Month: November 2012

As part of partnership more than a year in the making, on Thursday the Sound Transit board approved $2 million in funding to study rail transit connecting downtown to Ballard. This is joined by up to $800,000 from the City of Seattle. Sound Transit’s funding will go to study of modes in exclusive right of way, like Link, and the City funding will consider streetcar options, although the funding will be together in one contract. The Federal Transit Administration has indicated there’s no need to study buses further in this corridor.

The last time this corridor was studied, there was no updated Transit Master Plan, nor was there a Seattle Streetcar, so the outcomes will likely be different. The cost-effectiveness of extending the existing streetcar to Fremont and Ballard in its own right of way will be higher, and because of new development, the Interbay corridor will likely also look even better for more completely grade separated rail.

This planning will inform rail in both corridors, so regardless of exactly how the study work shakes out, it’s going to be beneficial for fast rail through Belltown, Uptown and Interbay, and slower rail through SLU, Westlake and Fremont.

During the board meeting, board member Paul Roberts (Everett city council) voiced concerns about Seattle “going it alone”. Before considering further projects, he said, we need to ‘finish the spine’, and build light rail to Everett. Most of the board, though, recognizes that in order to build to Everett, we need projects in Seattle in the next Sound Transit package – due not only to the need for Seattle’s high pro-transit voter turnout, but also because subarea equity requires that the revenue in each of Sound Transit’s five subareas goes to fund projects in that subarea. You can’t build in Everett without building in Seattle, Federal Way, Redmond (and maybe Issaquah), and Tacoma as well.

With that in mind, this makes a lot of sense. The more planning work (and even design and engineering) that can be out of the way, the shorter the timeframe can be for Sound Transit 3, and the better it will fare at the polls.

As for Seattle actually funding major rail construction by ourselves – that’s honestly unlikely. There’s need for rail transit throughout our region, and Seattle has plenty of smaller transit projects that very much need to be funded, like connecting our two streetcar lines together, improving our electric trolley bus system, and rebuilding our road infrastructure to prioritize transit. We’ll definitely help accelerate Sound Transit, but the grassroots groups who support transit expansion in Seattle want to do it in partnership with the region, not by ourselves.

Bailo’s prophecy has come true: a depopulated Seattle.

From the same guy who did this.

Most of Sounder’s North Line problems are well-known and structural: its would-be walkshed is comprised of half ocean and half cliffs, transit connections are poor, parking availability is poorer still, frequency is severely limited and codified by contract agreement with BNSF, and mudslides knock out service a couple dozen days per year.  Given these rather severe odds, the service garners just over 1,000 daily riders.  While the North Line’s high costs and poor performance have been all over the news lately (Seattle Times, STB, etc) , all indications are that the line will continue to operate indefinitely.  Sound Transit recently leased 5 years of additional Edmonds parking and is proceeding with long-term station enhancements, and on Thursday the mayors of Everett, Mukilteo, and Edmonds offered their unequivocal support (emphases mine):

Our service along the shore of Puget Sound offers the nation’s most beautiful commute…We strongly disagree with [the Citizen Oversight Panel’s] suggestion of reducing Sounder service to pay for more buses on I-5. Our communities have made a tremendous long-term investment in Sounder. We will not stand for reducing service. A number of vocal Sounder opponents, many of whom live nowhere near Snohomish County, have tried to skew the COP’s report to suggest the service might be subject to outright elimination. That will never happen.

So if the service is to continue, can it be improved without ‘throwing money at it’?   What sort of operational enhancements (if any) could increase ridership at no or little cost?  One possibility after the jump. Continue reading “Through-Route Sounder North?”

A while ago, I wrote about the Port of Port Townsend’s attempt to use a federal grant to start a financially self-sustaining foot ferry service between Port Townsend and Seattle. Sadly, the effort has come to naught, as the PT Leader reports:

During the commission’s Nov. 13 meeting, Executive Director Larry Crockett recommended that the $1.3 million Federal Transit Authority grant, awarded in 2010, be returned in its entirety. The money could have only been spent on a passenger-only ferry (POF), a project which Crockett has said is not supported by rider interest in Jefferson County.

