Month: August 2012

While following up with Metro about the lack of progress on RapidRide’s “tech pylons” along 3rd Ave Downtown (H/T Andrew N), I learned that Metro will not have off-board payment via ORCA for RapidRide C and D line until the launch of RapidRide E in mid-2013. Information below thanks to Rochelle Ogershok.

RapidRide C/D lines will be opening without ORCA card readers in the CBD south of the Belltown area.  Unfortunately 3^rdAvenue did not have an existing communication network to support readers.  However, there is a City of Seattle project underway now to provide a 4.9 gh wireless communication network that when complete should enable us to install readers.  We are expecting this network to be available by mid-year 2013.  Our RapidRide program goal was to have the off-board ORCA readers in time for the start of the E Line in fall 2013.

The grants that have been awarded for 3^rd Avenue will help fund amenities at RapidRide stops and non-RapidRide stops in the CBD.  The specific elements of the 3^rd Avenue project are still being developed.  Options include ORCA dispensing and cash ticket vending machines, but this is still to be determined.  Currently the RapidRide program does not include ticket vending machines.

Because “tech pylons” include both ORCA card readers and real-time arrival signs this also means that downtown stops will not have real-time arrival information till mid-2013 as well.

Metro delayed the launch of RapidRide by over a year to ensure that the brand wouldn’t be tarnished by Viaduct construction related delays, but now it is failing to implement the single most important feature for surface travel through downtown, off-board fare payment with ORCA. Then the King County Council eliminates the RFA, transitioning from the fastest boarding system to the slowest downtown, just to get a few million dollars in added revenue.

All snideness aside, I can’t believe how perfectly this news depicts the RapidRide illusion, Metro’s implementation stumbling blocks and the King County Council’s political morass and indifference. We have written multiple times about how RapidRide has become a seriously compromised “BRT” system, with  lack of dedicated ROW, poor routing choices, lack of adequate priority, bus heavy costs, and a half-baked payment system. These issues are now compounded by elimination of the RFA.

We have supported RapidRide and  BRT  from the beginning but Metro and the Council have let “BRT creep”  and politics take over, not what is best for riders. When RapidRide C and D lines open on October 1st we’ll have a glorified shiny new bus that is slower than existing service.

As a lifelong rider of Metro and a diehard advocate I am having a serious crisis of confidence in Metro and more specifically the County Council. Metro must do better or else it will be hard for this jaded rider and others to get riled up to support or defend Metro next time around.

With the South 200th Street Link extension working toward a construction start date in the 2nd quarter of 2013, Sound Transit is looking to finalize the name of the new station. Up to this point, Sound Transit has used South 200th Street Station as the working name, but it is also looking at South SeaTac Station and Angle Lake Station. Sound Transit would like your feedback:

Every day, we’re making progress to extend the Link light rail system between the Sea-Tac Airport and South 200th Street in the City of SeaTac. During the project’s early phases, the station at S. 200th Street was given a temporary, or working name. Now we’re approaching the time for the Sound Transit Board of Directors to adopt a permanent name for the station.

Over the past few months, we have been talking to community members and stakeholders about potential permanent station names. We’d like to be in a position where the Sound Transit Board could formally adopt a permanent station name as early as September, at the same time we award the design-build construction project for the guideway and station. As part of the process, we are collecting feedback to provide to the Board on the proposed choice of a station name.

Temporary Working Station Name	Proposed Choices for the Permanent Station Name
S. 200th Street Station	S. 200th Street Station
	South SeaTac Station
	Angle Lake Station

Station naming survey

Please learn more about the station naming criteria and weigh in with your thoughts on the name of that station by completing survey below by Monday, Sept. 17.If you have comments on any of the proposed name for the station along the South 200th Link Extension, please take a moment to send an email to Jennifer.lemus@soundtransit.org.

My personal preference is for station names to be as specific as possible while still ensuring recognition over the geographic area they serve (i.e. regionally or Link) while avoiding confusion with other stations close by or with similar names. In this regard stations that are in established and well known neighborhoods or emerging large scale TOD should take their name. Stations in areas without established identity should be named after the most specific and well recognized landmark in the area, preferably another element of the transportation system. In most cases this would be a road, especially when the road are arterials with freeway access.

So in this case I see South 200th Street Station as the obvious choice. South SeaTac Station is both poorly defined geographically and confusing in relation to SeaTac Station. Similarly, I’ve lived in the Seattle region my whole life and I have no idea where Angle Lake is. South 200th St is precise but still well known.

Earlier today, Sound Transit CEO Joni Earl named Mike Harbour, Intercity GM, as the agency’s new deputy CEO.  The move comes on the heels of the retirement of his predecessor, Celia Kupersmith, who had a brief stint at ST beginning in 2010.  Harbour is no rookie to the transit world, having spent 35 years between IT and a transit agency in Georgia.  According to Earl, the Olympia-Thurston County Chamber of Commerce also named Harbour the 2012 “Boss of the Year.”

