- Peter Steinbrueck highly skeptical of densification, opposes city money to study rail to Ballard.
- A review of all the stuff Bridging the Gap has done for transit.
- This report from a Metro meeting with the Arbor Heights community covers many subjects, in particular the planned major revision to Route 22.
- Sound Transit needs a new Citizen Oversight Panel member from the North King subarea.
- Redmond has highest surge in daytime population ($) in the U.S., with some qualifications.
- After confusion, downtown Kirkland development can go ahead.
- Bainbridge Island “Frog Hopper” bus will take tourists around on summer weekends. $7 for a day pass, and yes, there will be bike racks.
- Intercity Transit looking for a new leader.
- Skytrain boosting capacity, because they need it.
- TriMet installs doohickey to reduce light rail electricity consumption.
- High density with low buildings is possible, but requires lots of changes to the urban form, not just opposing tall buildings.
- People losing their minds over NYC bike share , but the real tyranny is of the car.
- Interesting ideas for New York’s Penn Station.
This is an open thread.
I think it is neat that they want to re-imagine Penn Station, it is a shame that the original headhouse was torn down. My only concern would be if they end up making something that is more art than functional station. Who wants to walk around a giant bowl 15 times to get to the bottom, like a flushing toilet?
I think you’re misunderstanding that rendering. That’s effectively the sidewalk in front of homes or businesses. Check out the cross section.
http://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/quick-note-why-the-focus-on-penn-station/
Wouldn’t that amount of money build the tunnels to NJ that Gov. Christie nixed? What’s the point of a fancy new terminal if you don’t increase capacity?
If you ever have to use the current maze of concourses under Madison Square Toilet Bowl, it will immediately be apparent that passenger circulation is a far greater problem than track capacity.
The more Peter Steinbrueck opens his mouth the more dislike him
I judge the latest incarnation of politician Peter Steinbrueck by his deeds more than his words. I’ve voted and even campaigned for him in the past, although without realizing his involvement in CAP.
One particular egregious deed is that he hired Cathy Allen as his campaign consultant. I’ve made a point of voting and campaiging against anyone who hires Cathy and her Solutions Group. There are no off-limits places that outfit is unwilling to take a campaign. Debate on issues gets pushed out of the way by mud when they get involved. I hope the rest of the mayoral field is doing some thorough “defensive opposition research” because the Solutions Group is almost certainly building files on you to drag whoever ends up in the final with Peter (if he makes it that far) through the mud.
[As an aside, our system of having only two finalists, rather than allowing voters to rank candidates, does a whole lot to encourage mudslinging. Peter was asked multiple times to support ranked choice voting while we was in office, but he never supported it. He was, like me, quite opposed to districting, which seems odd considering that his new base seems to include the NIMBY leaders of the latest districting effort.]
Oddly, Peter got a co-endorsement from the 36th District Democrats before announcing his opposition to even studying a Ballard streetcar. They may be feeling a little hoodwinked now.
CORRECTION: The 36th District Democrats made no endorsement in the mayoral race. It was the 46th Dems who gave Peter a dual endorsement.
My apologies.
I have to say, I’m really not enjoying this new design. The background image is pretty on its own, but it makes the page feel very chaotic. The various colors are all too close together for my taste, making it hard for me to distinguish where one item starts and the other begins. And the huge font and margins make it hard to keep anything in focus.
I may have to make myself a custom stylesheet…
Heh, I only see the background image as a thin undecipherable strip at the top of the page. Mostly everything is just solid white.
+1
Agree. Thanks for removing the background. It was too busy.
+1
A couple of weeks ago I complained to Peter Steinbrueck that his professed support for Link and his positions were inconsistent, and asked him to clarify.
Now he’s clarified.
Fast transit, in his mind, is only for the suburbs. In the city, either you are wealthy enough to drive and park — like his base — or you are stuck on slow buses forever.
And if there is any justice, there will not be a single person in lower Queen Anne or urban Ballard who votes for him.
Add West Seattle to the possibilities for justice since Lesser Seattlebrueck pretty much opposes any kind of rail for intracity transit.
I’ll do my part to ensure justice is served in West Seattle.
I see that FTA and WSDOT issued the Final EIS for the Mukilteo ferry terminal project:
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/projects/ferries/mukilteoterminal/multimodal/
Also, in related news, the transfer of the Air Force Tank Farm in Mukilteo to the Port of Everett is complete:
http://www.murray.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2013/6/mukilteo-senator-murray-announces-air-force-transfer-of-tank-farm-to-port-of-everett
How about the tyranny of insane parking rules – the first in a series of posts from Sightline:
“The 4.6 million single-family houses in cities across the Northwest, and tens of millions more elsewhere, are each required to have at least one off-street parking space. Yet many of these city rules add no net parking spaces to their cities’ supplies.”
