Between yesterday and today, there have been a couple of posts here and on Publicola that, in my opinion, fail to cover the most important parts of the discussion about high capacity transit planning on Eastlake, have some clear misstatements, and make assumptions that aren’t borne out by the Seattle City Council’s actions.
Let’s step back. Seattle’s Transit Master Plan identified several corridors as the highest near-term priorities for city-built high capacity transit. The highest demand of these corridors are Ballard via Fremont and the University District via Eastlake and South Lake Union. Personally, I wouldn’t really call these high capacity transit – we only called the fast lines to West Seattle to Ballard “intermediate capacity” in 2000. But the transit master plan clearly finds that these corridors, with even a streetcar in semi-exclusive right of way, are very cost effective, and will carry tens of thousands of people with far faster and more reliable commutes than they have today.
Last night, Mike Lindblom reported on the raging debate at the City Council over the money in the Mayor’s budget to study a streetcar on Eastlake:
Mayor Mike McGinn’s budget proposal for a $2 million streetcar planning study in the Eastlake corridor is running into resistance from the City Council. […]
Tom Rasmussen, chairman of the Transportation Committee, said Tuesday he’s not convinced Eastlake rail is urgent, as the nearby University of Washington will get light-rail stations in 2016 and 2021.
Let’s unpack this a little bit.
Eastlake is a pretty small place, about 4,000 residents in a quarter-mile strip of dense low-rise residential and light industrial, bracketed by the immovable and largely impermeable boundaries of Lake Union and I-5. While most of its local bus and trolleybus* service (66 and 70 in the daytime; 66 and 71/72/73 in the evening) suffers overcrowding at times, that’s primarily due to the terrible design of Metro’s U-District trunk routes (71/72/73), which take over local Eastlake service from the 70 in the early evenings, at a time when those routes are still overwhelmed with riders making longer trips — and who couldn’t care less about access to Eastlake or South Lake Union. Similarly with the 66, most of the peak crowding, in my experience, is riders making longer trips to the U-District or Roosevelt. Partly as a result of service duplication between the 66 and 70, and partly because there’s just not that many people in Eastlake, both routes consistently show up in the bottom third of Metro’s performance reports.
One of the features of redeveloping the Bel-Red corridor will be the addition of a new street grid in place of what is now a broken network of backroads and lightly used collectors. The City of Bellevue is planning to establish a new central thoroughfare, which by current grid orientation, is tentatively designated NE 15th/16th Street. Renaming of the arterial, plus parallel streets to the north and south, is currently under consideration.
Given the pressure to completely overhaul the Bel-Red corridor’s identity, the City might be more inclined to give NE 15th/16th a unique place-based name for the purposes of neighborhood branding. On the other hand, NE 14th and NE 18th, by my inclination, would be better off as numbered streets to maintain the grid’s function as a reference for orientation.
Input and suggestions for the street names are currently being solicited online with a November 30th deadline.
King County Metro RapidRide D and Route 2 on Broad Street
About six months ago, I wrote about the Uptown-Belltown Transit Project, an SDOT project to improve the bus interface between Belltown and Uptown. As I discussed and diagrammed in that post, all buses to or from Queen Anne, Magnolia or Ballard (via Interbay) must, in the outbound direction, traverse an awkward and time-consuming jog between 3rd Ave and 1st Ave N via Broad St and 1st Ave. In addition, trolleybuses must make this jog in the inbound direction, thanks to the lack of three blocks of trolleybus wire eastbound on Denny Way.
SDOT seeks to rectify these problems by adding the necessary inbound trolley wire and studying the possibility of a transit-only signalized left turn from 3rd to Denny. SDOT still doesn’t have a page on their website about this project, so last week, I checked in with SDOT’s Bill Bryant to see what progress has been made since then.
The first part of the project, which I labeled “Part A” in my previous post, to add trolleybus wire on Denny, is at 30% design and proceeding well; SDOT will probably start public outreach soon, and hopes to perform construction in 2013. For “Part B”, an RFP has been assembled to study the 3rd-Denny left turn, and that study should start early next year. The outcome of that study isn’t known, but Part A has been designed to accommodate the necessary additional trolleybus wire if that transit-only signal turns out to be feasible.
Washington is updating its State Rail Plan, its investment plan for capital projects and operating arrangements with neighboring jurisdictions.
On October 31st, there’s a public workshop for interested parties in Seattle, from 9am to noon. You can find out exactly where by RSVPing to Kerri Woehler at 360-705-6902 or Kerri.Woehler@wsdot.wa.gov.
Tomorrow the Growing Transit Communities (GTC) Partnership will be holding a workshop to bring together six GTC committees and citizens to start to lay out strategies to accomplish the aims of the project. Those that are interested in attending the meeting from 3-6PM at Seattle Center may RSVP here. More information below the jump.
One frequent open-thread discussion is the merits of Lynnwood as a destination for rail. I certainly agree that it shouldn’t be the highest priority for rail in the region, although perhaps it should be the highest rail priority in Snohomish County. That’s where the money is coming from and by law must be spent. Although I suspect most people’s opinion of this is motivated by something other than the specific situation in Lynnwood, here are some facts about what currently funnels into I-5.
