Month: May 2012

As someone who’s a big fan of center platforms in general, I asked Sound Transit spokesman Bruce Gray what the prospects were for East Link to add a center platform where it meets the Central line:

A center platform at IDS was not studied as part of the EIS plans and isn’t in the works for final design. As I understand it, there was discussion of this early on but the following issues are the main ones that precluded moving forward with it:

• Difficulties having enough space to add elevators/escalators for a center platform given the space constraints in IDS
• Fire/life/safety codes make it difficult to fit a wide enough center platform that could accommodate the crush loads we see at rush hours, much less game days
• Potential need for a turnback (pocket) track at IDS
• Our long-term ridership projections put Eastside > Airport travel at about 3% of daily ridership – not enough to warrant the costs/risks associated with what it may take to do a center platform

This may be one of those things where I can’t be moved by any arguments weaker than “this absolutely cannot be done,” which is not what I’m hearing. This is a minor project in the scheme of things, but it’s another example of the system punishing transfers as much as possible. If you have luggage, a stroller, or a wheelchair, it’s no small thing to take two elevators instead of simply walking across the platform. Even if you’re an able-bodied youth, it’s frustrating to see the train on the other track as you pull in, knowing you’re never going to make it.

It may be primarily inattention to detail by Sound Transit, or astonishing lack of foresight by the designers of the DSTT. In either case, it’s one more item where decades from now, riders will wonder “what were they thinking?”

For those of you who missed Jarrett Walker’s hat tip, TransLink has finally unveiled an excellent system-wide frequency map (PDF), a vast improvement over its predecessor (PDF), which bears several similarities to Metro’s current system map.  The map uses both color and line weight (thickness) to denote frequency while basic and limited services are deemphasized.  Frequent services include the three SkyTrain lines, the two B-Lines (BRT-style), and other routes that run at least 15 minutes during the day.

Unlike Spokane’s new frequency schematic  and Oran’s own design for Seattle, TransLink managed to use a geographically-accurate map base, aided in part by Vancouver’s very clear and regular grid.  The best part of the map is the ability to see the viability of anywhere-to-anywhere travel within Vancouver supported by frequent connections.  It’s also much easier on the eye than the old system map.

While Metro has yet to follow suit, they are beginning to the catch on to the frequency map palooza, with an excellent Eastside map that was released along with last October’s restructure.  However, as the agency aims to continue restructuring its system in accordance to the new service guidelines (PDF), what better way to educate the public than to do the same for the entire system?

The Summer 2012 Sound Transit schedule book is now available; new timetables take effect Saturday, June 9th.  There are no changes to Link. Sounder is unchanged, although maintenance in the South Corridor might aggravate drivers and pedestrians. Below are the bus revisions, especially big changes in Pierce County:

• Route 542: Revised stops at Redmond Transit Center
• Route 550: Trips added and minor evening schedule changes
• Route 554: Minor weekend schedule changes
• Route 560: Major nighttime schedule changes
• Route 566: Minor schedule changes
• Route 577: New weekday morning northbound trip; minor schedule changes
• Route 578: Route no longer runs between Puyallup and Tacoma; significant schedule changes; new Sunday service between Seattle and Puyallup; new evening trips
• Route 586: Two morning northbound and two afternoon southbound trips discontinued until October 2012.
• Route 596: New route between Bonney Lake and Sumner weekdays only. [The story behind this change is here.]

