Month: May 2012

The saga of East Link has been long. Originally voted down as part of the Forward Thrust plan in 1968 (a familiar map), the I-90 floating bridge was designed to handle rail in the future. In Sound Transit’s 2008 Proposition 1, we funded cross-lake rail, and since then, planning and dependent construction work has been chugging along, even in the face of all sorts of legal and activist opposition (that clearly doesn’t represent the voters).

Eventually, the Bellevue City Council worked with Sound Transit to demand (and partially fund) grade separation through downtown Bellevue. Unfortunately, Bellevue doesn’t really have the money to make up the full difference between surface rail and a tunnel.

Sound Transit and Bellevue are working together on cost savings options to get there. Sound Transit staff  presented (PDF) to the Sound Transit board last week, and came up with some interesting ideas – some new, and some that look like they’ve been brought back from much earlier planning now that cost is a larger factor.

Right now, Bellevue is on the hook for about $60 million in savings, and it looks like these options could cut those costs by as much as $20 million. Unfortunately for Sound Transit, the agreement they have with Bellevue gives any savings back to the city.

You should really look at the whole presentation if you’re interested in seeing all of the alternatives, but there will be another way to learn more. Sound Transit will be having an open house to answer questions on June 5th, at Bellevue City Hall, from 4-7pm.

Another quarter, another set of double-digit gains over the same time last year. The system as whole was up 12%. ST Express boardings rose 14%, Sounder 11% (15% on weekdays), and both Link lines, 10%, 8% on weekdays.

Although routes 540 and 560 took hits after service cuts, the big winner is the 513, up 39%, and the 542, up 28%. The 511, 545, and 555/556 were all up by over 25%. Cost per boarding was up to $7.19,  a trend ST spokesman Andrew Schmid attributes to fuel costs.

Sounder had no special trains, but more than made up for it with skyrocketing ridership. North Sounder was up 34% on weekdays, partially thanks to fewer mudslides, and is about 10% of the total. Sounder’s cost per boarding dropped to $12.45.

Central Link carried 22,585 souls per weekday in its customary winter lull. Cost per boarding is below the bus at $6.98 and is falling.

Of course, comparing cost per boarding over the different modes is problematic, as they cover different distances, charge different fares, serve transit markets of varying quality, and have different spans of service. But the broad trend towards lower per-rider subsidy is a positive one.

One of the most cherished realms of contemporary planning is the allowance for public participation, a tool often embraced for fostering democratic processes at the most local level of civic engagement.  It also happens to be one of the most contentious aspects that planners and policymakers face.  Borne out of a certain necessity in reaction against the top-down planning fiascoes of urban renewal, public participation has yielded issues of its own, often wielded as a tool for obstructionism and calling into question the distribution of citizen power.

Will Doig at Salon has an excellent article on how the public participation has been misused and abused over the years, allowing a disproportionate amount of power to be consolidated into the hands of a few:

These rules, designed to check the power of city officials, now perversely consolidate immense power in the hands of a few outspoken “concerned citizens.” By dragging out the building process indefinitely, these people can make it so expensive that deep-pocketed luxury developers have a better chance of surviving it than anyone actually building affordable housing. Worst of all, these rules have created a new norm in which individual residents just assume that their personal opinions should carry great weight in routine planning decisions.

More below the jump.

Continue reading “Rethinking Public Participation”

On Monday I posted about the major players who have been pushing for a 600-900 stall shared use garage. Today I’ll post specifically about why King County likes the idea, and the fundmental policy discussion we should be having.

King County TOD

Northgate is slated to become the region’s premier transit-oriented development (TOD) center, and King County’s current P&R is at the center of the plan. Northgate TOD has been in the work for several years, but as I wrote on Monday, through the Growing Transit Communities partnership, the publicly funded part of TOD is in high gear. The City is anticipating 2,500 new households and 4,200 new jobs in Northgate, and King County wants to use its current surface parking lots to catalyze other development at Northgate and finance the reconstruction of the Transit Center.