Excellent article. “The net effect—one mandatory off-street parking space plus one car-less household—is a one-space reduction of parking supply on my block.” (!)
Dovetailing nicely into this story is yesterday’s article wherein Sightline predicts a significantly reduced demand for parking in the very near future.
… and yet, Sound Transit continues to plan and build Park & Rides. Oh well, maybe they can be used as bases for all these self-driving cars.
Velo,
ST’s park and ride policy/choice appears to be a function of “we want ridership above all, but we’re building stations in the middle of totally unwalkable suburbia… what do we do?”
The trick is that those park and rides are a function of it being better to build the system politically feasible than not building it at all and worse than building the system TO density first… building park and rides in suburbia as suburbia is losing population (in general) is a bad choice as far as how to use resources. But necessary for the politics.
First, self-driving taxis have to become widespread in cities, which are always the first adopters of Zipcars, bicycle sharing, bike trails, etc. Zipcar has been around for years and Car2Go for months, yet they still only serve a tiny 0.1% of trips — way less than buses or Link. Adoption of self-driving taxis will have a similar curve: there will be plenty of time to watch it subsume 1%, then 25% of cars on the road, and watch the gradual traffic reduction if it actually happens. Second, this is all in the city. Spreading to the suburbs where the P&Rs are will be a longer-term thing because people are more attached to their cars and already have them, along with a garage, and free parking everywhere in suburbia. Eventually self-driving taxis may become mainstream in suburbia, but that’s ten or twenty years off. When there’s an actual reduction of demand at P&Rs — when spaces are regularly going empty — then ST can reconsider its to-be-built P&Rs and suburbanites will support the idea. Conveniently, most of these P&Rs are outside the North King subarea, so the fact that their suburban constituents are supporting shrinking P&Rs will be a watershed event. Then ST can start converting existing P&R spaces to TOD or taxi stands or whatever. At that point the garages will be a wasted cost, because there aren’t many options to convert them without demolishing them — except dystopian science-fiction novels about housing and law offices retrofitted into garage stories. (How do they get rid of the oil smell? And the bleak darkness?)
How is it not already a wasted cost. More is spent on providing free parking than the cost of their bus trip; which is pretty high for most P&R lots. Paradigm shift, free bus fare from P&R lots and you charge for parking. Here’s a hint, If you have to serve or create P&R lots (like East Link) then your light rail line has failed the basic test of viability. It’s really not much harder than that although our politicos addiction to public spending want to obfuscate that fact.
There was an interesting panel discussion about The Car in 2035 that I went to this past weekend – http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/8415391269 The one big issue they brought up, which everyone forgets, is the transition. The average age of a car on the road keeps going up, street space is limited, and there will be serious equity issues when rich people are driven by their Rolls Royces while the poor slog along on the bus or in their manually driven automobile. No one has the money to build new lanes for self driving cars, and if you take away existing lanes that will cause even more grief in the community. You may have cars on autopilot but they will either operate on dedicated roads or have a pilot/driver behind the wheel “just in case” like on an airplane. This self driving vehicle transition is going to be a huge paradigm shift that will be very chaotic over that period.
“Eventually self-driving taxis may become mainstream in suburbia, but that’s ten or twenty years off.”
… and yet, Park & Rides are a 30-50 year investment… As much as I enjoy the option of driving to the P&R when weather is crappy, I’d prefer at least part of the cost be paid for by a parking fee. Folks who park at South Bellevue do so to avoid paying $10-$20/day for parking downtown. $3 per day isn’t too much to ask. (And no, that doesn’t begin to cover the full cost of structured parking, but it’s a start)
The reason the P&R exists is that it’s cheaper than running all-day buses to within 10 minutes of every single-family house in the surrounding area. Free bus fare doesn’t help if there’s no bus near you, or it runs only peak hours and you’re travelling another time, or it’s hourly and you don’t want to wait an hour or possibly have to wait an hour on your return trip.
“How is it not already a wasted cost?”
That’s a matter of debate, whether the benefit of a full garage is worth the cost of construction, compared to using the money for a better rail line, or an all-day bus to some of the destinations surrounding the station. I’m sympathetic to the argument that these other investments would be more worthwhile, but at the same time I don’t agree with the argument that suburban P&Rs are useless/bad/sprawl enablers.
Another issue is the cost of self-driving taxis. Their fares will probably be the same as regular taxis or even higher. That’s because either the actual expenses will be higher, or the owner will want to monetize the perceived benefit of the gee-whiz technology. It’s inconceivable that taxi fares will be as low as bus fares.