“I’ve come to the conclusion we’re so small as a community,” Crockett said, adding the population figures for the City of Port Townsend barely qualifies it as a city compared to some metropolitan areas.

“This is not the right time for a passenger ferry,” he said. “I think this was a concept that needed to be explored, I think the port manned up and did that to best of our ability.”

Essentially, the federal grant would not have provided enough money to build a small but comfortable passenger ferry suitable for this crossing, and no such boats were readily available for purchase or lease. The only remaining option, transferring the currently-unused Spirit of Kingston commuter ferry from the Port of Kingston, was deemed not viable, as that boat would be far too large and costly to operate without very significant ongoing subsidy. The Port was also unable to identify local funds required to match the federal grant.

This ferry link could have made Port Townsend much more accessible to Seattlites, especially those without cars, and it’s disappointing to see it fall through. Still, it seems like the Port made the right call here: I’d rather public agencies take calculated risks with a solid chance of success, rather than roll the dice on high-risk projects which seem quite likely to end in spectacular failure. I hope the idea doesn’t die completely, as I suspect that in some form, this ferry link (possibly seasonal) could be viable with minimal subsidy, and would be a real asset to the communities it connected.

There is a silver lining, as mentioned by the Leader and discussed in more depth by KPLU: King County Ferry District may be able to acquire the Spirit of Kingston for free, to be used as a spare on the West Seattle and Vashon water taxi routes, making them much less subject to cancellation when Rachel Marie or Melissa Ann are out of service.

The Seattle Planning Commission held a panel debate this Wednesday featuring two sides: the developers v. the neighbors, with a Planning Commission representative in the middle.

The Issue

Over the past year there’s been construction of single family homes on small lot sizes, using loopholes in Seattle’s land use code. Because our building codes were written for certain minimum lot sizes, many of these homes have smaller than usual setbacks, and often feel like they’re quite tall (though technically built to the same height allowed for other homes). Also, because these small lots were at one time pieces of other lots they are sometimes located in what would normally be a back yard. The result can be a tall home built in a back yard with little setback, which understandably generated neighbor complaints. Last month this resulted in emergency legislation to end small lot construction until permanent rules could be put in place. Wednesday’s discussion was the next step in creating permanent rules.

The Panelists

On the developer’s side, Michael Ravenscroft (actually a realtor) described a vision of busy neighborhoods, dense neighborhoods, and continued housing construction. He argued that single family construction is needed drastically, and because of limiting codes very few homes have been built in Seattle.

In the middle, architect Brad Khouri advocated for diversity of structures in our neighborhood. He wants something supportive of the growth that’s happening in Seattle, and wants to find some room for affordability.

On the neighbor’s side, John Taylor explained that we buy homes rather than rent them because we want predictability, to control our house and to some extent control our neighbors. He believes standards should be well understood and not change. He used quite a few anti-development talking points (“out of character”, “open space”, “blocks light”), and implied that there should be a strict minimum of 2,500sf lot size in Seattle.

The Compromise
Continue reading “There are More than Two Sides to Small Lots”

Following up on Bruce’s post several weeks ago about the side effects of not having a schedule for RapidRide, I want to share information I collected for my masters research paper. The paper is structured around a survey of transit information in 24 cities, mostly in Germany, The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. While my research touches on all aspects of transit information, I wanted to pull out the relevant information about transit schedules to inform this discussion.

The table below contains relevant schedule and service information for the routes in the 24 cities I decided to include in the survey. I purposefully included a range of service types from local bus to subway.  The table below is sorted by minimum service headway and includes other service related information that impacts service reliability.

Scanning the table a few things jump out: Continue reading “Transit Information Systems: Schedules and Headways”

Those of us who live on the D Line have had plenty of opportunity to catalog anecdotally all the enhanced features that were (and largely still are) missing at launch, features which, along with stop reduction, would operate to make RapidRide D faster and more reliable than the 15 local it replaced. I’ve obtained from Metro a list of all outstanding capital projects related to all the in-service RapidRide lines, along with the estimated completion times.