King County sees an off-site structured parking garage, which would be achieved with the 600-900 stall shared use garage, as an important first step in giving the county flexibility in moving forward with TOD. Ron Posthuma said the 600-900 garage would allow the county to move forward with its first 414 units during station construction, allowing TOD to be on the ground when North Link opens. Following this King County could continue to move forward with redeveloping its remaining surface parking lots.

Past examples of King County P&R “TOD” has historically been a mix of affordable housing and market rate housing plopped on top of ugly structured parking, killing activity around the buildings and and leading to conflicts between bus movements and P&R or resident access to parking. Ron Posthuma said that King County see a shared use parking garage as a win for King County because this removed the need to accommodate replacement parking on County owned land, and relocation of P&R access away from transit center will give Metro more flexibility in building a high quality bus-rail transit center.

Access and P&R Replacement Policy

While most of the debate around parking at Northgate is about the number of stalls, it’s really is a proxy policy debate about how to prioritize access improvements to transit, how to best manage P&R supply, and whether or not P&R supply must be maintained when TOD is built on a agency’s property. All of these questions are, in my opinion, far from settled, with the status quo essentially lining up with what Sound Transit has thus far proposed at Northgate.

Continue reading “The Northgate 900 – King County TOD and Access, P&R Policy”

WSDOT has added a flickr set containing illustrations of the design alternatives of the Portage Bay section of the 520 bridge replacement. They’ve also put up the meeting materials from last week’s Seattle Design Meeting. WSDOT is exploring cable-stayed and typical viaduct-style replacements. The Seattle Times has a write-up on the different designs and the obvious community reaction.

What do you think?

Last week Councilmember Mike O’Brien fell into the Sustainability Gap, that wide chasm between what politicians say and what they actually do. O’Brien voted against a carefully considered and vetted proposal (read more about it here), more than a year in the making, to allow some commercial uses in multifamily zones.

Here’s what O’Brien says about his vision for Seattle:

My vision of Seattle is one of made up of the incredible and growing diversity of our communities, where amid this diversity, all communities are safe, healthy and thriving. I see a Seattle that is a model of economic vitality, environmental sustainability, and political transparency.

But O’Brien, along with Sally Clark, Richard Conlin, and Jean Godden, opposed a proposal that would have helped move Seattle’s land use code toward a more innovative way of doing things, allowing diverse uses to be closer together in denser, more populated neighborhoods. The proposal that O’Brien helped to kill (which he earlier supported) was to allow, essentially, corner store like uses in neighborhoods that are already zoned multifamily. This is the kind of mix that makes transit, biking, and walking work because as uses are closer together the car becomes less necessary. It also promotes economic vitality by allowing new businesses to form.

Why did O’Brien do it?

People who live in vibrant, walkable urban centers like Capitol Hill are the people we need on board to guide the future development of the city. We clearly don’t have them on board today.

Based on the comments of a few dozen people in Capitol Hill who claim they have all the walkability they need, thank you very much, O’Brien chose to oppose the same thing for other neighborhoods.

The gap between what O’Brien says on his campaign website and how he votes is clear. Rather than support an expansion of the kind of diverse and thriving use of land on Capitol Hill, he chose to listen to a small group of neighbors getting help from insiders working for the City Council and live on Capitol Hill who opposed the idea (two members of City Council Central staff opposed the measure, and one, Rebecca Herzfeld helped opponents craft letters to Council).

That’s not sustainable, and it’s not transparent. It’s hard enough to convince Councilmembers to make a bold move on land use, but when one of the members of Council who is supposed to be a reliable ally can be persuaded to oppose something he once supported by a small group of neighbors, we’re in trouble.

Closing the Sustainability Gap means holding our elected friends accountable when they make bad decisions. It’s not a pleasant comfortable thing to do, but it’s necessary. If you think O’Brien made the wrong choice by changing his mind on the proposal call him or e-mail him. He needs to know you’re paying attention.