The reason people don’t use taxis now for everyday trips is that they cost $2.50 – 3 per mile, and that can add up to $1500 a month. Unless self-driving taxis have a fare structure dramatically less than that, there will be no mainstream rush to exchange personal cars for self-driving taxis. There may be a rush for 18-year-olds to use self-driving taxis rather than buying cars, but that would be a longer-term phenomenon.
Certainly not useless; at least not the ones that are full of which Swamp & Ride is one. It provides a very Good alternative to paying to park downtown. Definitely Bad as a sprawl enabler because it takes almost all of the expense and a good deal of the pain out of having to driving to work. The Ugly part is that for this premium service which rewards living far from work the consumer pays absolutely nothing toward the expense which exceeds the cost of the actual bus service.
If P&Rs enabled sprawl, you’d see a significant number of buildings in P&R cachement areas that wouldn’t be there if the P&R weren’t there, and a significantly lower vacancy rate. I have not seen any evidence of this happening. It’s the highways that enable sprawl, and the number of drivers completely dwarfs the number of transit riders. If the Issaquah Highlands P&R didn’t exist, I expect the Highlands would have the same vacancy rate, or maybe just slightly higher. It would merely attract a different mix of people. because those who want to use transit wouldn’t be able to live there, but the 90% of suburbanites who don’t use transit wouldn’t be daunted.
Why should self-driving taxis cost more than human-driven taxis? In the developed world, human labor is expensive. Eliminate the labor expense and, as long as there is adequate competition, driverless taxi operators would be forced to pass the savings along to consumers if they want customers.
If you’re looking for a precedent, car2go today costs about 40-50% of what a human-driven taxi would cost for the same trip. The 50-60% savings is what you get by having the customer drive the vehicle, rather than a commercial driver that has to be paid for his time. If you think of self-driving taxis as a natural extension to the Car2Go business model, assuming the driverless technology becomes cheap enough, the costs can only go down further. If cars can drive to the customer, rather than being forced to sit at the southern tip of Lauralhurst for days on end, the number of trips that each car can make in a day will go way up. Which means the fixed cost of manufacturing and maintaining the car can be spread out across more trips, which, in turn, means cheaper trips.
Yet another potential cost savings that driverless taxis could make, would be some sort of automated carpooling system. This would essentially result in two tiers of pricing. You can pay for the premium service and be guaranteed that you would have the who vehicle to yourself, with no stops to pick up or drop or anyone else along the way. Or, if you’re not in a hurry, you could pay a cheaper price, in exchange for delays from picking up or dropping off other passengers along the way. Essentially, this “budget” mode would function a lot like a DART bus today, but with more, smaller, vehicles, fewer people per vehicle, and 24-hour on-demand service with minimal wait times. If done right, shared, driverless taxis, combined with direct government fare subsidies for low-income residents, could completely replace regular transit service to sprawly areas like Sammamish, which are impossible for a regular bus system to service with anything remotely resembling efficiency.
There is one reason, though, which I can see driverless taxis charging the same fares as human-driven taxis, and that is government regulation that artificially keeps the supply down, competition limited, and fares high. For instance, if driverless taxis are required to purchase a license that only exists in limited numbers – in other words, if the supply of driverless taxis becomes capped at the current supply of human taxis – competition will not be able to force lower fares, and all the savings by eliminating the labor component of the service will simply go to the vehicle or license owners in the form of higher profits.
@Mike I’ll grant you that there is one type of sprawl that P&R’s help to contain, job sprawl. As it gets more difficult and expensive to drive into a CBD a transit option becomes more appealing. So employers downtown enjoy a subsidize perk via public transit covering 80% of the cost of their employees commute. In the case of P&R lots the subside per person is double the average yet nothing extra is charged. Without transit there would be a much stronger incentive for employment to move to where the labor force is. But I’m not convinced moving jobs closer to where people live is a bad thing. If as you say, people are going to move out to the boonies anyway then it’s cheaper and has less environmental impact than driving to a P&R and being given an Express bus into the city.
I’m more worried about jobs proliferating in sprawlsville. I’m afraid I may someday have to take a job in a Lynnwood or Issaquah or Kent office park, far from an all-day bus or even a peak-hour bus, and I’ll either have to have a miserable commute from Seattle or move to a godforsaken area. (BTW East Hill 104th does not count as godforsaken. Renton Ikea, Canyon Park, and places like that do.) First the jobs were concentrated downtown, then sprawlsville became predominent, then more jobs started to concentrate downtown and near suburban centers. So it’s getting better but not decisively. Against this, a well-used P&R is of little importance. And if companies would locate around the P&R, so much the better.
As long as densities are not allowed to increase beyond large lot single-family homes, all the relocation of jobs to the suburbs is going to do is to push housing even deeper into the suburbs. Just as the presence of Microsoft in Redmond lead to a housing boom in Sammamish, the relocation of downtown Seattle jobs to Lynnwood will simply create a housing boom out in Marysville, perhaps even Arlington.
