Month: July 2012

There’s a scene in The West Wing where one of the characters proposes ending a standoff between India and Pakistan by promising India new infrastructure in exchange for backing down.  “Buy them off,” says the character, Lord Marbury.  He goes on to explain how the British Crown used to buy the loyalty of regional leaders in India by giving them money and a title.

Back in February, Josh Barro at Forbes explained how Chicago facilitates urban development in a similar way:

This is partly because Chicago also liberally uses Tax Increment Financing districts, which now cover huge swathes of the city. When a TIF district is created, the amount of property tax revenue that the district sends to the city is frozen for 23 years. Increases in property tax receipts are instead directed into a special fund that can only be used for projects within the TIF district boundaries—and new developments tend to mean significant increases in property tax collections. When you create a TIF, you create an incentive for residents and their Aldermen to approve new development, as that means more money for local goodies.

Of course, we don’t have a TIF in Washington State and Roger can give you all the reasons why.  But the idea of buying off affected communities has broader merit.  Here’s a piece from Dawn Stover at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on how to get communities to agree to allow an energy (or waste) facility to be located nearby:

The commission studied the experience of the United States and other nations and concluded that “any attempt to force a topdown, federally mandated solution over the objections of a state or community — far from being more efficient — will take longer, cost more, and have lower odds of ultimate success.” Instead, the commission recommended that communities be encouraged to volunteer as hosts for a nuclear waste management facility and be offered substantial incentives for doing so.

Stover goes on to argue that the consent has to be truly informed – you can’t just go to the poorest communities and buy them off because they have no other alternatives or don’t know what they’re getting into.  Fortunately, as relates to transit projects, this is less of a concern.  For one, the main opposition may come from high-information, high-income residents (think of the South Bay Area and high-speed rail, or Beverly Hills High School and the LA Subway).  And, of course, the end product is an amenity, like a train station, not a nuclear waste site!

So, next time you’re faced with an recalcitrant neighborhood opposed to a new transit project or upzone, consider appointing a maharaja.  Or at least offer to build a new gym for the local school.

See that bus stop? You probably wouldn’t unless you were looking for it, and if you were walking on that sidewalk, you’d find it’s almost impossible to see until you stumble onto it, the sign being completely obscured by the bushes. If you try to catch a bus there, you’ll find you have to stand right at the curb to be visible to the driver (here’s the passenger’s-eye view from that point) — and it’s worse at night, when the bushes block what little street light there is, making it easy for drivers to sail right past you, and lending the stop a sketchy, unsafe feel despite its proximity to bustling Ballard Ave.

The stop has other problems. The sign is bolted into a concrete slab about 4′ wide at the curb, placed in a narrow gap in the bushes. Because parked cars usually crowd the front of the zone, it’s very difficult (impossible when the bike rack is open) for a bus to pull all the way up to the sign to the deploy the ramp or lift correctly onto the slab; assuming the driver sees you, you’ll probably have to step down into the street to get on the bus. So basically, this stop is ADA-inaccessible, for the sake of a bit of laurel hedge. There’s no shelter. And to crown it all, there’s a stop with none of these deficiencies about 400′ southeast of here, directly across from the Ballard Food Bank — a minute’s walk down this street.

All these problems might merely be vexing and not terribly pressing if they were associated with a little-used stop on a turnaround loop, or even on a sleepy daytime-only coverage route, but this stop happens to be on two important routes from Ballard to Seattle, the 17 and 18. After September, it’ll be on the revised 18 (renumbered 40) and the new 61 (Sunset Hill shuttle), the former becoming a major trunk route between Ballard, Fremont, South Lake Union and Downtown. Getting this stop wrong affects lots of people — and Metro is getting it seriously wrong right now.

More after the jump. Continue reading “Fixing Leary Way”

Several local institutions have banded together to host a talk on Seattle’s streetcar history:

Thursday August 16th

7 to 8 p.m.

Roy Street Coffee & Tea, 700 Broadway Ave E

In 1941, Seattle’s streetcar tracks were torn up and sold for scrap. Now we’re tunneling under Capitol Hill and laying new tracks on Broadway. What has changed? Join in a discussion about the past and present of Seattle’s street railways.

Rob Ketcherside will discuss the streetcars of the early 20th century, and insha’Allah I will be there to tie it in to more modern developments in urban rail.

In 1995 and 2007, voters struck down measures to build and expand regional rail at the ballot, only to pass both the following years (1996 and 2008, respectively).  In both instances, the approved measures were scaled down in scope from their predecessors, which has since unleashed quite a bit of consternation over the what-ifs and the woulda-coulda-shouldas had we built rail out to places like Tacoma, Everett, and Issaquah.

