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This is an open thread.

111 Replies to “News Roundup: Multiplying”

  1. I hope the readership is well aware the Tri-County Connectors are being gutted thanks to Curtis King: http://www.growlernoise.com/2013/04/tri-county-connectors-set-defcon-one.html

    Please help. I am very busy up here on the Facebook, the Flickr, the blogs, the Skype, and the e-mail attempting to save not just my bus… oh it’s bigger than that, but the key transportation links between four counties (Island, Skagit, Snohomish, and Whatcom)

    1. Phase two: http://www.growlernoise.com/2013/04/an-open-letter-to-state-senators-bailey.html

      There would be nothing less than cataclysmic damage to Island, Whatcom and Skagit Counties’ economies separately and together – not to mention some damage to counties to our south such as Snohomish and King.

      Ultimately, without the Tri-County Connectors, transit-dependent folks will be totally sledgehammered in our region and many of us can’t just magically move to Seattle. Many students will be unable to get to-from college. Many attractions from Naval Outlying Field Coupeville to Bellis Fair to Paine Field will become inaccessible to those out-of-county. Finally, many employees will be unable to get to & from work via transit, decreasing their job security.

      That’s the reality. It’s that simple. Let’s work together.

      1. Hear hear! (With a couple exceptions for protecting individual rights, which clearly isn’t going on here.)

  2. FWIW, Ballard Terminal Railroad is right; the East Side line should be entirely intact for freight service. It’s rather important and there’s no real redundancy for it.

    1. To say something is important is not enough. Defend your position. Lay out your argument as to why you think it’s important.

      2. Is it more important to maintain the tracks, or to hold on to the ROW? How long has it been since those tracks have been renewed?

      3. Do any of you understand railroad operations?
        Have any of you talked with the operators?
        Do you know how and what the EOT-red flags mean at the Woodinville wye?
        Or how they got there?

        Who has had contact with Sound Transit and knows anything they can share?

      5. No problem Jeffrey, I just have to get to a real computer later in the day.

        The links I can supply are for the passenger rail aspect, remember.

        For freight rail operations, since these are private companies, (BNSF, Eastside Freight RR, Ballard Terminal RR), there are no public documents for their specific plans (linkable), other than anything they’ve submitted to a gov’t agency.

        Otherwise, you would have to know who to talk to… Or at least keep your ears to the ground to pick up the info.

        Doug Engle has made some good comments on the Kirkland Patch article about the lawsuit.

      6. Okay Jeffrey, here are some of the links.

        The beginning of the history of commuter rail on the Woodinville Subdivision actually started with a document produced in 1992 for Metro. I got it from the Seattle Public Library and copied it years ago. It’s titled Eastside commuter rail feasibility study by Parsons Brinkerhoff.

        I can only find that reference at the library, and no online digital version.

        This document is what I referred to when I was on the I-405 Corridor Program Citizens Committee, and asked them to extend the study to incorporate the boundaries of the I-405 Program (to Woodinville, since the 1992 study covered only Renton to So. Kirkland).

        If you look at the I-405 Corridor Program FEIS completed in 2002, you won’t see the commuter rail option in the cost/benefit analysis.

        The City of Renton, and the Kennydale Neighborhood Association submitted a letter to the I-405 Program’s Executive Committee asking that it go no further than what was a preliminary analysis.

        That’s all it took. Not In My BackYard.

        The next in line is the 2003 WSDOT BRT White Paper, followed by Sound Transit’s Eastside HCT Analysis completed in 2005. One thing to note with the Sound Transit study was that they had to revise the $’s downward because Sound Transit assumed they were being given 2004 Budget Dollar figures, to which they applied an inflation factor for 2005. Turns out WSDOT had given them the YOE (Year of Expenditure) dollars. Plus some of the technical analysis showed that they could trim more costs by reconfiguring the HOV to HOV direct connections. The high end $5 Billion+ was revised downward to around $3.5 Billion. If I can find the link to the Seattle Times article that explained this I’ll post it.

        Then came the Joint Sound Transit/PSRC analysis for commuter rail on the BNSF corridor in December 2008

        Here’s a review of the timeline:

        Eastside Commuter Rail Study for Metro – April 1992
        The I-405 Corridor Program FEIS –June 2002
        WSDOT BRT White Paper – August 2003
        Sound Transit’s BRT analysis – August 2005
        Joint Sound Transit/PSRC analysis for commuter rail on the BNSF corridor – December 2008

        Why is the statement about not having any plans for the corridor being repeated by trail-only proponents?

