Month: May 2012

• Inslee takes Mckenna and Kemper to task for attacking light rail.
• Positive feedback for WMATA, an oddity.
• May 14th Puget Sound Sage to releases report, hold panel discussion on how to ensure TOD is healthy, green and just in the Rainier Valley.
• Denver releases industry leading report on TOD and growing equitably. Seattle not that far behind with the Growing Transit Communities roughly a 1/3 of the way done.
• Downtown Target to open on July 29th, Capitol Hill residents have one less reason to go to Northgate.
• Vancouver’s TransLink long term planning and funding in disarray, sounds normal for a US city.
• Sunbreak details Seattle Subway, puts Amazon’s expansion plans in context.
• SLU is “family friendly”, not just for nerds and hip 20 somethings.
• More details of Amazon’s 3.3 million square feet expansion plans. Amazon not the only one with projects in the pipeline.
• 35th Ave NE half way through their interesting “Coffee Talk” lecture series. Place-making up next.
• Bauhaus buildings on Capitol Hill will be kept and integrated into new development.
• A few parts of Regulatory Reform look like they will make it through soon, other parts still up in the air.
• Using social media to define neighborhoods.
• Metro Matters: Moving Beyond the 42.
• The Renton Highlands gain national attention.
• ‘Ultimately, helmet laws save a few brains but destroy many hearts’.
• What is your bicycle style?
• Slideshow: Living in The New Metropolis

This is an open thread.

Yesterday brought the heartbreaking news that PubliCola is folding. Luckily, friends of STB Josh Feit and Erica Barnett are landing on their feet at Crosscut.

It’s a small ecosystem of local sources that focus heavily on transit and land use, so this loss will be keenly felt. PubliCola, and Erica’s writing in particular, was the closest thing to STB in the for-profit realm. It’s true that enthusiasts like us can cover many functions previously exclusive to the formal media, thanks to ease of publication and widely available source material on the internet. But volunteers with day jobs have difficulty covering press conferences, unrecorded midday board meetings, or hanging around city hall to pick up the tidbits that construct a larger narrative. I don’t think STB competes with other sources, but rather, complements them with additional information and in-depth analysis. One less sister publication will make our jobs harder, not easier.

Best of luck to Josh and Erica. PubliCola will be missed.

The President is making another swing into town tomorrow, May 10th.  That means you can expect lots of traffic tie-ups, which, in our bus-dominant world, means transit delays.  Two major closures to be aware of are at Convention Place Station and Pine Street.  Metro has more details here:

From about 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Convention Place Station (CPS) in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel will be closed to all pedestrian access. Buses will continue to travel through CPS, but will not stop there. No passengers will be allowed to board or exit buses in the station, or access the tunnel from the CPS entrance at 9th Avenue and Pine Street.

During this time please board or exit all tunnel buses at the other four tunnel stations, or at their regularly posted surface street stops before they enter or after they leave CPS. Sound Transit Link light rail service is expected to operate normally in the tunnel during this time.

Additionally, from about 9 a.m. to about 4 p.m. on Thursday, Pine Street will be closed west of I-5. During this closure there will be no bus service on Pine Street between I-5 and 3rd Avenue.

 

 Community, Environment and Planning by Rachel McCaffrey

Sightline, a Seattle bases sustainability think tank, which does a lot of unique, data-backed research in the transportation field, and is looking for help this summer. I wanted to pass this along this internship announcement via UW’s Community, Environment and Planning (CEP)  tumblr account, since it’s probably perfect for someone in our readership. Also above is a shameless plug for CEP, which both Sherwin and I major in, and Sherwin has a cameo in. I would encourage our young readers to check out both.

Sightline seeks a motivated, organized, and self-starting data geek for a summer internship. You must be able to demonstrate strong academic credentials, meticulous attention to detail, excellent data analysis skills, experience with spreadsheet software, a passion for simplifying complex data into a clear and understandable story, and a commitment to a sustainable Northwest.The project:  Assist Sightline’s research team in compiling, analyzing, and interpreting data on traffic and transportation from the Pacific Northwest and beyond. After decades of steadily increasing car traffic, vehicle travel has stagnated – even as state and provincial governments are planning billions of dollars to rebuild and widen urban highways.  Our look at traffic figures suggests that the region simply doesn’t need—and can’t afford—these costly highway megaprojects.  We need a research intern to help compile and analyze traffic trends, demographic data, state budget reports, and other sources of information that help us tell the story about the changing demand for car travel, and our declining ability to pay for more and bigger roads.

This position is unpaid. Sightline’s interns commit to working at least 24 hours per week for at least 10 weeks during the summer. Interns are provided with office workspace, including a computer and email account, along with a bus pass.

To apply: Please email a cover letter, resume, and at least one example of analytical work to mieko@sightline.org by May 21. Sightline Institute encourages candidates from all socioeconomic, racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds to apply.

The Sound Transit Citizen Oversight Panel (COP) is an internal watchdog that observes Sound Transit’s various functions and identifies risk areas. They produce some of the more interesting reports to come out of the agency.

Anyhow, they’re looking for members of the public, especially from South King and Pierce Counties, with some kind of relevant expertise to fill some vacancies:

To Qualify You Must:

• Be a registered voter within the Sound Transit District
• Reside and/or work in King County, Pierce County or Snohomish County within the Sound Transit district boundary
• Have experience/skills in one or more areas of expertise related to the panel’s responsibilities-business and finance management, engineering, large projects construction management, public facilities and service, government processes, and public policy development or review
• Be able to attend meetings twice each month during normal business hours.

More application details are here.

Update: Looks like Publicola’s Erica Barnett beat me to the punch prior to the publication of this post, tackling issues not addressed in this piece.  See her rebuttal for more.