Bus service into Seattle currently consists of Sound Transit routes 510 through 513, in addition to wide array of 400- and 800-series Community Transit (CT) commuter routes that terminate in either Downtown Seattle or University of Washington. As Link will provide frequent, traffic-separated, reasonably direct access to both destinations without having to stage through the HOV-lane-free I-5/UW bottleneck, it would take suicidal tendencies on the part of CT to not truncate their buses at Lynnwood and/or Mountlake Terrace and transfer riders to Link.
According to Martin Munguia of CT, in 2011 CT’s commuter routes to both destinations had 9,800 daily boardings, all in the peak. That’s down from 12,000 per day in 2008, before everything imploded. According to ST’s 2012 Service Implementation Plan, weekday ridership on routes 510 through 513 was 8,002* in 2Q 2011. We can conclude that if Link through Lynnwood opened tomorrow, they’d draw at least 8,501 boardings at the two stations, presumably most at Lynnwood. For comparison, in 2Q 2010 the most weekday boardings at any Central Link station was at Westlake, 3,976.
And when I say “at least,” I’m assuming that the service hours saved by not sending buses into downtown Seattle go into the ether, rather than being redeployed to improve service. I’m assuming that absolutely no one is attracted by the superior speed, reliability, legibility, and frequency of rail. No one finds Link to be superior to the 510/511 to go to a game or get to the airport. And of course, the station will actually open in 2023, when the region will presumably have grown, CT might not be destitute, and from which point Lynnwood will take their shot at fostering development in the station area.
Finally, a note on capacity and headways: with the peak lasting about three hours, those 4,900 AM peak rides on CT comes out to about 63 riders per train at six-minute headways. The 510 and 511 average 53-64 passengers per trip in the AM peak and at the peak of the peak arrive 10 times an hour. Together, that’s about 125 people per train before it crosses the county line. If you want to use the Tokyo-style capacity of 800 per train, that’s 15% full under extremely conservative ridership assumptions. Using ST’s planning capacity of 548 per train, which provides a little slack in the system, it’ll be about a quarter full before a single King County resident gets on.
All this is not to say that Lynnwood is transit Nirvana, as high a priority as UW or Northgate or downtown Bellevue, or even some unserved King County neighborhoods. From a narrow engineering perspective, it might have been possible to build something nearly as nice with buses, with less capital cost but with supreme political will from both voters and agencies at all levels.** Nevertheless, it’s a good project to provide a high-capacity link to the natural collection point of all the county’s buses, and a sensible use of Snohomish County funds.
* Add 946 more boardings for 2012, but I’m trying to keep my inputs constant.
** As with all idealized BRT concepts that demand total focus of all players in the political system on good service delivery at minimum cost, I have my doubts!
[UPDATE: To be clear, the Seattle MSA includes the entirety of Snohomish, Pierce, and King Counties. Below, I argue that the considerable hinterlands in that sample aren’t of much relevance, but that’s the scope.]
The traditional measure of density isn’t very informative about whether a city can really support heavy transit use and gain the other benefits of people packed in. Dividing population by area is highly sensitive to how you define the area. Municipal boundaries are arbitrary, and a vast hinterland can obscure a dense and vital core city.
A method that overcomes this problem is population-weighted density, which counts the local density around each person and averages it over all the residents in an area. Although not without its own problems, the average is less impacted by large unpopulated areas, largely eliminating boundary games. And now, the U.S. Census Bureau has given us detailed Metro area data. Here are the Bureau’s national summary slides.
This spreadsheet provides the raw numbers. Of the 366 “Metropolitan Statistical Areas” the Census Bureau tabulated, in the 2010 census Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue came 24th in population-weighted density at 4721.6 people per square mile , although it’s 15th in overall population at 3.4m people. The cities ahead of us include obvious ones, like Chicago and Boston, and sunbelt cities few people think of as dense, such as Las Vegas and San Diego.
On the other hand, greater Seattle is densifying quickly: up 247/sq.mi. in population-weighted density since the 2000 census, 17th overall. Only two metro areas of over a million people scored higher, and they’re both smaller and also less dense: Virginia Beach (+495) and Portland (+378). Cities bigger than us are generally shrinking and/or spreading out.
For all the rhetoric about the Manhattanization of Puget Sound, it’s striking how much room there is to grow before we approach East Coast levels of claustrophobia. A 78% increase in weighted density would bring us merely to San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, which no one would compare to Central Paris. It would still be well below Los Angeles and San Francisco, to say nothing of New York.
The 50 densest cities from the spreadsheet are below the jump.
Martin surreptitiously dropped in a link to last week’s roundup detailing the results of a survey (PDF) that Bellevue administered as part of its Transit Master Plan update. The findings are worth digging into, because they reveal quite a bit about the current state of transit in the city from a riders perspective, and what strides need to be taken to get to the next level. As a respondent myself, I can attest to the level of comprehensiveness in the survey, which broke down questions for current riders, former riders, and non-riders.
The entire report is nearly 200 pages long, so the Executive Summary is the most convenient read if you want to avoid getting into the thick of the weeds. Highlights from the summary can be broken down threefold: 1) Existing Transit Market Profile, 2) Perception of Existing Service, and 3) Transit Service Priorities. Some of the analysis of the Executive Summary below the jump.