      7. Laying out the positions of all the players is what I hope the lawsuit does, especially Kirkland’s motives given the evidence. Someone on this board must have railroading experience to back up their opinions for removing the rails.

      8. Doesn’t freight rail have legal precedence to keep the tracks intact, over whatever Kirkland or Sound Transit want to do? The premise of rails-to-trails railbanking is that it preserves the right-of-way for future rail service if it should ever be needed. Wouldn’t that apply even more so if the tracks still exist? (Which may be a reason why Kirkland wants to rip them out as soon as possible, to diminish the ability of a railroad to reactivate them.)

    2. Nathanael, let me ask you a more specific question. You said “the East Side line should be entirely intact for freight service. It’s rather important …” I’m not exactly sure when the last freight train ran on those tracks. It has to be 5+ years ago, right? If having the track for freight is as important as you say, you should be able to point some some harm that has occurred in the last 5 years. Perhaps communities have been devastated, or hundreds of jobs have been lost, etc. Could you please point out to me what harm has been done?

      PS, the Burke-Gilman trail used to be a train track. Should we bring freight trains back on that trail, too?

      1. I would also be interested in knowing what was there 5+ years ago that DID utilize a train that is not there anymore. Was there some industry that doesn’t need it now? Was it a through route? What was there then that is not there now? What is the historical use?

      2. Keep watching the line from Edmonds to Seattle.

        BNSF doesn’t release the information about delays to freight caused by the *inability to divert trains* when the line *repeatedly* gets closed due to mudslides, but it is substantial and serious.

        The East Side Line provides vital redundancy for the north-south freight route. If there’s ever a *really* serious mudslide north of Seattle, it could snarl up West Coast freight for *weeks*.

        The removal of all diversionary / secondary rail routes in other locations has caused such national disasters before, further east. If you had a diversionary route, then this one wouldn’t be so important. But you don’t. It should never have been severed by the highway rebuild.

      3. (Technically, you can reroute through Spokane and Yakima. That would not be very effective.)

    3. We got into over on the Bike Blog over the BT wanting to run the line. Yes indeed, there is no redundacy here, once this line goes then it is gone.

      The multi-use path can wait. Once I see a real plan that has funding and shows how the trail can be converted into a light rail line or something similar, I may support it. But to simply put this line up for abandonment and install a cheesy path is a recipe for increased traffic and largely a waste of money in my opinion.

      2. I was excited to see various players (Kirkland) contribute to getting this ROW. Then shocked when Kirkland was going to take tracks out of the middle of the line. You can’t just take all the water out of the middle of a river. You have to think about the people above and below you. I don’t see how someone in the middle of a rail line should be able to take out any tracks because it effects everyone else.

      3. Sam, just found your comment. What I see about the BGT is it isn’t used to its fullest extent, for several reasons. Overall I am a trail supporter, but it has to be done right in my opinion.

        I won’t go into it here in-depth, we already did that over on the Bike Blog.

    4. It hasn’t been intact since WSDOT severed it at the former Wilburton tunnel to widen 405.

    5. Fuck Ballard Terminal Railroad. They have no plans for establishing real freight service on that line and never have for the past 20 years at least. If you walk by there, you can see how overgrown the tracks are – it has probably been 20 years at least since any train last ran on them.

      The lawsuit is really about grasping a straws in an effort to extort the city of Kirkland to pay them settlement money. This needs to get thrown out and fast.

      1. The last time the tracks through Kirkland were used was when Boeing was taking 737 fuselages built in Kansas to the plant in Renton for assembly. That ended when the Wilburton tunnel was removed in 2008. At the time the International Paper Plant in Bellevue still received rail shipments as did the Safeway Bakery and Coke-Cola Bottling plant on occasion. IP paper plant is closed and ST has a option to buy it to build their MF. The other plants get by with truck deliver and will likely close as the land becomes more and more valuable. Freight south of Woodinville isn’t viable even for a short haul RR.