First, note that this list excludes capital work in the downtown Seattle area; that was discussed in an op-ed by Metro GM Desmond. Essentially, in downtown, Metro made a high-pain high-gain tradeoff to delay installing ORCA readers and real-time displays until Seattle finished installing its own fiber network on 3rd Ave in the second quarter of 2013. This saves a tremendous amount of money (by avoiding digging up the street at Metro’s expense), but, of course, downtown Seattle is exactly the place where off-board payment and other enhanced features are most desperately needed. In this post I’m going to focus on deficiencies elsewhere.

Note that in this discussion, I’m going to count opposite-direction paired stops separately, rather than together, as riders usually do. So the northbound and southbound stops at 3rd & Cedar count as two stops, even though I’d typically speak of the two together as “the stop outside my apartment.” Also, a few of these things may already fixed, as most of my information is probably a couple of weeks old by now.

After the jump, we go Line-by-Line. Continue reading “The RapidRide Punchlist”

• Metro summarizes all the bus trips they’ve added since last month’s service change.
• Capitol Hill station area planning grinds on.
• Pro-light rail, anti-sales-tax forces are actually working on a different funding plan to get rail over the CRC. If only Seattle forces opposed to the vehicle license fee but “pro-transit” did that kind of work.
• City of Des Moines looks to add a S. 216th St. stop to South Link.
• Peter Steinbruck – ex-council member and perpetual mayoral rumor – once again exercises his anti-urban, anti-density instincts.
• Sounder train gets stuck on a Tacoma hill.
• Snohomish County mayors stand behind North Sounder.
• Dreams of Eastside commuter rail are getting ever more complicated.
• This remarkably even-handed Freakonomics post about carbon impact of travel modes is accurately titled, in that everyone will find something to hate. The big miss, in my opinion, is that transit enables denser modes of living that have their own positive impacts. We reported on the carbon impact of local transportation here.
• The enormous fiscal and economic cost of building height limits.
• Venice was underwater earlier this month. But hey, at least gasoline is cheap!

This is an open thread.

One of the more interesting discussions I think we have here is one of density. Where do we allow growth, and how much? What kind of public amenities should have to come with new density, how much affordable housing, what kind of investment in common space, and what kind of requirements should there be on design?

Personally, I’m interested in allowing a great deal, because I see the alternatives as worse for both affordability and the environment. If we don’t build enough new housing to keep up with the demand from new residents, it pushes costs up for all housing, all the way down to the poorest of us. If we don’t allow density, our growth will come at the edges, worsening congestion and pressure on our transportation system, and contributing to climate change.

South Lake Union is possibly the perfect place to allow large increases in density. It has very few existing residents outside of those who have come in very recent development, far fewer than any other neighborhood in the city, so change there has the lowest impact on existing communities. It is directly adjacent to downtown, meaning new residents are most likely to walk or take transit to work, and with expansion of the streetcar through downtown, that will only be a stronger argument.

Tomorrow evening, the city council will take public comments on approving the recommendations from the city’s Department of Planning and Development. These are, at the root, taller buildings, but there’s lots more in the full plan (PDF), which is really worth a look before being critical. It limits exactly where towers can be and how many.

Comments are at City Hall tomorrow in council chambers, run from 5:30 to probably 6:30, and you must sign up to comment before 5:30 to be called. I urge you to comment in favor of the recommendation – it protects the small part of South Lake Union with older residential, and makes more room for downtown to grow. It would help us be more prosperous and sustainable, and make all of our investments in transit infrastructure more efficient.

Public Hearing South Lake Union Proposed Rezone Legislation November 14, 2012 5:30 p.m. City Council Chambers 2nd floor, Seattle City Hall 600 Fourth Avenue View the public notice for hearing details.

The Puget Sound Regional Council largely serves as a conduit for allocating federal funds. With all the grim news in Pierce County, it’s a small consolation that the latest chunk of funding is $481,000 to Pierce County, replacement for aging vanpools and completion of preliminary engineering for Tacoma Link. You can comment on these uses from November 8th to December 6th:

How to make a comment:
Mail: Puget Sound Regional Council
ATTN: Kelly McGourty
1011 Western Avenue, Suite 500
Seattle, Washington 98104-1035
E-mail: tipcomment@psrc.org
In Person: December 6 at PSRC offices, 1011 Western Avenue, Suite 500, Seattle