Month: June 2013

Representatives from various Eastside city governments were on hand Wednesday night for a “transportation town hall” at Bellevue City Hall.  I had thought it would be focused on Metro cuts, and, indeed, the Transit Riders Union was out in force.  However it turned out to be a broader effort, designed to drum up support for the various transportation bills floating around in Olympia.  I didn’t stay for the whole thing, since it seemed to consist of softball questions about the need for more revenue.

Fred Jarrett (King County), Jane Hague (King County), Rod Dembowski (King County), Don Gerend (Sammamish), Jennifer Robertson (Bellevue), David Baker (Kenmore) and Bruce Basett (Mercer Island) were on the panel, and several other elected officials were in the audience as well.

All panelists supported a local option for Metro funding.  Big props to Hague and Dembowski for keeping the focus on buses.  Cheers to Jarrett and Baker for emphasizing the importance of road maintenance.  Jeers to Robertson for pushing I-405 expansion.

I wish there’d been more of a dialogue about the tradeoffs between highway expansion and the maintenance backlog.  If we’re closing one bridge per year in King County, as Jarrett claimed, should we really be adding lane-miles to I-405? Sadly, the question went unanswered.  Or at least no one answered it before I had to leave to catch my bus.

I did, however, get to see some renderings of the new and improved Downtown Bothell, which includes some pretty fantastic pedestrian-oriented redevelopment projects.

Were you there? What did you think? Let us know in the comments!

Thanks to a State Regional Mobility Grant to Intercity Transit, six round trips of ST Route 592 will continue to the (Downtown) Olympia Transit Center with an additional stop at the Hawks Prairie P&R in Lacey. According to Meg Kester of Intercity Transit, this is a peak-direction-only service. The northbound trips will depart every half hour between 4:12 and 6:42am, arriving in Seattle between 6:10 and 8:46. The southbound trips will leave Seattle between 3:03 and 5:33pm and arrive between 5:23 and 7:53pm. (See the full timetable here.) Service starts September 30, assuming the ST board approves it in July.

IT will also establish the Route 609 “Olympia Express” between Lakewood and Tumwater via Olympia, providing bidirectional peak-hour service. The timetable for the 10 round trips is here.

Kester added that the $530,000 grant is covering 80% of the two-year cost of the service, with IT picking up the rest. She added that IT is “hopeful” that there will be a renewal in two years. You can comment on this service change here.

King County Metro’s Low Income Fare Options Advisory Committee met for the last time in person Wednesday. They are still wordsmithing the document that will be transmitted to the County Executive and the County Council, but plan to have that finalized document sent by July 1st.

The committee will be recommending 200% of the federal poverty level as the breakpoint for qualifying for a low-income fare, mostly because several federal programs use that threshold, and the documentation from those other programs would enable Metro to stay out of the business of income determination. (For those unfamiliar with the federal poverty level, it is based on a combination of income and family size.)

The committee still wants Metro to do some direct income determination for riders who are either ineligible or uninterested in those other programs for reasons unrelated to income, but did not appear to have a plan for how to limit income determination to just those who fall in that category. Metro General Manager Kevin Desmond expressed discomfort with the idea of putting Metro in that position.

The committee appears ready to recommend the farebox as one of the more immediate sources of revenue to fund a low-income fare program. Indeed, they could not agree to recommend any other source. But they also don’t want Metro to become the primary funder, much less the sole funder. Still, the committee seems willing to move forward with a program funded solely be farebox revenue if no other revenue sources can be found. The idea of the farebox approach is that as fares increase, a portion of each increase would go to funding the low-income fare program. Metro could raise fares more steeply than originally planned, raising more money to save more service while offsetting the increase for those least able to afford it with a robust low-income fare program.

Kate Joncas, representing the Downtown Seattle Association, raised a troubling question: How does someone who earns 205% of the federal poverty level feel about having his or her fare substantially increased in order to fund a discount for someone earning 197% of the federal poverty level. Nobody on the committee had a good answer. After the jump, I’ll try to give a good answer, from the vantage point of someone earning over 201% of the federal poverty level.

Continue reading “We Are the 201%”

Much of the yesterday’s excitement was about what the city plans to do with unused money from the Spokane Street Viaduct project, a Bridging the Gap project which came in under budget, but there was another, similar announcement regarding a separate pot of transit-only BTG money:

Mayor Mike McGinn and King County Metro General Manager Kevin Desmond today announced the City of Seattle is buying more than 5,000 hours of added service per year through early 2016 on nine high ridership bus routes in Seattle. Using $750,000 in savings from the voter-approved Bridging the Gap Levy, the City of Seattle is able to help Metro increase evening and weekend frequency on high-ridership routes from 30 to 15 minutes or from 60 to 30 minutes.

“This one-time savings will help us make transit a better option for more people,” said McGinn. “But there isn’t any more money where that came from. I stand with mayors from across King County and Washington State to urge our legislature to pass the local transportation funding package we proposed to them in February, which includes revenue options that will help prevent a devastating 17% cut to Metro bus service.”

“It’s great to be able to add this service at a time of ridership growth,” Desmond said. “Every bit counts, but solutions are still needed to sustain service for all of Metro’s riders.” As temporary funding expires and reserves are exhausted, Metro faces a $75 million annual shortfall.