Right now, the number of people who want to live in Marysville is constrained by the fact that commuting into the city is so time-consuming, even with your free parking and one-seat express bus. In the long-term, as traffic builds, commutes from Marysville to Lynnwood are going to be just as time-consuming as commutes from Lynnwood to Seattle are today.
Oh, and that’s assuming that you can get away with living in the same suburb as your job. If you and your spouse are not fortunate enough to find jobs in the same suburb, either one person or the other is going to have a god-awful commute, and likely be stuck driving it, day after day after day.
Bellevue, Redmond and Kirkland all have areas where multifamily housing is as dense as anywhere in Seattle; which BTW is also predominantly SF neighborhoods. But the eastside cities by and large are adding all the new growth in areas already zone MF or light industrial instead of trying to gentrify their existing SF neighborhoods. The housing boom in Marysville was largely due to Boeing. Those houses are a tough sell now days. Lynnwood is trying to adopt the eastside model of pushing the majority of it’s growth into a city center. It’s really the only choice since there are few SF lots left to build on. Samammish Plataea and Redmond Ridge in particular were driven largely by Microsoft or it’s spin offs. The explosive growth in Auburn, Black Diamond, Covington, et al has almost nothing to do with Microsoft. Most of those people are commuting to jobs in Kent, Renton and Seattle. Trains and P&R lots are an alternative to the commute from hell keeping the option viable. But the real sprawl king of public transit is the WSF system.
Hey what about equipping all of these park and rides with E-V chargers… They sit there for 6-8 hours a day anyway, why not slap a metered connection on them and charge a few bucks for having a full charge to go home on?
Is anyone else finding it harder to read the blog with the new theme? I’m not a fan of dark grey text on a light grey background.
+1
It’s too early to tell, but I suspect the new format is discouraging comments. Too much wasted space and not enough content on a page is my biggest issue.
Any trends showing up in the first week?
Anecdotally, I think there’ve been fewer comments so far this week. Has anyone else noticed trends?
Agree, especially when reading mobile, the new format is much less comment friendly, as well as harder to read. A bit better today with the background gone, but still a triumph of form over content.
The more I think about Peter Steinbrueck’s vision of the city, the madder I get.
His housing vision is that 1) single-family neighborhoods are unchanged, while 2) current pockets of density all go to 65- or 85-foot towers (because that is the only way to accommodate all the growth without changing any single-family areas).
His transportation vision is that the city’s bus system and roads are unchanged, except maybe for RapidRide-style low-cost, fig-leaf efforts. (He talks up BRT, but then makes it clear that he would be unwilling to make the decisive street-level changes real BRT would require.)
The common thread here is that he is pushing for a two-tier Seattle. Tier 1 has existing residents and the people wealthy enough to buy into the fixed supply of existing single-family housing. Those people drive and park everywhere, exactly the same way they do now, and they do nothing at all to help the city absorb growth.
Tier 2 has everyone else, which includes all new arrivals who are not wealthy. (And that’s not just the poor, although it includes them! It’s also a hell of a lot of middle-class and even upper-middle-class people.) Tier 2 residents have one housing choice: multi-family housing in large projects. Tier 2 residents have one transportation choice: slow buses. Spending money on anything related to the well-being of Tier 2 residents is “unwise” or “wasteful.”
It’s hard for me to express just the sort of anger this sort of vision for the future makes me feel without saying things that would (properly) get me censored or banned.
“Tier 2 residents have one housing choice: multi-family housing in large projects.”
You forgot the word “expensive”. Seattle needs to needs to expand the multifamily area enough to bring rents down to $1000 or as close as possible, but it’s not even considering that, so rents remain in the $1000-1500 range except for the most marginal cases and some studios. So a lot of Tier 2 residents are just outpriced from Seattle, especially families with kids, and this will become even more acute as the population rises. So either get with it on excellent transit to Kent, or expand the supply enough to stabilize and ideally lower rents.
It is finals weeks so I may have missed it if this was posted already but I saw that the safe streets bill got passed in an article on streetsblog. http://streetsblog.net/2013/05/30/washington-state-passes-neighborhood-safe-streets-bill/
Sale of Kent City Center property complete
Goodman Real Estate, Inc. to begin construction of The Platform by months end
Kent, Wash. – June 5, 2013 – Kent continues to revitalize its downtown with the sale of its City Center property to Goodman Real Estate, Inc. of Seattle. The city and the developer previously agreed to a two-year lease with the option to purchase. The sale closed June 4.