      3. I was involved back in the day of Eastside Rail NOW. I drive past those plants several times a week. IP is “boarded up”. The contingent sale to ST is big news in the debate over the MF location. The tracks into the Coke-Cola plant are gone or paved over; have been for years. No delivers to the bakery since BNSF sold to Port of Seattle. Rail operations were terminated at Woodinville. Kirkland put large cement blocks across the rails at all the grade crossings of the portion they own. It’s no secret Renton, Bellevue, Kirkland and Remond want to drive out the remaining industrial use. The Safeway Distribution Plant and IP Plant are only the last two dominoes to fall. Remember Graham Steel or Lange Stoves? How about See’s Candy, Tum-A-Lum Lumber?

      5. That is pretty much the money quote from Mayor Marchione of Redmond; except he added the adjectives smelly and noise. In Kirkland the major opposition was wealthy property owners of Houghton. Bellevue of course wants development just not the blue collar working class factory jobs which don’t add to the tax base like upscale condos and Class A office towers.

  5. When they took down the tower crane they moved the Husky Station on-line webcams over to Husky Stadium proper.

    The view isn’t as good, but it sure is nice to see both the station and the stadium coming together. Both are going to be awesome assets for the UW, and ridership should be fantastic.

      1. The “B School”? Seattle Central CC?

        It’s interesting that Link will tie together the UW, SCCC, and Highline CC — all with a single seat ride. That has to be good for both ridership and education.

        Call it the “Education Line”.

      2. and NSCC when they build the bridge. They just need a connector for South Seattle Community College.

      3. B School = Business School. Their buildings are at the north end of campus which is about a 15 minute walk from the station. For them, it’ll be faster to take one of the 70-series express to 43rd & The Ave.
        Until 2021, when UW Tower Station opens.

      5. Ah, “B School” == Business School. We never called it that in the engineering departments, but I guess it makes sense (and on a variety of levels). I thought maybe you were making some sort of backhanded remark about the cougs

        But regarding access to NW campus: Yes, Link won’t serve those sites well until the Northgate Ext opens, and in the near term I’d still expect those people commuting from the north to continue using other modes, but for those people commuting from the south Link will become the preferred option.

        And I wouldn’t expect all the 70 series routes to remain unchanged after Husky Link opens anyhow. Expect lots of changes.

        But I thought all the Business School kids just stumbled down from Greek Row anyhow.

  6. I was surprised to learn that fare box recovery for Metro is only 28 percent. While I have no problem with the subsidizing of transit as a public good, I would think that it’d be a goal of the agency to increase this ratio over time, much like the ferry system has done.

    Granted it’s a fine balancing act between raising fares and driving away riders or causing riders to drive into work, etc.

    1. Fare recovery is at an all-time high because Metro finally got to do a major route restructure and now get to charge downtown. Other than instituting a cash surcharge, raising fares through the roof, or waving a magic wand to double the density of neighborhoods along their routes, I can’t see fare recovery going up much more.

      Keep in mind that it would take a 67% increase in fare recovery to cover the lost revenue Metro is facing when the CRC and WSDOT grants run out. Fares alone won’t do it, or even come close.

  7. That flat fare increase proposal (which at this point is just a price-point presentation, not a real proposal) is a big reason why cash and ORCA fares need to be separated (with ORCA fares being lower than cash fares, not vice versa, in case I haven’t made that clear).

    Increases, like COLAs, are based on percentages in the real world. With separate ORCA fares, Metro could raise fares by, say, 10% across all categories, and get a similar result. Okay, it might be a little more than 10%, but it’s close to that figure.

    I’m fully expecting RRFP fares to go up $1. Matching Community Transit’s RRFP fare will be the reason given. I’m fully expecting the 1-zone off-peak “discount” to go away. The rest is unclear.

    I’m not seeing much interest at Metro to institute an electronic payment courtesy discount so far. But my guesstimate is that the service efficiency from such a move would save more than the $10 million figure cited for additional fare revenue from raising fares 25 cents.

    Given the choice of raising fares by 25 cents for everyone, or raising cash fares by 25 cents and thereby instituting a cash surcharge, with the same effect on the overall budget, which would you rather have?

      1. Of course a cash surcharge would bring in less dollars than a systemwide increase. But if it convinces enough people to switch to ORCA, it’ll speed up the buses which will lower costs. And it may speed up the buses enough to convince more people to take the bus, which would increase ridership. So even if it brings in fewer dollars, it may help the bottom line enough to compensate for it. And better yet, if Metro really does a good job (i.e., more offboard payment and stop diets in addition to a cash surcharge), it could improve the bottom line even further by increasing ridership more. Full buses pay for themselves, as in the 7, 48, and 49. It’s the mostly-empty buses that don’t.