The question of how far we should extend rail is a practical and worthy conversation to have.  Rail, by its mathematical nature, performs best where there are the highest concentration of riders in the least amount of space.  And as a result, productivity will only decrease as trains travel across longer distances and lower population densities.  When you get to these kind of routing typologies, freeway segments and park-and-rides are usually thrown into the mix to net a broader drivershed-based catchment area.

Continue reading “How Far Should We Extend Rail?”

From Flickr user wolfstad. See a bigger version here. (Via)

[UPDATE: to be crystal clear, I don’t know anything about juvenile justice in general or this facility specifically, and wouldn’t comment on the overall value of the package. But the point about the new housing units is a big plus of the package, not a minus.]

I found Ariel Wetzel’s Slog guest post about the juvenile jail levy entirely unconvincing, but it did teach me something new:

What you won’t find in the voters’ guide is that King County plans to sell off three of the facility’s 9.5 acres to developers for $16 million so developers can build 425 condos.

Well, the link says “425 residential units,” so they might be apartments. Ms. Wetzel is scandalized that someone, somewhere, might turn a profit on some part of this measure, but this strikes me as a win-win-win.

The taxpayer has part of the cost of the new center offset by the sale. More housing units increases aggregate supply and reduces demand for sprawl. I’m no real estate expert, but housing next door to a juvenile justice center is pretty unlikely to be million-dollar condos, so this housing is likely to be “affordable” depending on your definition of the term.

This is how affordable housing will get done on a scale that benefits more than a few households that win a lottery: increase supply through upzoning and reduce barriers to development on plots that have some sort of drawback for upscale consumers. It’s scalable because it’s revenue positive, both because of the sale itself and from the larger tax base the new building will bring. More, please.

After my post on incorrect transit information, and Matt’s follow-up on crowdsourcing, on July 25 STB received this email from Sound Transit Link Operations:

As of this morning I have directed the SCADA technical staff to remove Convention Place Station from all recurring informational messages. What this means is that Adhoc messages about tunnel emergencies, reroutes and shutdowns will still play, as well as all Fire Life Safety emergency information but passengers will no longer hear the recurring messaging regarding light rail procedures.

I still find it remarkable that something like this could have gone unnoticed for so long, but many thanks to Sound Transit for a quick response.

In response to Apple dropping transit directions from iOS 6, OpenPlans wants your support to fund development of OpenTripPlanner Mobile, a mobile application that not only provides transit directions but also allows you to combine walking, biking, and bike share in the same journey. The app will provide transit directions for most transit agencies in North America (and eventually, the world). According to their preliminary coverage map, the Puget Sound and Cascadia region appears to be well covered, including the ferries. It is essentially the OneBusAway of transit trip planning. They need to raise $25,000 by August 18.

OpenPlans are the people behind the fabulous Streetfilms, TriMet’s Interactive System Map, and New York City’s adaptation of OneBusAway. If you are disappointed that Apple is not including transit directions in the next version of iOS 6 or you would like to support development of an independent trip planner not controlled by Apple or Google that anyone can freely use or improve upon, you should help fund this project. I personally did and invite you to do the same.

• We’re losing the war on sprawl.
• Prioritizing maintenance over new construction is a good thing.
• Post office property on Broadway sold. Changes afoot?
• A fee to park and ride?
• More bike parking, please.
• Can the Port back up claims of arena-caused traffic woes?
• Open house tomorrow for Ballard greenway.
• Call for artists in the Lakewood Station connection project.
• The mindset of Zipcar users.
• Bellevue launches a new commute incentive program.
• Seattle trails other Cascadia neighbors in transit ridership.
• Possible racist labor practices on U-Link construction.
• Interactive Rapid Ride B Line “pulse” art.
• Finally, some reform of parking regulations.
• New “against” writers for Pierce Transit’s November ballot measure.

This is an open thread.

For various reasons this didn’t make this morning’s endorsement post, but STB endorses Greg Nickels for Secretary of State.

While the office of Secretary of State is not typically involved in transit decisions, Nickels has a track record of going above and beyond in office in ways that benefit transit. He is one of the truly special pro-transit leaders of this generation, and we are excited about his possible leap to statewide office.

Mr. Nickels understands the influence of a few rich donors hijacking the initiative process to produce ill-considered ballot measures that cripple transportation financing, and threaten valuable long-term projects at their weakest point. In Olympia, he would propose a statewide discussion of how to change our initiative process to bring it back to the people. He would also help prevent statewide initiative attacks on local transit funding.