You can e-mail Mike at mike.obrien@seattle.gov

The author was a member of the panel, called the Regulatory Reform Roundtable, that recommended these changes to the code.

What do you do when you’re a traffic engineer hired to come up with a plan to accommodate 2,500 additional cars entering the heart of Brooklyn on a semi-regular basis? Well, if you’re Samuel Schwartz, you don’t add fuel to the fire by building a ton of parking:

Mr. Schwartz, a traffic commissioner during the administration of Mayor Edward I. Koch, said the strategy unveiled on Tuesday — counterintuitive as it might seem — was to provide fewer, not more parking spaces for the 2,500 cars expected, according to surveys, in a “worst case scenario.”

Earlier sketches of Atlantic Yards included 1,100 spaces on its grounds, but Mr. Schwartz recommended half that number.

Here’s the money quote:

“We will scare drivers away from the arena,” Mr. Schwartz said in an interview. “My message to New Yorkers is, Don’t even think of driving to the Barclays arena.”

Will it work? Some Brooklyn Councilmembers were skeptical.  Despite New York City’s generally excellent transit coverage, there are some significant gaps in train coverage for riders attempting to travel between the outer boroughs. Kudos to Schwartz for coming up with a plan that tries to address parking from the demand side, not the supply side.

Over the last week there’s been a lot of conflicting information with regards to the 900-stall parking garage at Northgate. It started with Cascade’s blog post accusing Sound Transit (ST) of making a backroom deal to build 900 parking stalls, which ST initially denied but later recanted. This could be a reflection of the complex and evolving planning story of Northgate, but it certainly indicates that it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community.

Northgate is, in my opinion, the single most complex station in all of ST2, if not the system. While there is disagreement about how much parking is the prudent choice, from a legal, short-term, and long-term perspective, everyone involved wants to make Northgate a shinning success of Transit Oriented Development, bus-rail integration, and non-motorized access.

Thursday’s ST Board briefing slides are above. Below are highlights of my talk with Ron Posthuma, Assistant Director of KCDOT, who is King County’s lead on the Northgate TOD effort.

The Players

Through the Growing Transit Communities (GTC) program, of which STB is a member organization, King County (KC), ST and the City of Seattle DPD have been working on creating a “catalyst project” at Northgate. The idea is to open the station with a bang, bringing a critical mass to the station area so private development follows. These discussions have been occurring within the GTC program and in parallel with ST Northgate station area planning. Those not following both could certainly get the wrong impression because of this.

Additionally, according to Ron Posthuma, Simon Properties, which owns Nortghate Mall, has been a part of the discussion. Simon Properties, which will lose 451 stalls during construction and 64 permanently, is interested in the idea of a 600-900 stall shared-use garage, much like the current “SPG” (ie JCPenney) parking garage. KC Metro currently leases 280 of these stalls.

Construction of the SPG parking garage was necessary for the mall to meet its lease agreements with long term tenants. Ron said that without the SPG garage the recent expansion of the Mall to the west would have violated the lease agreements. Likewise if the Mall wants to further redevelop parking lots with shopping and TOD, additional structured parking will be required to comply with lease agreements. A shared use garage would make redevelopment of surface parking a more likely option.

Tomorrow I’ll post about King County’s take on the garage

I signed the recent letter to Sound Transit, letting them know that they were steaming ahead with the analysis of options for Northgate without sufficient public review. Many of these options seem to be in conflict with the neighborhood and Seattle’s goals to create a walkable, livable city, especially around Link, where it’s easily possible to walk, bike, and ride transit to all your needs. They agreed that there hasn’t been enough public involvement, and scheduled a public meeting to get feedback (information below). It’s very likely that a parking garage will happen here, but we can and should improve it.

Continue reading “Making a Northgate Parking Garage Palatable”