Goodman and its architect, Studio Meng Strazzara, will construct a five-story, mixed-use development consisting of 176 urban style apartments, 3,100 square feet of retail and 35 public parking spaces in addition to the parking set aside for residents.
http://www.kentwa.gov/content.aspx?id=23476
Sam’s roundup within a roundup.
– In many cities, the youth fare is the same as senior/disabled fare. In King County, the youth fare is 66% more. Why?
–
Actually, that’s all I have.
In all STB news roundups, the stories actually have links. Also, you are overlooking train fares.
The short answer is that the senior/disabilities discount is a federal requirement. The youth discount is not.
The federal requirement is only that off peak senior fares be 1/2 of the regular off peak fare. This discount is not required during the peak.
The senior fare is available at all times and is less than half of the regular off-peak fare.
Personally, I would like the South Link to Federal Way to be like this:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MAX_Green_Line_train_on_6th_2_-_Portland,_Oregon.JPG
At-grade track that takes one lane of Pacific Highway South from S 180 St to around S 216 St, and having stops as frequently as the current A-Line. This also would replace the A-Line completely. That’s what they do in Portland, and I like the way it works. It would probably also be the cheapest option, since there is no support structures involved, and to make up for the reduced traffic capacity, there could be some sort of promotion (and of course, drivers would drive by and think “I should try the link…”).
Does anyone else think this might be a good idea?
Yeah, about 20 years ago.
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19920313&slug=1480824
We promoted it as the Rhody Line, which incorporated a series of stations at overcrossings every ~3/4 mile at major intersections until connecting with the DSTT/E3, then back to Hwy 99.
Basically Swift, RR-E and RR-A on steroids. John Bailo would have loved the linear TOD potential.
It would have also pushed the TSM alternative of HOV/P&R alternatives along the major freeways as part of the package deal.
Seattle HCT – then and now.
ST isn’t going to do that (nor a facsimile of what it did on MLK, which involves wider stop spacing, fewer crossings, and greater separation) because it’s chasing short-term ridership at park-and-rides. Longer term…
– The vision here would be more like Central Link than downtown Portland. This area is not downtown Portland… nor SF’s Sunset District, for a non-downtown example of center-running rail in a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood.
– Long-term you’d hope for some redevelopment along this corridor… and maybe have similar problems as Central Link. In particular, building center-running rail capable of covering this distance (almost 10 miles from the airport to FW!) with decent speed and reliability at-grade would make it harder to transform to an urban street as development demanded (see the short stretch of Lake City Way with frequent street crossings and street trees that actually function as street trees — the crossings being the more important feature, but the street trees actually look pretty nice). So I’d rather see the train elevated than at-grade.
So Mr. Davis got his wish, and after just 30 years, his RTP tunnel plan will have made it all the way to Northgate – a whopping 6.5 miles from the DSTT.
It has long been agreed upon by the Link stakeholders that stop spacing will be 1-2 miles except in large downtowns. They aren’t going to suddenly decide to make the Federal Way extension a totally different kind of system. If they decide not to extend Link with 1-2 mile spacing, they just won’t extend it at all. It’s inconceivable that they would put in Federal Way a spacing that would be more appropriate for Seattle. One, South King really can’t afford it and critically needs rapid transit in other corridors. Two, there would be howls of protest from those who wish there were that kind of stop spacing in Rainier Valley and Capitol Hill.
I’m sorry that I was away from my computer all of yesterday, thereby missing out on the further discussion of the impediments to financing small-lot density. At the moment — and on a related note — it feels most pressing to address Matthew Yglesias’s stunningly inaccurate assessment of Somerville’s present and future.
Yglesias correctly states three facts: that Somerville is very dense without being tall or having particularly large individual buildings; that triple-deckers are the dominant residential form; and that the city has become increasingly desirable over the past two decades as young urban professionals have been priced out of Cambridge.
About everything else, he’s completely wrong.
He’s wrong to expect the extremely wealthy to waltz in and convert triple-deckers into “spacious single-family homes”. These aren’t brownstones that were built as mansions before being subdivided, and could be mansions again. These were built as tiered multi-family structures, with proportions that would be extremely difficult to “mansionize”. Including the purchase price, such a project would be as expensive as a tear-down and rebuild — in the range of a couple of million — and someone who really wants a single-family house that badly can likely afford to get one in Newton rather than fashioning one out of whole cloth in a non-s.f. environment.
But most importantly, he’s wrong to call the units in Somverville triple-deckers small. Most Boston-area triple-decker units boast a very comfortable 1500-2000 feet. That’s why they’ve long played equal-opportunity host, depending on price fluctuations, to a Dominican family of four, to three grad-student roommates in their early thirties, or to that yuppie family of three looking to stay close to the city but priced out of Cambridge. The total number of people/sq.mi. may fluctuate slightly with economics, but not nearly to the degree that Yglesias implies.