• King Tut taking up residence at King Street Station.
• “North Corridor” is now officially “Lynnwood Link”.
• I-90 lawsuit may go back to the Washington Supreme Court.
• Downtown condo market is improving.
• Council backs off corner store portion of Regulatory Reform proposal.
• Former Hopelink employees commit bus pass fraud nearly worth six figures.
• TriMet bus driver gets off his bus in the middle of traffic to stop a beating.
• Translink gets frequent transit maps!
• The Seattle Sketcher documents his 358 experience.
• Prepare to run into the walking undead on Link this weekend.
• Future of Coleman Dock foot ferries still in limbo.
• Neighboring TransLink in Vancouver seeks to address its own financial woes.
• McKenna and Inslee weigh in on the prospects of a state transportation package.
• Plans for Mukilteo’s new ferry terminal will improve connections to Sounder.
• Another congestion ranking comes out.
• 520 contractors caught drinking on the job.
• Terry Ave North construction finished ahead of schedule.
• Traffic from a proposed SODO arena would be manageable. Port officials aren’t convinced.
• Drivers will be paying more to cross the Tacoma Narrows.
• Bicyclist safety from a freight advocates perspective.
• Cascade training new bicycle leaders.
• Sound Transit Deputy CEO Celia Kupersmith retires after only two years at the agency.
• Hottest trends in urban housing. It’s all in the demographics.
• Seattle Housing Authority looking for an intern.

Seattle City Council Member (and Sound Transit Board Member) Richard Conlin was cited as a source in the comments on my last post about the currently-circulating rumors of a “back room deal” for a 900-stall parking garage at Northgate. I asked him for comment about this, and here’s what he had to say:

ST has not made a decision on this, there are several options under consideration.  Not sure why I was cited as a source!  There are some 900 spaces being displaced, half from Metro and half from the Mall, the question is what is the right approach to mitigating this.  ST is required to provide mitigation, but exactly what mix of parking and other access options is still under discussion.

Let’s zoom in a little bit on what Conlin is saying, because I’ve covered this all at great length, but it’s evident from the comments on my previous post that many people are sounding off before they have bothered to educate themselves about what’s going on here; perhaps a summary will help. There are four pieces to the parking puzzle at Northgate:

1. Temporary Displacement of Private Parking: 462 stalls. For several years during construction, ST will need to use a substantial part of the Northgate Mall property for construction of North Link. ST is legally required to provide compensation to the owners for loss of those parking spaces, compensation which could take the form of replacement parking, or cash — potentially lots of cash, while still incurring legal hazards. This has nothing to do with the Federal Transit Administration or the North Link Record of Decision, or whether you or anyone else thinks there ought to be parking structures at Northgate, this is a consequence of widely-applicable law related to the power of eminent domain. See this post for all the details.
2. Permanent Displacement of Private Parking: 64 spaces. Some of the tail track and other supports for the North Link guideway will be located on private property, resulting a permanent loss of spaces. For exactly the same reason as in (1), ST needs a permanent solution for this displaced parking.
3. Temporary Displacement of Transit P&R capacity: 428 spaces. Under the terms of the North Link ROD, ST must provide “best effort” mitigation for P&R capacity lost during construction. This could be improved bus service (either direct to downtown, or connecting service to Northgate), pedestrian and bike infrastructure improvements, satellite parking lots with shuttles, or (theoretically) more structure parking. I personally think it’s highly unlikely ST would choose to build additional structure parking to meet this requirement, because such parking is around $30,000 a space for ST to construct, making other potential options rather cheaper, in addition to much more politically palatable.
4. Permanent Displacement of Transit P&R capacity: 117 spaces. Under the same ROD, ST has committed to the FTA to provide one-for-one replacement of all P&R stalls permanently displaced by the project; if the ST board were so inclined, it could petition FTA to remove this requirement*.  This is the only place where policy arguments about pedestrian vs. car infrastructure at Northgate could reasonably be put in play, but is somewhat moot due to the much more stringent constraints imposed by the requirements in (1), which militate much more strongly towards building a larger structure. In other words, if ST just builds a 460 space garage to mitigate temporary parking loss at the Northgate Mall, that same structure would more than suffice to offset the permanent loss in P&R capacity after construction is complete.

The “900-stall garage” rumor presumably arises from the belief  — which, to my knowledge, nobody has provided evidence for, and which Conlin and ST Spokesman Bruce Gray have explicitly denied — that a fix is in for ST to solve both problems (1) and (3) by building structure parking (462 + 428 = 890).