  8. So Metro fares will be $2.50 off peak, $2.75 peak one zone, and $3.25 peak two zone? Does the increase affect youth fares ($1.50 if it does)? This worries me. I think that this might really drive off riders.

    1. They always factor in lost riders into the forecast and it’s impossible to tell whether or not the forecast was actually right.

    2. It’s an outrageous amount of money, especially for a service that promises never to improve (between swearing off efficiency-boosting restructures in good times and endlessly threatening service cuts even on core routes in bad times).

      This would represent a doubling of the base off-peak fare over just six years. Not to mention the extra sales taxes we all pay. And it sure as hell hasn’t gotten easier to get anywhere.

      I hope there is a tempestuous political backlash that puts the kibbosh on any more across-the-board fare hikes for years to come. Cash surcharges should be on the table, as should be premium fares for premium routes. But $2.50-$2.75 for the crap we currently have is flatly unacceptable.

    3. Unacceptable for what? You can’t just wave a wand and make expenses lower. Seattle and Pugetopolis are less dense than New York. That means buses have to go longer distances with fewer riders. That’s where most of the expenses come from and why the fares are so high. Metro #5 can’t be compared to Manhattan’s 5th Avenue bus without taking that into account. Most of the cities with significantly better service and lower fares than Metro are city-only transit systems in much denser cities. To fairly compare Metro with SF or Chicago or New York, you’d have to include their suburban transit agencies, which I’m sure do not have as good cost/rider or service/fare ratio and their city transit agencies. And once you get outside SF/Chicago/NY/Boston, the fares are lower but the service is also significantly lower than Metro too.

      1. Again, Mike, I don’t fucking care!

        Until you’ve done the efficiency consolidations, axed the 61 that requires two empty buses to drive in circles all day and night, made a good-faith effort to go cashless through incentives for ORCA use, stopped padding the shit out of schedules to appease overpaid incompetents like Beavis, and told service-hour wasters from West Magnolia to the Central District to the VA to go fuck themselves, you cannot start charging close to $3 for something that doesn’t actually work!!!!

      2. Try doing that in the political reality we have. If it were easy, Metro would have done it years ago.

      3. What part of I don’t care am I being unclear about?

        It is outrageous to tell every person who rides your urban transit system that they now have to pay close to $6 per round trip because you’re too cowardly to say “no” a few loudmouth idiots.

        That every minutiae of the restructure was raked over the public-hearing coals, yet a $6 round-trip fare is considered “inevitable” and not even subject to public discussion, is completely insane.

        For those who don’t know, you can easily park in the middle of downtown Seattle for $6 in the evening, or for $11 all day. You can do that every single day, and never have to deal with all the bullshit that Metro puts you through. No missing every light. No hold-ups from extended conversations. No excruciating stenches. No crazy people. No unpredictability.

        Anywhere else in the city, you can park for free. Yes, free. You might have to walk a few blocks to where the free parking is, but your walk is likely to just as short as the walk from the bus.

        If you live in the city and own a car anyway, the marginal cost of doing this for every trip is negligible: at most you’ll spend $1 in gas, and the short distances will barely register in your maintenance costs.

        Mike, Metro simply cannot ask $6 for their shitty, shitty, shitty, shitty, shitty city service. It does not compute.

        (Also, it’s outrageous to defend the fare hike on the basis of Metro also being a suburban agency. The suburbs are expensive to commute from in a car, and suburban-commute transit is justifiably expensive in comparison cities. Offering a tremendous subsidy to suburbanites is an invalid justification of your horrible performance overall or your desire to raise urban fares to the breaking point. More proof that the agency in charge of running our urban transit neither understands nor gives a crap about their urban mission.)

      4. d.p., what you propose will simply end Metro. Like Mike Orr wrote, if it were that simple, Metro would have done it a long time ago. If Metro pulls back to what is the most efficient for the money that it has, Metro loses the support of virtually every politician outside of Seattle. If it does that, it will very quickly lose the ability to collect sales tax outside of Seattle, further squeezing its income. Metro has to consider riders and areas outside of the city because it collects taxes from those areas and people.