Residents of recent soulless Seattle megaprojects would likely be shocked by the spacious living rooms and ample kitchens these places have. The trade-off is less privacy when young and single, but the benefit is that Bostonians don’t view “apartments” and “families” as incongruous concepts the way shoebox-addled Seattleites learn to. By advocating against Somerville density and in favor of, well, Seattle’s approach to “density”, Yglesias would actually reduce unit size and reinforce the western preference for moving on to houses as you age. Ephemeral youth density is not a paradigm shift at all.
Yes. And Compared to Seattle, those aren’t narrow streets, they’re basically a bit like wallingford, but three storeys instead of 1-2. Basically, if you spread density wide enough, you get something very livable.
London proves this in a greater way.
Along with Paris
I would love it if my yuppie family could live in a home like that in or near the city. But it isn’t really an option since they don’t exist.
From the Redmond article …
“Just 26 percent of Redmond’s massive workforce live there. Everybody else is commuting from somewhere else. Is it any wonder the traffic is such a nightmare? But take heart — light rail to Redmond should be up and running in a mere decade.”
So 58,000 people commute into Redmond from other cities every day. 40,000 of those work at Microsoft’s Redmond campus. Does anyone know how many people are expected to ride East Link every day?
And I have to ask… How many of those 40,000 Microsoft “commuters” actually live just a few blocks away from the main campus across the city line in Bellevue?
Yawn, who cares about the impacts of a single campus which has its own transit center, freeway exit, future light rail station, and company shuttles? It’s already doing most of the right things, unlike an obvious other employer that’s an airplane manufacturer. Subtract out the Microsoft factor, and what’s the remaining inflow of Redmond workers, outflow of Redmond residents, and traffic impacts in downtown Redmond and other parts of Redmond?
DOT now has about 40 live traffic cams.
Go to:
http://web6.seattle.gov/travelers/
Select Live Traffic Video on the lower right and pick a neighborhood.
Make it 20.
Washington State Passes Neighborhood Safe Streets Bill
http://streetsblog.net/2013/05/30/washington-state-passes-neighborhood-safe-streets-bill/
Leading Places for Percent Change in Daytime Population has stats for other cities. I’m surprised that Chicago which is known for it’s commuter rail has only a 4.9% increase. High priced San Francisco with it’s BART system only 21.7% compared to Seattle’s 28.4% (same as Denver). A general trend seems to be that the mega cities with the worst reputation for public transit are most reliant on a workforce from bedroom communities; Houston 20.6% and Dallas 19.1%. Also interesting is the “bedroom communities” of Bellevue 40% and Redmond 100+% are more accurately described as Jobs Centers. But San Jose has the largest net outflow at -5.6%. Then there’s Tukwila; +136.2%. But that’s actually “normal” for cities in the 15-25k population range.
Rats, for some reason the link didn’t work, Leading Places for Percent Change in Daytime Population, by Size.
The size of the city also plays a role. Chicago is four times as large as Seattle so more of the workforce lives in the city. Seattle has an unusually high percentage of transit riders because the lakes and waterways are right in the middle of the major traffic patterns and cause an unusual number of bottlenecks and push people further apart than they’d otherwise be. Also, downtown Seattle has an unusually large percentage of the jobs in the metro area, even though Boeing and Microsoft aren’t there.
San Jose’s position is probably a quirk. It has 90% of Silicon Valley’s residents but most of the employers are just over the border in adjacent suburbs, and there’s a huge pull of commuters to San Francisco.
I don’t know about bad transit being correlated with more worker inflow, but bad transit suggests the city is probably low density and doesn’t have enough housing for its workers, so they have to live in bedroom communities.
Also, you have to be a little careful with numbers like this because so much depends on how localities choose to organize themseleves. Upthread, someone pointed out that there are probably a fair number of Microsoft employees in that influx who walk (or at least could do so) from across the street in Bellevue. In Houston, there are all the pocket villages — places like West University that are mostly residential but reasonably close to downtown.
The problem here is there is not fixed definition for the geographical boundary of a “City”.
Hence it can be inclusive or not of a large metropolitan area. And typically what we call cities are defined by pre-car architecture and design (hence density).
For example if we decided to make cities based not on 19th century apartment buildings and the range of horse drawn carriages, but on the typical commutes for cars, you could consider say Bellevue, Redmond, Issaquah — all part of one 21st century “city” — circulating its population using Personal Transit (the car).
Does anyone know wht the new fall south sounder times will be? I heard there will be new reverse trips. Is this true?
There is a draft schedule in the SIP.
