’s discuss if that’s the right thing to do.

The shame of it is that Sound Transit itself has little power to do anything at this point. There were multiple decisions in the period 1995-2005 that could have dramatically improved 2012 ridership¹, but now most of the power lies with Metro and the City of Seattle. Continue reading “Improving Link Ridership”

Please, put down your drink.  Then read Michael van Baker’s post about gondolas.  It is hilarious yet intelligent, stringing history together with current events to come up with a possible future.  It’s genius.  I don’t love the recent criticism that Amazon isn’t philanthropic enough – that’s their business, and I believe that social services should be provided by the government.  That said, the Seattle Center to SLU to Capitol Hill line likely benefits Amazon more than any one entity.  And considering how slow our tax-averse state is to build infrastructure, a helping hand from the private sector would be appreciated. 

I wonder if stringing a fiber optic line on the thing would be useful.

Last week, I got a tip about a great new minor-capital transit improvement project that Seattle DOT is undertaking in the Belltown-Uptown area, specifically at the interface between Uptown (aka Lower Queen Anne) and Belltown. This project has only just formally begun, and doesn’t yet have a page on SDOT’s website, but I spoke to SDOT’s Bill Bryant to get a preview of the details. As a regular Queen Anne/Ballard bus rider, I’m very excited at the improvement this is going to make to those routes, including (although, unfortunately, not in time for) Metro’s soon-to-be launched RapidRide D Line.

First, it’s necessary to understand the tangled mess of streets and bus routes that exist in the north end of Belltown. Denny Way, running east-west, forms an edge between two differently-aligned street grids: the Belltown grid, oriented northwest-southeast, and the Queen Anne grid, oriented north-south. Uptown has two viable arterial streets for north-south transit service, which function as a couplet, and cut through its commercial and historic core: Queen Anne Ave N, which connects to Western Ave in Belltown, carries southbound traffic; and 1st Ave N connects to 1st Ave, and carries northbound traffic. In addition, local routes to Ballard service Uptown on the way to Ballard, while routes to Magnolia (and express routes to Ballard) sidestep the heart of Uptown, and serve Western Ave north of Denny.

South of Denny Way, things start to get really confusing. After the jump, a map.

Continue reading “The Uptown-Belltown Transit Improvement Project”

Sadly, this remains completely accurate 62 years on.

This is an open thread.

In The Rent is too Damn High, reviewed by Andrew here, Yglesias argues that single-family homes are typically owned, not rented, because the costs of managing the property make it inefficient to do so. And indeed, it’s cheaper to be a landlord for a multi-family building, since much of the infrastructure and common space is shared by multiple tenants.

Nonetheless, the wave of foreclosures in America over the last few years has led to a wave of investment companies scooping up distressed homes and turning them into rental properties:

With home prices down more than a third from their peak and the market swamped with foreclosures, large investors are salivating at the opportunity to buy perhaps thousands of homes at deep discounts and fill them with tenants. Nobody has ever tried this on such a large scale, and critics worry these new investors could face big challenges managing large portfolios of dispersed rental houses. Typically, landlords tend to be individuals or small firms that own just a handful of homes.

It’s possible that single-family housing has gotten so cheap – and other investment opportunities have gotten so scarce – that this new wave of investors will actually make a profit. It’s also possible that advances in technology, like the ability to remotely monitor houses or dispatch plumbers, have fundamentally changed the economics of landlording.

More interesting, though, is the question of how this new industry will make its mark on suburbia. Defenders of the home mortgage tax deduction often claim that homeowners are better stewards of their property and more invested in their community than renters. But surely large-scale landlords managing an investment portfolio have interests as well, and unlike single-family homeowners, they’ll be able to dedicate significant resources to lobbying.

Unlike suburban developers, who close the sale and are gone, suburban landlords will need to make money from their neighborhoods over time. They’ll also need to attract a different clientele than the typical urban renter, probably a family (multi-generational?) that can fill a 2600 sq ft house. Will they advocate for more density in the ‘burbs, so as to lower maintenance costs? Or perhaps less density, so as to keep rents high? More parks? Better schools? More highways?  If this new business model proves successful (and that’s a big if) it could fundamentally change the landscape (both political and actual) of suburban America.

Coming up, on the evening of April 18th, Town Hall Seattle is hosting a debate between two well-known transit authors:

Authors Darrin Nordahl and Jarrett Walker discuss public transit from two different ends of the bus route: technical simplicity—and fun. Most everyone agrees that public transit is a powerful tool for addressing a range of urban problems, but while Walker, author of Human Transit, believes that transit can be simple if we focus on the underlying geometry that all transit technologies share, Nordahl, author of My Kind of Transit, argues that when public transit is an enjoyable experience, tourists and commuters alike will willingly hand in their keys.

Regular readers won’t be surprised at all to learn that I am completely in the tank for Walker in this debate, as I am in most. In fact, almost everything I’ve written here on STB has been dedicated to the proposition that a simple, high-quality all-day bus network designed to maximize frequency, directness, and reliability would serve the city far, far better than what we have today. Two of the County’s best bus routes, the 358 and 120, were created out of mediocre services in a restructure process that was predicated on exactly the same ideas. And besides, what could possibly be more fun and enjoyable than travelling on the 358?

Sadly, my travel plans don’t permit me to attend, but I would commend this debate to the attention of anybody who takes an interest in promoting transit use, which is, I presume, all of you. STB is a co-sponsor of this event, for which space is limited.