The Seattle Times took yet another crack at Mayor McGinn’s parking and transportation policies today, arguing against proposed elimination of parking minimums near transit and furthering the “war on cars” myth so beloved by transit opponents.  The piece builds a rather misleading case with irrelevant data, essentially arguing that Seattle’s car ownership rate doesn’t support eliminating parking minimums.

There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of parking and land use at work in this piece– elimination of parking minimums has very little to do with how many households own cars citywide, and much more to do with the effects on real estate pricing that such requirements have.  Lynn Thompson, the piece’s author, doesn’t mention anything about the connection with housing, which was one of the Mayor’s primary arguments, nor does she address the issue that housing costs are artificially inflated when parking costs are bundled in.

Continue reading “A Fundamental Misunderstanding of Parking and Land Use”

There was recently a long, passionate, and strange argument in the comment section of STB about whether food should be allowed on the bus.  Some of the more bizarre (to me) arguments include: buses are so slow, I need to eat at some point in the journey and people shouldn’t eat on buses because Americans are fat.

I have a solution.  I’ve been reading Darrin Nordahl’s book Making Transit Fun (we’ll have a review here in a few weeks), and this idea would fit right in to the theme. 

The idea:  change Metro policy to disallow all food except carrots.  Hire a pleasant, friendly salesperson to wear Metro orange from head to foot.  Buy large local organic carrots, wash and dry them, and cut the ends off (so carrot top litter doesn’t become a problem).  Then have her hop on and off not-packed-full buses, selling carrots for $0.50 each.  And give her an ORCA card reader to charge from your ePurse. 

Yes, carrots are loud.  But that’s part of the fun.  Imagine hopping on a bus and finding it full people crunching on carrots. 

Benefits include:

• Carrots are healthy.  There goes the Americans are fat argument.
• Carrots are food.  There goes the OMG I WILL STARVE argument.
• Carrots are clean.  They have little smell, aren’t wet or sticky, and have no wrapper.
• This would be fun.  It would support interaction between bus riders.  It might boost ORCA adoption, as you can actually buy something with it.  It might even drive up ridership, as people see the news stories about bus carrots.  It would certainly make the bus feel a little more friendly and inviting.

In addition to the rapid streetcars for the North End, one interesting aspect of the recently-finalized Transit Master Plan is the proposed Madison Street BRT. (Martin did some analysis of this line a year ago).  The line would run on 5-minute headways from 5am to 9pm and 15 minute headways evenings and weekends.  The corridor is challenging, as the plan notes, due to  “the diagonal nature of Madison (which leads to many intersections and odd traffic movements) and the frequency of signals.” Nonetheless, Madison Street is taking on a ton of new multifamily development between I-5 and 23rd Avenue, which makes it a good candidate for high-capacity transit of some kind.  Since the 9% grade is too steep for rail, BRT is a good alternative.

Meanwhile, an alternative service to First Hill is under construction in the form of the First Hill Streetcar.  While Martin and Zach have already made good arguments about why the streetcar isn’t primarily designed to Downtown-First Hill traffic, once both are operational it will be interesting to see which mode gets the lion’s share of blue scrubs in the morning.

Martin’s post about signal priority on the First Hill Streetcar brought to mind an exchange I had with SDOT staff about signal priority on the RapidRide D line, which will replace Metro’s current Route 15. In particular, I raised an issue that an STB commenter had mentioned to me, namely that the inbound left turn from Elliott Ave W onto W Mercer Pl (where the bus turns from Interbay to make the deviation through Lower Queen Anne) is, under its current configuration, likely to cause unacceptable delays:

Regarding the D Line (Downtown-Uptown-Ballard), there is a signal at Elliott & W Mercer Pl that, from 2 PM to 8 PM, presents a very long (3-4 minutes, I believe) red signal to traffic turning from Elliott to Mercer. This will have a dramatic effect on the speed and reliability of the inbound D Line unless it is fixed. What kind of signal priority will the D Line receive at this light? If it’s the usual ~15 second hold-or-advance-green it will be completely inadequate at this light.

Here is the response I received from Enrique Garcia, Signal Timing Engineer at SDOT:

The reason for the wait time on the southbound left turn movement is that, in the PM peak commute hours, there is a high influx of northbound traffic. Our goal is to provide progression on the main arterial for this large traffic volume. This may result in side street and left turn movements having to wait a bit more. The idea is that once you are on a main arterial with good progression, the stopping should be minimal. I monitored this location and although the wait time can be a few minutes for the southbound left turn, the signal clears out the queue once the movement is serviced.

We are currently working on the re-timing of signals for the installation of the D Line Metro project. The specifics have not yet been finalized, so at this time we cannot say what kind of signal priority will be implemented at this location. We will, however, be taking an in-depth look at the timing and adjusting it to accommodate all modes and directions of transportation as efficiently as possible.

This answer, while totally reasonable as a discussion of engineering trade-offs, does not address* the policy question of whether good signal progression for arterial car traffic is more important than ensuring speed and reliability on a bus route that is being held forth by Metro and the City as a flagship BRT route. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether your transit runs on steel or rubber tires, what matters is whether it’s frequent, reliable, and a speedy way to get in to, out of, and (most importantly) between dense urban areas. SDOT aren’t to blame for RapidRide’s 15-minute off-peak headways, but they have have a lot of say in how fast and reliable the C, D and E lines will be, and Elliott & Mercer is where we shall find out exactly how much the City of Seattle is going to Walk, Bike and Ride the talk.

* And I’m not faulting Garcia — I wouldn’t expect an SDOT staff member to address a policy question such as I’m doing in this post.