Steinbruck is on the money. There really isn’t a huge need for densification given what’s happening to local rents – we’re one of the most affordable cities in the country for renters. Even more so than Atlanta – and the trend is going in renters favor. I was stunned too – but check it out over at The Atlantic. http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/06/most-expensive-housing-markets-are-becoming-even-less-affordable/5818/
The article is wrong. Seattle is one of the most expensive areas in the country, and the ten or so more expensive cities are generally larger and/or have much better transit. Rents in Seattle flattened in 2008 and may have sporatically dropped, but they started rising again in 2011. My (Capitol Hill) rent increased in 2012 and 2013, and I assume it will rise again in 2014. I doubt rents are dropping anywhere in Seattle, although they may be flat in some outlying places. A lot of new buildings will open over the next five years, and that may stabilize rents or slow the increase, but it’s unlikely to lower rents. It may even increase them if landlords are successful at convincing people that proximity to new buildings makes the whole neighborhood more desirable.
This makes sense to me, at least anecdotally–I was literally just now looking at apartment rents in Atlanta, and prices for 1 bedroom units in Midtown/Arts Center in newer high-rise construction run from about $1200 (the area is more or less where SLU is in relationship to downtown). You can’t find similar units near downtown Seattle in comparable construction at anything near that. In the northern suburbs near Perimeter Center or Sandy Springs (similar to Lynnwood) the price is about $200 less per unit; I would have expected a bigger drop. (Caveat–I was only looking at areas near MARTA stations; if you want to see how little development there is around those stations play around on Google Earth. Buckhead and Lindbergh have some TOD, but very little elsewhere.)
We tend to compare Seattle with the handful of more expensive cities: New York, DC, Boston, San Francisco, and San Jose. (Chicago is around par, as is LA outside the glamorous districts.) But the vast majority of American cities and where people live are cheaper than these, and have much worse transit or walkability. They have to be cheaper because the average American salary can’t afford to live in Pugetopolis. For instance, Dallas is roughly like Seattle but you can get a large house in an adjacent suburb for under $200K. Here you’d have to go to Lakewood or Everett to find a similar house. The Atlanta area is even more affordable than Dallas, I gather.
Housing price correlates to the quality of transit and walkability for the most part, which is interesting because people say they don’t take transit into consideration when they choose a house (and in fact they don’t), but house prices behave as if transit were a major factor. Silicon Valley is the obvious exception, with high prices and pathetic transit, but that’s because it has a mountainful of millionaires bidding up prices and demanding McMansions.
Yes, but our salaries are way above average middle America Heartland. The stats showing the huge percentage that commute into Seattle attest to how cheap housing is available all around the city; unlike SF where you’d be looking at a 3 hour commute to match the 1 hour commute you can enjoy here while living on acreage and having a horse farm. Seattle ranks in virtually every study I’ve seen just about equal to it’s ranking in size. It’s not an outlier like Honolulu. We’ve got it really damn good and that’s why there is an upward pressure on pricing. People everywhere else realize how good we got it and move here pushing up prices. Don’t like it; join the Lesser Seattle Society and stop the Californication of Puget Sound. Hint, impress on anyone you know thinking about moving here how it rains all the time!.
From the Arbor Heights meeting link: http://wwrhah.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/metro-at-wwrhah-june-4-2013-meeting-notes/
There are a lot of bus routes now terminating at Westwood Village. Is there a plan for any of those routes to connect back to White Center?
1a Answer: They have actually kept a number of routes back into White Center, and two routes still connect WWV to White Center directly, such as the 120, which also connects Delridge, Westwood Village, and White Center now.
From several routes serving the heart of White Center down to only a few, catching the 120 and transferring to Westwood Village is the only solution to riding those lost routes. I like how a question was asked if any routes would be returning to serve White Center, yet the answer is only a thinly veiled suggestion to catch the 120.
Soon, the ST 560 will be routed away from White Center over to Westwood Village, removing yet another route that used to serve White Center directly.
The thing is, the few routes remaining are significantly more useful than any one of the hodgepodge of routes that were there before. It’s misleading just to look at the number of routes.
There used to be seven different routes to downtown from White Center, all slow, and all running hourly (except that the very slowest were half-hourly). Now there is just one, but it’s frequent and faster than any of the previous ones. The east-west connection, on the 60, is also more frequent now than it was before. The only connection that’s really missing is the old 136/137/23 connection to Sodo — for that, you have to walk 3/8 of a mile west and catch the 131.
The link has a lot of good information about Metro on a wide variety of topics. Much of it is West Seattle-specific of couse: the 21 and future 22, overcrowding on the C, 45% ridership increase on RapidRide and feeders, Westwood Village as an emerging transit hub like Northgate, the wall of layover buses at Westwood Village, partial restoration in Arbor Heights. But some of it is relevant to all Metro riders: the cost of fare evasion, the impending budget cuts, what a 1.5% MVET would gain, the feasability of expanding Access for low-ridership areas and for disabled/poor riders downtown, whether Metro has learned anything from Swift (Community Transit’s BRT), etc.