In addition to serving on the board of Transportation Choices Coalition, Harbour boasts a fairly impressive resume, part of which involved righting the ship at IT following both the passage of I-695 and the recession:

In 2002, Harbour led the development of a funding restoration measure approved by 58 percent of Intercity Transit voters. In 2010, 64 percent of voters approved a measure for modest service increases that are helping to fuel the Olympia area’s economic recovery.

Previously, Harbour worked eight years as general manager of the Chatham Area Transportation Authority in Savannah, Georgia, overseeing significant service expansions and a 35 percent increase in ridership. Earlier industry roles included serving as assistant general manager to Tri County Transit in Orlando, Florida; senior consultant at ATE Management and Service Co. in Cincinnati, Ohio; transit coordinator for the Mayor’s Office of Transit Administration in New Orleans, Louisiana; and director of planning for the Metropolitan Transit Authority in Nashville, Tennessee. Harbour received a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Vanderbilt University.

We welcome Mr. Harbour’s expertise in helping guide ST through an exciting era and wish him the best.

The new timetables take effect September 30th. The big news is five Sounder round trips serving South Tacoma and Lakewood Stations (the five earliest northbound and latest southbound). The Sounder change will take place “in October”, not on October 1st with the other weekday changes.

As usual, Link is unchanged. Here are the bus changes:

Route 510: Minor schedule changes; stop closes at Broadway and 38th St
Route 512: Stop closes at Broadway and 38th St
Route 513: Significant schedule changes
Route 522: Northbound trips now run on 4th Avenue in downtown Seattle
Route 532: Stop closes at Broadway and 38th St
Route 540, 542, 545, 555, 556: Yarrow Point freeway station closes eastbound only due to construction.
Route 540, 542, 556, 586: Stop closes at 15th Ave NE and NE Pacific St.
Route 586: Two morning northbound and two afternoon southbound trips added starting September 24; all trips now end at Tacoma Dome Station
Route 590: Trips added and major schedule changes; new stops added in north downtown Seattle
Route 592: Major schedule changes; major route changes in Seattle; new stops added in north downtown Seattle; all trips serve DuPont station
Route 593: When Sounder begins service to Lakewood and South Tacoma stations, all 593 trips will change to 590 and will no longer serve South Tacoma Station.
Route 594: Two southbound trips added; minor schedule changes; new stops added in north downtown Seattle.
All downtown Seattle routes: The Ride Free Area in downtown Seattle will end starting September 29. You will need to pay as you enter the bus at all times.

• ST Board Member Joe McDermott 100% right about the U-District plaza. The Board votes unanimously to build on the site.
• Report from a Tacoma Link expansion open house.
• Kemper Freeman fighting with Wright Runstad over Spring District development’s traffic impacts.
• Meandering Crosscut editorial sets up a false choice between urban and suburban development, decides the answer is “neither,” then suddenly veers into the rail/bus debate with predictable results. STB fully supports bus service and would love it if Crosscut was around the next time we tried to even modestly improve it.
• Coast Guard lets West Seattle Water Taxi carry 172 people, up from 150.
• Kingston-Seattle foot ferry done for good Sept. 28th. However, Seattle-Port Townsend run may start this year, up from 2013.
• A gallery of Seattle’s bus stop art.
• Seattle downtown circulator proposal mutates.
• The new Mercer has a bad first day.
• Columbia City development moves forward.

This is an open thread.

In many cities where supply is constrained by various factors – geography, NIMBYism, etc.  – the price of housing tends to be expensive.  One way that cities have tried to solve for this is by increasing the potential supply of housing through zoning changes.  Naturally, this has been met with some resistance in the neighborhoods slated for upzones, as has been documented on this blog many times over.  Alternative approaches to increasing affordability, like rent control, often have unintended consequences.

What if we took a different approach to housing affordability? Let’s consider the median multiple: a metric of housing affordability that compares the median house to the median income in a given area. For example, a metro area with a median income of $50k/year and a median house price of $150k/year would have a multiple of 3, which is the historical average in the US (Seattle hit 5.2 in 2008, making it one of the least affordable cities in the country).

What if a municipality were required to issue as many housing and zoning permits as needed until the median multiple hit some number, let’s say 4.0?  Why 4.0? Well, 3.0 would be nice, but since the income data trails the housing price data somewhat, the municipality would risk overshooting the target and crashing the housing market.  The precise number isn’t important.  What’s important is that there would be a target to aim for, similar to the way the Federal Reserve buys and sells short term interest rates to hit an inflation target.

How would that look in practice? King County median income was $67,806 in 2009. Multiply that by 4 and you get $271,224.  King County’s median housing price, meanwhile, was $382,160 in September of 2009.  So there would be quite a ways to go to hit the target.  Build, baby, build!

