Month: April 2013

Back in November, Bruce bashed RapidRide for having neither a published schedule, nor real-time arrival board, nor real support in OneBusAway:

I don’t expect miracles, but I do expect Metro to deliver this service at a level of quality that befits a premium, flagship service. The status quo of no schedule and no OneBusAway on the C & D Lines — more than six weeks after the start of service — is an intolerable embarrassment to the agency and is corroding the RapidRide brand.

All these points are valid, and thankfully Metro has corrected the situation. But that just calls into relief the outrage that Link, a few years older and with an order of magnitude more capital investment, still has nothing but an onsite two minute warning.

Fortunately,  a new research project provides some hope that ST will find a solution in the next few years. Last July the Sound Transit Board appropriated funds to a new research & technology program known as “Regional Data Services.” Yesterday I spoke with Michael Berman, the Program Supervisor, who told me the prospects of getting what we’ve been waiting for all this time.

All below the jump.

Continue reading “Real-Time Arrival and Link”

• Report from the 185th St. station meeting, mainly about the experience of other neighborhoods.
• PubliCola provides their summary of the current House transportation budget.
• House Transportation Budget has some exceptional fine print, including $15m to split RapidRide C and D.
• Rep. Marko Liias fighting for more bike and pedestrian funding.
• Chris Karnes with a nice little treatise on the arithmetic of adding stations.
• City budget is kept afloat with jobs housed in new development and jobs from the development itself. I prefer density to cutting City services, but I suppose some see it differently.
• Although the lakefront heights are still strictly limited to 160′, the Seattle Council has now worked out exactly how much they’re going to tax new housing in an effort to make it more affordable.
• A look at the remake of Downtown Bothell ($).
• Local traffic congestion declining ($).
• Here’s a plan to save $2.5 billion on the CRC.
• Oregon Governor stands up for light rail ($).
• USDOT has $474m available for TIGER grants.

This is an open thread.

Over the last couple of weeks, the Puyallup City Council has been in talks with Sound Transit over potential access improvements to Puyallup Station.  Like many of its South Line counterparts, the station is heavily auto-oriented despite being situated in a fairly quaint and walkable downtown. As a result, growth in Sounder ridership has greatly increased the pressure on nearby commuter lots, all of which are already at-capacity on the weekdays.

At the same time, the November failure of Pierce Transit’s Prop. 1 and the recent curtailing of local transit service have continued to dwindle multimodal access options.  Many commuters are now relying on the Red Lot, a secondary lot on the Puyallup Fairgrounds, which is served by PT Sounder feeder routes 400 and 495.

Continue reading “Puyallup Mulling Sounder Station Improvements”

Publicola today has one of their fantastic “one question” pieces – this time for mayoral candidate Ed Murray, on his view on Sound Transit’s subarea equity policy. Murray says it should be eliminated.

As a quick bit of background, subarea equity is a policy in which Sound Transit is split into five subareas – and money collected in a subarea must be spent in that subarea. This means money collected in Seattle essentially stays in Seattle, money collected on the eastside stays on the eastside.

Subarea equity originally existed because suburban legislators, in creating Sound Transit, wanted to make sure that suburban money didn’t end up spent in Seattle. As a result, Link implementation was at first slower. But now that Sound Transit 2 is passed, the North King subarea’s “spine” is fully funded. Most of the political pressure on Sound Transit is now to expand to Tacoma, Everett, and Redmond, and most of the board votes are outside Seattle.

In a Sound Transit 3 package, subarea equity is paramount to ensuring that we get a new line in Seattle – it ensures that Seattle’s contribution stays in the city, and political pressure doesn’t move money out to the ends of the lines.

Murray claims that his reason for wanting to remove subarea equity would be to focus transit investment in Seattle – but the outcome of removing it would be the opposite. As a transit advocate who wants Seattle to have more grade separated transit, this is scary because it’s a direct threat to a new line in the city, and it’s scary because a mayoral candidate should have a better grasp of the issues.

Last night, the Bellevue city council slogged through what may be its last big East Link planning decision ever, and ended at a unanimous endorsement of its preferred cost savings options.  Before I get to exactly which specific picks the council made, it’s worth mentioning that this is effectively only a recommendation and isn’t a binding action.  The final alignment decision still rests in the hands of the Sound Transit Board, which is expected to vote on the matter this coming Thursday.

Ultimately, the council approved three major alignment segments:

• Retained cut alignment side-running along Bellevue Way with no savings.  A cheaper alternative would have brought the alignment to at-grade, added a new HOV lane, and pushed the entire roadway west.  This was ultimately canned after residents balked.
• Road-over-rail crossing of 112th Ave SE and an at-grade crossing of SE 4th limited to emergency vehicle access only.  The SE 4th crossing saves in the neighborhood of $2 to $4 million.
• Open downtown station at NE 6th, producing $19 to $33 million in savings.  We’ve opposed this option since its conception and our stance hasn’t changed.  Although I’ll give ST and Bellevue staff credit for doing their best to improve the design, the station remains hugely inferior to its 110th Ave counterpart, for all the reasons Martin alluded to last week.  As a concession to picking the NE 6th station, the council did approve an amendment which would authorize spending $5 million of the savings to improve the walkway between the station and the transit center.

In total, the cost savings don’t even end up anywhere close to the $60 million target the City was hoping to reach, which leaves anywhere from $23 to $39 million unaccounted for.  The remaining difference will ultimately have to be paid out in cash in order for Bellevue to fund its share of the downtown tunnel.