        I’m genuinely sorry that you don’t like the suburbs but there are still real, actual, tax-paying people living over here. Like it or not, we use the bus, too. Personally, I ride B, 248, 545, and 550 on a regular basis, with occasional jaunts on 221. If someone chooses not to ride the bus, we should be asking “why not?” instead of thwapping them for it.

      5. I never said suburban service shouldn’t exist.

        I said that the “need” to offer 20-mile trips for $2.50-$3.00 is not a valid justification for charging $2.50-2.75 to go two miles at barely 5 mph in the city.

        Asking an in-city fare that is more expensive than driving for a service that is significantly worse than driving in every possible way is not a sustainable practice either.

        I hope this next blunder does kill Metro. Perhaps Seattle will be forced to reconstruct something that actually works out of its ashes.

      6. On the one hand, it would be very nice if this blunder gets us a better agency.

        On the other hand, I don’t think that better agency would arise at once, and I really don’t want to suffer through a year or two of horrid transit service – even assuming it would ever come about.

      7. And I really don’t want to keep handing Metro my wallet every two years for all eternity.

      8. Half the voters tell Metro and the county they want more streamlined bus service. The other half tell them to not delete any one-seat rides or stops, to add P&Rs and focus on peak-hour service. That’s hardly an overwhelming mandate for reform, and is the underlying reason why Metro is so mediocre. It’s not going to change until a higher majority demand reform and are willing to accept its consequences. Second, you have to separate what DP personally thinks Metro should do, from what the majority of Metro’s planners, administrators, and councilmembers think it should do. You can’t expect it to take one person’s opinion over all of them.

      9. Yes, I can.

        What Metro has done hasn’t worked.

        You can’t get around without a great deal of hassle. Driving is always faster and easier. The system goes broke every 18 months like clockwork. And the fare is already the highest in the country, with another increase on the horizon.

        Fuck that. Fix it or die.

      10. The system is broke every 18 months because it lacks a stable funding source. I’m thrilled that you want to gut a transit system I rely on out here in the Mad Max suburbs, except that I just used sarcasm. Get Metro stable funding that is indexed to inflation as a base for it to move up from. That is the solution in this political environment. If you make Metro a city-only service you risk turning it into Dallas’ DART. A system that few use outside of commuting because it only goes within Dallas. If you’re going to need a car to leave the Seattle core, why not use it all of the time? That will be the logic used by more people than I think you expect.

      11. As most of the riders have employer-subsidized passes, the burden of the fare hike will mostly fall not on riders themselves, but on their employers.

        Has there been any evidence thus far of employers declining to pay for employee’s bus passes due to steadily increasing fares?

      12. Most employers (or, at least, the ones into paying for bus passes, which mine is not) are paying for peak passes, I suspect. Getting rid of the “off-peak discount” will mostly hit individual riders. That’s one of the few good arguments I’ve heard against getting rid of time-of-day differential.

        Employers are less likely to jump ship from the pass program if the fare increases are adjusted annually to the cost of inflation, which can only be done if we separate the ORCA fares from the cash fares, and raise the ORCA fares in increments of pennies.

      13. Redmond,

        Few use DART outside of rush hour not because it’s a city-only system*, but because it’s horrible, useless transit for getting around for any non-commute purpose, even (perhaps especially) in the city.

        Just like Metro is horrible, useless transit for getting around for any non-commute purpose. Which is why Metro also has a single-digit modeshare outside of peak for in-city travel.

        Your logic, frankly, is stupid. If transit is your only likely, don’t live in sprawling Redmond. I’m not paying $3 and short, slow ride to subsidize your terrible choice.

        *(In fact, I just looked it up, and that’s absolutely untrue: the service area sprawls over 12 suburbs, and not just at rush hour. DART’s failings are similar to Metro’s failings.)

      14. If transit is your only lifeline, don’t live in sprawling Redmond. I’m not paying $3 per short, slow ride to subsidize your terrible choice.

      15. If transit is your only lifeline, don’t live in sprawling Redmond.

        What about Microsoft, and everything we urbanists have been saying about living close to work? Or do you distinguish between Overlake and Redmond Ridge (as I do)?

      16. People who take local transit to work should have access to a reasonable local fare, and service at the level that the land usage is able to justify.

        People who take premium express services to their six-figure Microsoft jobs can fucking well afford to pay a bit more.