Whatever you think about the future of Northgate; even if, like me, you are horrified to see scarce transit dollars spent on “free” structure parking, and you think those millions could be spent in any number of better ways, if your comments fail to acknowledge and attempt to address the reality of Sound Transit’s legal obligations (as I’ve summarized above, as best I understand them), they are pointless, irrelevant, and a waste of everyone’s time.

* There would be a pretty good factual basis for such a petition, as the North Link ROD predates the ST2 ballot measure that extended the formal scope of the North Link project to Northgate; the initial scope under the Sound Move measure was only to 45th St, and had no P&R displacement.

UPDATE 5/26: Shortly after I published this, Spokesman Bruce Gray and Board Member Richard Conlin wrote to me with clarifications.

Conlin:

This is a good article. One nuance that I would clarify. While no decision has been made a 900 stall garage is one of the options in the mix. With st serving 15000 riders compared to metros current 5000 there is a rationale which includes replacing mall parking that can be used for tod and or supporting future tod on metro property that will want some parking. Of course if it is supporting other development it would not be solely financed by st. And I have never seen the 40 million dollar figure and don’t know where that came from.

Gray:

Just saw your latest post about Northgate. Good stuff. Staff will have all the details for the Board tomorrow. A 600-900 stall shared use/cost (with Northgate mall) garage is an option they will be discussing as part of an idea approach to turn about seven acres of parking into about an acre of parking – freeing up the other six for TOD.  Costs are a big unknown but it’s safe to say the $40M number that’s been tossed about would be a non starter.  Also interesting ideas about long-term use of the garage as transit’s share of getting people to the station increases exponentially. Tomorrow will be a good starting point for an informed discussion over the next month or so.

I’ve finally made it through Puget Sound Sage’s much-hyped report “Transit Oriented Development that’s Healthy, Green, and Just.” I read it warily, but was pleasantly surprised by many of the conclusions, even as I had issues with some important omissions. As it happens, the argument the report makes is largely orthogonal to the apartment-tower-vs.-single family home debate that rages on the internet, and in that sense it’s quite refreshing.

For those of you who are interested in this issue, the sixty pages are totally worth your time. The executive summary is pretty good too, but for the extra-lazy here’s my summary:

• Gentrification (an influx of higher-income residents) is happening in the Rainier Valley, encouraged by light rail and other factors.
• Through a variety of mechanisms, gentrification is likely to lead to displacement of the poor into South King County, with various moral, social, and environmental consequences.
• The set of policies usually grouped under “affordable housing” must expand to more directly consider the obstacles to disadvantaged people remaining in place.

There’s a lot to agree with here, although I think the report applies a much more negative tone to the idea of gentrification than I would. In particular, I find the emphasis on the relative proportion of various racial groups as opposed to their absolute numbers to go well beyond avoiding displacement. (In fact, the report shows that the population of color has continued to increase, although not as much as other areas and perhaps not sustainably.) Gentrification is essentially inevitable in an improving neighborhood, so we should either resolve to not improve the neighborhood, or else look to mitigate some of gentrification’s less attractive consequences.

Continue reading “Gentrification: The Cause of, and Solution to, Displacement”

On Wednesday evening, 6-8:30 PM in the Neptune Theatre, Sound Transit is hosting an open house to present, and obtain public feedback on, the 60% design of Brooklyn Station. ST staff tell me there is “nothing earth-shattering” in the changes to the station itself since 30% design. Long-time readers will recall that due to very strong public feedback about ST’s initial choice to use a single entrance, ST revised the design to provide two entrances while maintaining minimal cost and construction risk. With no pitched battles about parking (there won’t be any) or overbuilding (it’ll be designed for at least 65′ overbuild), the public has been reduced to arguing over the station name.