The next best thing for transit advocates to do is to make your opinion known at the Sound Transit Board meeting this coming Thursday, at which point the Board will likely seal East Link’s fate before launching the project into final design.  The meeting will be held from 1:30-4pm in the Ruth Fisher Board Room at Union Station.  Public comments are solicited near the beginning so it’s important to show up on time if you plan on testifying.

At noon today, at the South Lake Union Discovery Center, Puget Sound Bike Share will hold a press event to formally announce their choice of operating partner for the Seattle-area bike share, whose roll-out is expected to begin next year. Two other local transportation agency heads will be on-hand, including Peter Hahn from SDOT, and Metro’s Kevin Desmond. From the PR:

Puget Sound Bike Share, a nonprofit partnership of public and private organizations, announced today that it has selected Portland-based Alta Bicycle Share as its operator/vendor. Alta will work with PSBS to plan, launch and sustain a regional bike share network beginning with approximately 500 bikes and 50 stations in Seattle and eventually expanding into other areas of the Puget Sound region. One of the most experienced bike share companies in North America, Alta is the vendor/operator behind the highly successful Capital Bike Share in Washington D.C. and Boston’s Hubway. In the coming months, Alta will launch Citibike in New York City, the largest bike share network in the nation, as well as systems in Chicago, Vancouver, B.C., Portland and San Francisco.

The selection of Alta isn’t a great surprise to those of us who’ve watched the bikeshare movement expand in this country. The US market is dominated by two players: Alta and B-Cycle, and most larger or coastal cities seem to end up choosing Alta. The difference to users is primarily in the details of the bikes and docking stations: Alta’s equipment is designed by Bixi of Montreal, whose eponymous original system has served that city since 2009, while B-Cycle is partnership of bike manufacturer Trek with other companies, most well known for the successful Denver B-Cycle program. Both systems work well, although (completely anecdotally) most people I know who’ve ridden both found Bixi slightly more polished.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of talking to Holly Houser, executive director of PSBS, and I relayed some of your questions from yesterday. After the jump, a summary of our conversation. Continue reading “Puget Sound Bike Share Partners with Alta Planning”

[Note: Moved up due to the all time-sensitive stuff this morning.]

On Wednesday April 10th Metro met with planners and staff from the cities of King County to go over progress on the Strategic Plan Update and to better explain the recently released 2012 Service Guidelines Report and its implications.  Considering the 17% cut illustration Metro released with the Service Guidelines Report, that part of the agenda understandably dominated the meeting.  Metro also announced that starting this fall the publication of its Service Guidelines will move forward half a year.  Spring data will be released the following fall.

The majority of the meeting was spent on how to read the Service Guidelines Report.  It’s important to note that the route tables in the report look at two separate but related sets of factors:

Corridor Analysis: 1. Productivity  2. Social Equity  3. Geographic Value  4. Ridership  5. Peak Route Evaluation;

and

Route Performance Analysis  1. Rides/Platform Hour  2. Passenger Miles/Platform Miles  3. Overcrowding  4. On-time Performance

More after the jump.

Continue reading “Context of the 2012 Metro Service Guidelines Report”

As we reported two weeks ago, the principal stated reason for the Seattle Council’s rejection of 240′ heights right along Lake Union were the shadows they would cast on Lake Union Park.

The images above are from Via Architecture director Matt Roewe’s presentation to the City Council prior to the vote. There are lots of interesting renderings in this presentation of various visual impacts of these buildings, but you can see the estimated shadows of 240′ towers throughout the year, and judge for yourself if this was worth forgoing more residents in the city, and more revenue through both developer height bonuses and additional economic activity.

I suspect most readers know what bike share is by now, but if you don’t, go read the wiki page or take a gander at the websites for Denver B-Cycle or Capital Bikeshare. Tomorrow, Puget Sound Bike Share is holding a press event to announce the selection of an operator for the system they plan to roll out in Seattle starting next year, and they’ve kindly offered to answer my questions today.

So, what questions do you have for Puget Sound Bike Share? Keep in mind that there’s no point asking low-level or operational questions, like the location of specific bikeshare stations, as those things will not have been decided yet.

I need the questions by 1 PM.

Today’s Times has a helpful reminder ($) that the fate of the Downtown Bellevue Link station will likely be decided this week. Bellevue’s Council will decide on its favored alternative tomorrow (Monday), which influences the Sound Transit Board’s decision on Thursday.

The process has placed a lot of weight on short-term construction impacts and noise issues to a few homes along the line, and little to the impact on thousands of future riders, every day, over the decades (centuries?) that may find that transit doesn’t work well for them due to a station design that doesn’t care about effective transfers and moves the station away from most of the activity centers in Bellevue.

Now is the time, especially if you’re a Bellevue resident, to let your Council know that the latter set of issues is the important one – particularly when the savings will be no more than $33m,or just over 1% of the cost of an East Link project whose primary purpose is to serve Downtown Bellevue. Do it today.

If you don’t live in Bellevue but have a stake in what’s going on there, your best bet is to contact the Sound Transit board members that happen to represent you. Everyone in King County votes for Dow Constantine, and if you’re in Seattle, Mike McGinn, Richard Conlin, and perhaps Joe McDermott or Larry Phillips represent you as well.

Commenting below on this is all well and good, but nothing works like constituent mail or phone calls. Even if you think that East Link is not the best use of resources out there, it’s in almost everyone’s interest that the line be as effective in moving people as possible.

Go write that email, then come back and read some additional thoughts after the jump.

Continue reading “ACTION ALERT: Downtown Bellevue”