      17. “Most employers (or, at least, the ones into paying for bus passes, which mine is not) are paying for peak passes, I suspect.”

        I didn’t know there was such a thing as a peak-only pass. I thought a pass simply specified a maximum fare amount and if it’s good during the peak, it’s good at all times.

    4. Also, re city transit agencies vs county-based transit agencies, the cities with abundant service in city-only transit agencies are mostly older and larger than Seattle. I’ve said before that I think the size an American city was in 1930 is the biggest factor in how comprehensive its transit is. Seattle’s county-based agency is typical for smaller/newer cities (e.g., Portland). Seattle/Pugetopolis was relatively small all the way until a few decades ago. That’s why we have a county-based agency and mediocre transit, because smaller cities were more automobile-minded in the early and mid 20th century. They didn’t see a need for lots of transit, because distances were small on the freeways, and congestion was not a big issue.

      (It took a decade for I-5 to fill up. In the beginning many people didn’t even know what to do with it, because the established commute patterns — e.g., Boeing Hill to Renton Boeing — were not where I-5 went.)

    1. I was watching a documentary about daily life in North Korea.

      There is near zero auto ownership or traffic.

      The main streets seemed empty. The side streets near the homes more busy, but mostly a lot of milling about.

      I got the sense that a lot of people didn’t really go to work at a job, and could basically hang around home although they couldn’t buy much or do much.

      N.K. transit:
      http://www.brooklynrail.net/N.KoreanRapidTransit.html

    2. There was a radio piece this morning saying a typical salary in North Korea for the past several decades is like $50 a month. (Or maybe it was $200 or something, but in any case outrageously now.) That’s in line with the old Soviet adage, “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

  10. Idea. STB has a seldom used Youtube channel, filled mostly with U-Link tours, RapidRide speeches, and some other boring stuff. The last video was posted over a year ago. I think STB should make more videos and incorporate them into the blog. But instead of focusing on tunnel tours and speeches from politicians, it should include other things … tbc

    1. What a wonderful idea. You suggest it should have something else and don’t name what that something else is.

    2. Myself, I prefer text to videos because I read faster than most people speak. Plus, it’s easier to quote, link, and search.

      1. I prefer text to videos for the same reasons. It probably is not a reason which applies to the masses, however. Most people read slower than we do.

    3. Sam, I look forward to your first in a series of high quality, in-depth videos on improving transit in the Seattle Metropolitan Area.
      When should I tune in?

      1. A few things.

        First, I’m an ideas man. I come up with brilliant observations and ideas, and leave the implementation to others. Think of me as the Steve Jobs of comment sections.

        Secondly, I don’t buy the premise. Transit in King county doesn’t need much improvement. Our county already has some of the best public transit in the nation. So transit doesn’t need to be improved, but behavior does. Example. People move out to South Bumblefuck, WA. There’s no train service and poor bus service to and from Seattle. That must mean we our transit sucks, right? That we need to build them a multi-billion dollar rail line to bring them to or from work, or at the very least buy a fleet of new buses to serve them. Wrong. That is not the answer to the problem … The King of Queens is on. I have to go.

      2. We’ve already built them a multi-billion dollar highway, and they ask for more.

        And you know what? The state is planning to build it for them.

      4. “Our county already has some of the best public transit in the nation”

        That’s a low standard. There’s no reason we shouldn’t have a frequency like Chicago or San Francisco or or even parts of fucking Los Angeles.

    4. Jim, I hope you realize buses and trains aren’t a solution to the problem, just as more bandaids isn’t the solution to the problem of someone who cuts themselves. We have to get at the root of the problem. And trains and BRT buses aren’t the solution for another reason. Because for as many people as they may serve, they disenfranchise an equal number of elderly and disabled who find the up to half mile long trek to the bus stop or station nearly impossible.

      1. The large majority of the population is not elderly or disabled, and is perfectly capable of walking half a mile. Those who can’t can still drive (or move closer to a major transit stop), and their numbers are few enough so their impact on congestion and parking isn’t that much. By contrast, build transit around the elderly and disabled, everyone else will drive because it’s too slow, and the elderly and disabled will also drive because it’s too slow. That leaves no one left for transit to serve except for those who are too poor to be able to drive.