What’s nice about this approach is that it doesn’t presuppose any particular development pattern.  The city could choose to build up OR out.  Now, I’m pretty sure that between the Growth Management Act and the geography of the region, building up would be the path of least resistance. In reality, the city still would run into resistance and likely have trouble meeting such an aggressive target.  But the momentum would change. Instead of asking “should we build?” the question becomes, “where should we build?” That’s a question the urbanists have a better answer for.

I’ll caveat this by saying that “affordability” is very complicated and one statistic or ratio will never capture all the nuances.  Transportation costs and interest rates, for example, are ignored by the median multiple.  But I’m coming around to the idea that crude metrics, even if they don’t meet all our wonkish ideals, have a certain political appeal.

Interfaces between transit agencies and riders can often be brutal, particularly when the line of communication centers on the latter’s inability to understand why the agency does what it does. A typical customer complaint, for example, might plead for more buses during the afternoon commute and question why resources might not be diverted from those “empty buses I see running around the suburbs.”  The agency is left to decide how much the customer needs to know about things like subarea equity, and thus must standardize an “information threshold” in customer relations policy.

Sometimes, there are very planning-oriented questions that arise– why isn’t destination X served, why not run along Y street, etc. Jarrett Walker has a decent example of this from a query in Bellingham, asking why WTA doesn’t serve the airport. In short, WTA responds with a very courteous and very informative e-mail which weighs the pros and cons of airport service and how the agency’s thinking is determined.

As Jarrett notes, you can’t really do this with a massive agency like Metro, with the amount of queries they get on a daily basis. As a result, it’s very difficult to get a personalized response with anything more than a nod of acknowledgement that the query was received and action was taken. A really good suggestion to combat this kind of a quandry is perhaps employing an FAQ or customer portal of sorts that streamlines common questions/complaints with genuine responses fit for a layman’s understanding.

The irony of it all is that the information is already there, albeit in the form of high-level planning and political documents that must first be unearthed from a labyrinth of a website, and then dissected. Naturally, this doesn’t have to be the case. As is with frequency maps, the task here is simply to take existing information and make it clear, concise, and understandable for the riding public.

Fortunately, a lot of this is already happening, even if it’s because of terrible circumstances.  As Martin pointed out this morning, Pierce Transit’s website for Prop. 1 really is outstanding for its clarity and user-friendliness.  Metro, as well, has been catching on with a cleaner interface and website for upcoming service proposals.  Still, even when streamlined, many customers won’t bother sifting through that amount of information, especially with a complicated website architecture.  Information for Metro’s past and current service changes, for example, are in completely different places.

Regardless what issues customers may bring up, the very fact that they have to submit an inquiry means that the information they’re looking either 1) isn’t there, or 2) is difficult to find.  If these two issues can be remedied, there is much labor and grief that can be spared from dealing with the public.

Sherwin’s reference to Pierce Transit’s Prop. 1 yesterday reminded me that we haven’t properly introduced the measure yet. As luck would have it, PT has an exceptional website that concisely lays out what the impact of a yes vote and a no vote would be. There are also open houses from September 5th through October 16th at various points in PT’s service area. It might be a good place to drag your not-quite-as-excited-about-transit friends.

Anyhow, PT’s reserves have just about run out, and if the tax rate remains as it currently is, there would be a 53% reduction in service hours by 2014, including the elimination of all weekend, evening, and holiday service. The routes that remained would of course become less frequent than they are today.

In contrast, increasing the sales tax rate from 0.6% to 0.9% would not only preserve current service, but allow a 23% increase over six years. It would also restore special event service.

The website provides further details on the cuts PT has already made to both their service and their administrative costs, as well as the concessions the union has made.

Metro and Community Transit are positioned to attract choice riders, but for PT it’s the basic level of social service that is under threat. On the other hand, it’s surprising how little 0.6% buys these days.

Chris Karnes at Tacoma Tomorrow has a blistering take-down of the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber’s decision not to support Pierce Transit’s measure at the ballot this November.  At stake is a draconian scenario– a devastating 50% reduction in service should the sales-tax increase fail to pass.  Accompanying the cuts could be major economic impacts, many of which seem to have been overlooked by the Chamber.

Karnes estimates that tens of millions annually have already been diverted out of the county since service reductions began in 2007, and that additional cuts might exacerbate that impact more than twofold:

In total, more than a hundred million dollars that could have stayed in Tacoma each year, in the form of good jobs for bus drivers and money in people’s wallets, will head out of town in the form of car payments and gas, if Proposition 1 fails in November.

The most significant difference between this year’s vote and last year’s is that PT is dealing with a new service area, one significantly smaller than its predecessor and which omits exurban cities that have had historically anti-transit voting records.  While the new demographics are more favorable toward a ‘yes’ vote, the spread of misinformation, or at least lack of information, can easily corrupt the hearts and minds of voters who will believe anything they read.