Yesterday I went on a Seattle Transit Hikers walk from the Issaquah Highlands P&R to exit 20 (Preston) and the Tradition Plateau trail to downtown Issaquah. The forest trails were pleasant and quite Cascades-like, and part of the Tradition Plateau trail is especially well-built, but what I want to focus on here is the Issaquah Highlands, which is surprisingly well-done.
I’d never been to the Highlands, but it starts with a quasi-expressway from I-90 that turns into a regular street. The first 218 stop is Swedish hospital and a neighboring apartment building. The second stop is the P&R, which is surrounded by a surprisingly large number of TOD-like apartments, under-construction commercial blocks, townhouses, single-family houses, and trails. All the non-SF buildings come up to the sidewalk without setbacks, giving it a neighborhood-y feel. The townhouses look more like East Coast brownstones than anything I’ve seen in this area. (Not the architectural features, but the size and shape and pedestrian accessibility.) The whole area is walkable, even the single-family houses. There are no corner stores and some streets are 4-lane one-way, but it’s better than most suburban developments. And it’s large: four times the size of The Landing or other New Urban developments around. I asked what’s going into the commercial blocks and was told a Safeway complex, but it looks more like a shopping mall and satellite businesses.
In short, the Issaquah Highlands is the right kind of development in the wrong place. This is what we should be building in closer-in places like Southcenter, Kent, Renton, Burien, Shoreline, Aurora Avenue, and Pacific Highway. Much larger (not necessarily taller) walkable neighborhoods. I’d urge STBers to take a walk around the Highlands and see what they think.
Downtown Issaquah has a cute, well-preserved look, at least parts of it. Issaquah is doing several things right in the Highlands layout, downtown restoration, and the multitude of trails. Of course, it’s not doing everything right. I suspect that the Highlands greenfield development exists in order to keep that development out of downtown Issaquah.
It was also my first time on the 218, and perhaps my 10th time ever on a peak-only route. The 218 starts in the DSTT and stops only at Rainier station, the Highlands Swedish stop, and the P&R. It was full, with three standees. The 554 takes an hour for this trip, while the 218 takes 30 minutes. (In other words, while I’m getting off at the Highlands P&R, DP is halfway to Ballard.) At first I felt a bit dirty taking an evil peak express, but I reasoned I had to look at the route, see how full it is, etc. I can see this route as worthwhile, but with a premium fare and not displacing an all-day route in the DSTT. (Although I did pay a premium fare, if the $3.00 two-zone fare qualifies as premium.)
That big open flat area to your right as you arrive on the lower plateau was originally slated to be a shopping complex/mall; I don’t know if it’s still planned to be the same. My old firm received permits for a hotel project up there that I was PM on in late 2008 (nice timing); it never got built save a large retaining wall built into the hillside. You can see it directly to your right as you drive across the lower plateau towards the transit center.
There is no shame in peak-hour expresses if there is demand for them. That’s particularly true when they serve areas, like Issaquah Highlands, that are set up for (at least some) people to walk to transit.
At some point in the next couple of years my wife and I are going to buy a house. We’re pretty much only considering Seattle neighborhoods… except that we’re also looking at closer-in parts of Issaquah Highlands, because it gets us closer to our outdoor hobbies while the transit to downtown is still convenient and the local area is quite walkable and bikeable. If more sprawl development were organized the way the Highlands is then sprawl wouldn’t seem as horrible.
But you still have the capital costs of a bus that’s useful for (if you are lucky) 4 trips a day, and the operating costs of transporting air out to the suburbs in the morning and back to the center in the evening.
DP, I misremembered the walking time from the Summit area to Westlake station. From Bellevue & Thomas it’s 20 minutes. From Bellevue & Roy (the 47’s terminus) it’s 30 minutes. I lived at Thomas for five years and was mildly annoyed at the infrequent 14, which caused me to walk more times than I cared to, and was a significant factor in my moving closer to Pine Street. Roy was where I looked at an apartment, which was nice and unusually large (900 sq ft), but the half-hour isolation was too much to contemplate. (It would be more acceptable when Capitol Hill station opens, but that was too many years away.)
Ironically, coming from Columbia City to Thomas Street in the evening, it was faster to take Link including the 20-minue walk than to take the 8.
This is bound to irritate almost everyone but me:
The French Hydrogen Fuel Cell Bicycle !!
http://www.tgdaily.com/sustainability-features/72035-hydrogen-fuel-cells-eyed-for-electric-bikes
Cross Kirkland Corridor Planning Day Saturday, June 8:
Be there or be square ;-)
How about something like this bridge for the bike / ped bridge being thought of near Northgate?