        If you want a city that approaches transit this way, you should visit places such as Yakima, Tri-Cities, Butte, Montana, or Montgomery Alabama (for years, they went through a phase where paratransit was the only transit in the entire city). But if you want a system that is a viable option for people that have enough money to choose, we need to do better than this.

      2. What do you consider the root of the problem?

        Maybe that’s the real question…
        What is the problem?

      3. Build lots & lots of wheelchair accessible apartments in downtown and the elderly and disabled have another option. FWIW, you may have already done so in Seattle.

  11. So now that online purchases will soon be subject to sales tax, will that significantly bump up revenue for local and regional transit agencies?

    1. At least in Washington, the biggest online retailer, Amazon, has already been paying sales tax from the beginning. Even Amazon’s teams of lawyers couldn’t find a way to convince the regulators that their corporate headquarters don’t count as a physical presence is the state.

  12. Why are these hybrid corridors in Tacoma being pushed so hard? Is the city council really keen to reach an “underserved, minority” area? Are the casino owners pulling strings to get a streetcar to them? (Never mind that a vast majority of casino patrons will drive, whether or not there is a streetcar. There’s something about gambling and taking transit that don’t seem to mix. Even if people do take the bus up and down the Las Vegas Strip. But Portland Avenue is not the Las Vegas Strip.) Or does the city council just totally not understand transit, and can’t grasp where the city’s transit needs are, or how the network looks to non-drivers?

  13. Just blows me away…

    I call up State Senator Eide’s office and tell the gent who took the call that Seattle Transit Blog helped her get promoted by supporting State Senator Barbara Bailey so State Senator Eide could get promoted. Had to explain a couple of times…

    But finally got around to asking for funding for the Tri-County Connectors. This is important folks.

    I am also Growling down on State Senator Bailey and being Mr. Nice Guy to State Senator Pearson’s staff. However, I feel long-term we need to stop having to fight these battles individually and start fighting for transit in a more allied way. Otherwise, as I’ve seen in comments in my guest post, we’ll have sniping that allows for divide & conquer by anti-transit forces.

    1. I can’t help but note that you haven’t bothered to “growl down” on your County authorities, even though they are the ones who passed the buck to the State in the first place.

      I wish you well, but do you still not get that your State funding is a unique privilege, and that fighting to save it through State-funding channels alone is the exact opposite of working “in an allied way” for wider transit funding? Do you still have no local backup plan at all?

      1. d.p.;
        a) Since you want local funding, you mind telling me how that’s going to work for multiple counties in such a short timespan?
        b) “Your State funding is a unique privilege”. Totally untrue and cynical and divisive. I have supported local options for transit and also there is transit financial aid for capital projects – and rightfully so.

      2. a) Three counties write three checks.
        b) The recent aid for capital projects and bus replacements comes from the Feds. Olympia has failed even to provide transit mitigation funds for the duration of the stupid highway tunnel they’ve forced upon us. Direct funding for your service remains unique.

      3. d.p., I wish it were as simple as rejiggering three counties’ transit runs and budgets between 30 April and 1 July.

        On second thought, the thinning of other runs for the Tri-County Connectors is going to make our part of transit just as political as Seattle’s transit mess. Perhaps I should be grateful it isn’t that simple.

        I’m tentatively done with you. I feel you want to begrudge me a transit net because you aren’t getting yours and I think you should get yours.

      4. You’ve been talking about the Connectors for a year, and I know you’ve testified at Skagit and Island County hearings. I also know that they’ve consistently passed the buck by telling you its going to be State funding or nothing.

        Why did you accept that as final?

        Because now you’re freaking out about the state funding, because you were unable to fathom the need to plan ahead for alternatives. You were seemingly unable to fathom that you wouldn’t keep receiving special treatment.

        You may think we should all get State aid, but as I’ve said before, you haven’t even begun to address your partisan role in that impossibility.

      5. d.p.;
        All I’m going to say to you is the State House Transportation Budget has the funding and I agree a long-term funding plan instead of a biennium funding crisis is best. Perhaps a state funding grant program for other county connectors or a local funding package going forward, but for now… too little time for local funding to come together.

      6. So it sounds like Avgeek needs to talk to his county leaders as well as his state representatives, and DP needs to realize Avgeek is part of the solution and not part of the problem. Avgeek has said repeatedly he supports adequate urban transit, and similar rural connectors across the entire state. The only reason it looks like a parochial interest is it’s his service that’s under attack right now. Metro’s 2-year $20 fee was also a “parochial interest” by that definition. But if counties are doing the right thing by having transit, they should be rewarded, not punished.