There is a fairly significant change to the construction process. Sound Transit has decided to add a one-lane access road around the University Manor Apartments, from Brooklyn Ave to 43rd St, supported by a deck overhanging the construction pit, as shown on the map above. This strikes me as a not-inexpensive addition to the project, but the neighboring businesses and residents apparently made a compelling case to ST that this vehicular connection was extremely important to the neighborhood; ST staff declined to make public the cost, citing the preliminary nature of cost estimates at this point. ST also floated the possibility of a pedestrian path around the southwest corner of the site, also shown on the map above.

Dan Bertolet has an interesting post up about the “fourth wave of planning”.

I have thought for a while that each generation of environmentalists is shaped in response to the differing environmental challenges of their time. While older generations of environmentalists were shaped by the back-to-the-land movement, one that believed in an essentially rural solution to environmental problems, young environmentalists are exactly the opposite, believing that dense cities are the primary solution to the problems we face.

Call it Vashion Island environmentalism vs Capitol Hill environmentalism. I find these underlying beliefs to be a helpful organizing structure when talking about density, tree preservation, parking requirements or other issues facing infill development. Dan’s post is a perfect example of these two ideas playing out.

Last year in Seattle, the Bullitt Foundation’s proposed Living Building was subjected to a costly legal challenge based on Washington’s State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA). Opponents argued that an environmental impact statement (EIS) should be required because the building would block views. Given that it’s on track to being one of the greenest commercial buildings ever constructed in the United States, and is also located in a dense, walkable, transit-rich neighborhood, the fact that environmental regulations could be exploited to oppose the project suggests something is amiss, to put it mildly.

Following on the heels of the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Washington’s SEPA was created during an era in which the planning culture was dominated by concerns over ecological degradation and responded with strict limits on growth -– planning’s so-called first wave. In the mid-1970s planning entered its second wave, focused on comprehensive planning and infrastructure, followed by a third wave defined by “smart growth” that began around the turn of the century and is still the prevailing approach today.

And now a fourth wave of planning is emerging, with a perspective that will hopefully put an end to perverse contradictions such as what happened with the Bullitt Foundation Living Building. The formative influences on planning’s fourth wave are the “new normal” economy, climate change, energy, food systems, and regional sustainable development.

Full post here.

Cascade Bicycle Club is currently running a blog post under the title “A backroom deal for Northgate that’s bad for bicycling“, which reads in part:

What we do know is that Sound Transit reached a backroom deal to build a parking garage without any public involvement, none. A backroom deal that a prominent neighborhood leader described as “repulsive and offensive,” because it was reached without any consultation with the community and does not align with anyone’s vision for the future of the neighborhood

The total cost and size of the garage is, with even more vague sourcing, claimed to be $40 million and 900 stalls. I asked Sound Transit spokesman Bruce Gray for comment on this:

Much of the discussion and information swirling about future Northgate station area plans appears unencumbered by facts. We look forward to hosting a robust, well-informed discussion about all of the options at Thursday’s Board meeting.

As I’ve documented at great length, Sound Transit will probably end up building a parking structure of some size at Northgate, to mitigate temporary parking displacement on adjacent commercial property. That temporary displacement amounts to about 460 spaces. I have no idea where “900 stalls” came from.

There is a Sound Transit board meeting scheduled to discuss this issue at 1:30 PM Thursday in the Ruth Fisher Boardroom at Union Station. We expect to get more facts on this situation then, if not before.

Two interesting opportunities for the public to comment this week:

• Sound Transit is holding a public hearing on Ride Free Area elimination. It’s at Union Station this Thursday from 12:30 to 1pm. The stated purpose of this meeting is to receive comment from the public.
• The Puget Sound Regional Council is doling out $2.3m in federal funds, for operating subsidies to Community Transit as well as transit facility construction in Kitsap County. The deadline to submit comments is May 31st, but May 24th is the deadline to get your comment in the agenda packet.