      7. His service is only “under attack” because it’s the only service directly funded in that way.

        No other service could be “under attack” by virtue of loss of direct state funding, because no other such service exists.

        If the service were locally funded, as all other services in the state must be, it would not be “under attack”.

        This is the very definition of a “parochial interest”.

        (And the $20 charge is not equivalent, since we paid for that. The Connector’s counties already have untapped funding options they could be using to pay for the Connector.)

      8. And I’m not trying to beat up on either Joe or the Connector here.

        I just have a visceral objection to the culture of “demanding things that don’t make any sense, on the basis of arguments that don’t make any sense” that is pervasive in Washington.

        Can a good case be made for state involvement in rural lifeline services that cross arbitrary county boundaries? Absolutely!

        Can a case be made for unequal treatment that denies other rural areas similar benefits, while politically beating up on (and actively redistributing revenues from) the one area of the state for which public transit is actually crucial? Not so much.

        Can a case be made for $1 subsidized service from Bellingham to Mt. Vernon when it’s going to cost $2.75 to get from Capitol Hill to downtown Seattle? Even less so!

      9. As to:

        Can a case be made for unequal treatment that denies other rural areas similar benefits, while politically beating up on (and actively redistributing revenues from) the one area of the state for which public transit is actually crucial? Not so much.

        Can a case be made for $1 subsidized service from Bellingham to Mt. Vernon when it’s going to cost $2.75 to get from Capitol Hill to downtown Seattle? Even less so!

        Actually part a I feel there is NO case for beating up on the Seattle Metropolitan area.

        Part b, it would cost by my math $2 to go from Bellingham to Mt. Vernon. Another $2 from MV to Everett. That’s a fair fare. $2.75 innercity? Not so much.

        Thanks Mike for the help. I will promise you this, I will be speaking to transit leaders at the county level about a long-term plan. People like I need stability because we have long-term responsibilities (i.e. jobs, relatives to care for, mortgages, studies); and need not a game of chicken against Senator Curtis King every two years.

      10. The state is also directly funding extra Metro bus service on Hwy 99 (until next June) and on SR 520.

      12. And it’s not even adequate mitigation. And it runs out in the middle of the project.

        Face it, Olympia is a Special-Ed program.

      14. d.p. is saying that the people who run the state government in Olympia are mentally much less competent than the average person. I think he has too high an opinion of the intelligence of the average person.

  14. I was just checking my ORCA account to see how much was still in it. Before I’d always thought having the bus route there was kind of handy but didn’t pay attention to anything but that and the fare/transfer credit. Now that I’m using the dumb phone edition of One Bus Away I would have hoped that “Location” would have been the stop number. No such luck South Kirkland P&R for instance shows up as KCM-BUS-3420 instead of Stop Id 74450. Why the cryptic number? FWIW Metro’s website doesn’t have an obvious way to hunt down stop numbers either.

    1. I think the number is the coach number. The ORCA validator is attached to the bus, not the stop (except for RR stations).

      1. I just verified that a trip on RR-B could get you something like KCM, NE 24th/Bel-Red WB, but it doesn’t identify the route number.

    2. The number looks right for a coach number. And I care about that why and what does it have to do with the title of the column in the ORCA transaction page which is labeled “Location”? Most stops don’t have a stop number posted, at least not on the eastside. You can get it from the menu tree on OBA but if it’s mid route it takes a while to skip through all the stops. Thank goodness they let you bookmark stops and I only have a handful I care about. It’s piss poor customer service that they (meaning KC Metro and ORCA) make this information so hard to find.

      1. Serious answer: “Location” is probably a lousy name for the information they have, which is which card reader you tapped your card at.

        Trollish answer: The location of the card reader is roughly fixed relative to the bus it’s attached to, just like the location of South Kirkland P&R is roughly fixed relative to the surface of the earth.

        There are a lot of places where it’s hard to find stop numbers or select stops in OBA. The DSTT is first on my list.

      2. It seems pretty clear to me that the location where Bernie tapped was inside the bus. ‘Location’ seems like a perfectly fine header for the datum that the ORCA system knows.

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