The routes benefiting from this temporary boost in service are the 5, 10, 21, 40, 41, 48, 49 and 120. Presumably the hope for when this money runs out in two years is either that Metro will be on a firmer financial footing, and able to fund these trips by itself, or that another BTG package will be authorized by Seattle voters. A separate, permanent 5,000 hour boost in service will come from Metro, paid for by Transit Now. As I understand it, each jurisdiction that has made significant investments in transit speed and reliability for a RapidRide route gets a bonus of that size, which they are allowed to spend on core routes of their choice. SDOT has evidently chosen to spend it on the E Line, which will need all the help it can get.

As the news release notes, the quantity of service hours purchased here is not enormous, certainly not compared to Metro’s structural budget shortfall. 5,000 is hours is not adequate to launch a new service, or a major expansion in frequency on an old service, but it’s enough to pay for a handful of new trips per day on a handful of routes. As part of the Urban Village Transit Network plan, SDOT has a policy goal of achieving, on weekdays, 18 hours of 30-minute service, and 12 hours of 15-minute service on UVTN routes; SDOT is using this money to fill gaps in the schedules of Seattle’s highest ridership routes, to bring them closer to that goal.

More after the jump. Continue reading “Seattle Adding Service on Nine Core Routes”

Great news from Metro yesterday: the agency has selected a builder for its next big batch of trolleybuses, and the 60′ coaches will have three doors. From the news release:

King County Metro Transit announced today it will replace its aging trolley fleet with new all-electric New Flyer coaches that will take about one-third less energy to power. Metro is second only to San Francisco in having the largest electric trolley fleet in the nation.

Metro plans to initially purchase up to 141 trolley buses – about 10 percent of its entire fleet – under a contract with New Flyer totaling up to $164 million. Future bus purchases will be dependent on fleet needs and whether Metro is able to avoid service reductions in the coming years.

“Electric trolleys have a lot of fans, and I’m one of them,” said King County Executive Dow Constantine. “They’re quiet, they run clean, they’re part of our transit heritage, and studies confirm they’re the best for moving riders in our very hilly and dense urban environment.”

[…]

The trolleys also will be able to operate off-wire on battery power for short distances – a feature that will allow the bus to reliably reroute around collisions without calling for a Metro push truck. It also will reduce the need to substitute diesel buses when construction affects routes along electric bus corridors.

The new buses will have low floors for easier and faster boarding and exiting. They include an updated system to secure wheelchairs, and the 60 foot buses will have three doors, air conditioning and the ability to kneel the full length of the bus.

The selection of New Flyer Industries is not a particular surprise: NFI is the dominant seller of transit buses in the US, and (I believe) the only domestic manufacturer with an off-the-shelf trolleybus propulsion system. While I’ve heard off-the-record that three-doors and RapidRide-style interiors (less seating, more standing room and wider aisles) were favored for 60′ coaches, official confirmation that those coaches will have three doors — a feature whose importance is hard to overstate — is a relief. I have a question in about interior layout, and also about air conditioning, which the wording of this press release seems to suggest may only be featured on 60′ coaches.

The new trolleybuses will start to arrive in 2015, and they can’t come soon enough for me. The Breda articulated trolleybuses are 23 years old already, and they look, sound and smell every day of it. I’m convinced that a certain amount of American anti-bus prejudice, particularly in the west, arises quite reasonably from the fact that so many transit agencies operate so many terribly-designed bus routes with awful rolling stock; whereas rail systems tend to be newer, and mostly built out in straight lines with low-floor vehicles and sensible stop spacing, so they don’t provide the experience of sluggishness and decrepitude that is the unfortunate hallmark of many bus routes. Both aspects of this experience are completely fixable, and they have to be fixed if we’re to stand a chance of moving the needle on transit ridership and Greenhouse Gas emissions.

UPDATE: After the jump, renderings of the new buses. Also, all models (40′ and 60′) will have A/C. Continue reading “Metro Chooses New Flyer for New Trolleybuses”

Last May STB reported on an extensive successful theft of copper wire from the Link guideway between Rainier Beach and Tukwila. King 5 is now reporting that two suspects are in custody have been identified:

Prosecutors say DNA left on Gatorade bottles lead them to two men suspected in the largest known metal theft in Washington state.

Donald Howard Turpin, 54, and Lee Russell Skelly, 44, are accused of stealing 4.3 miles of copper wiring from the Sound Transit Light Rail System between November 2010 through August of 2011.
“Stealing miles of copper wire must be hard work, because it was the defendants’ Gatorade bottles left at the scene which ultimately was their undoing,” said King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg.

Prosecutors say the two men allegedly committed the theft by entering maintenance hatches in a tunnel that runs below the light rail between the SeaTac and Rainer Beach Rail Stations. They would enter at night and remove the copper wire. They allegedly dropped the wire through air vents and then drove along the line, picking up the cut wire at various locations.

Evidence gathered by King County Sheriff’s Detectives shows that the men allegedly took the wire to various scrap metal recycling businesses in King County and sold the metal. Turpin had a state issued business license which would allow him to scrap the metal with little if any scrutiny by the buyers.

Both men are charged with Burglary Second Degree and Trafficking in Stolen Property First Degree. Turpin is also charged with Theft First Degree with a special sentencing aggravator.

If convicted as charged, the sentence range for Turpin is 63 to 84 months in prison. Skelly faces up to one year in jail.

UPDATE: The original version of this article erroneously claimed the suspects were in custody. According to KOMO, Turpin is at large and wanted on a $50,000 warrant, while Skelly is scheduled to appear in court on June 27. We regret the error.

Today we have news from City Council that they’re willing to agree to the Mayor’s proposal to accelerate the UW-SLU High Capacity Transit (HCT) Study, the precursor to extending the streetcar (or potentially BRT, hence the study) to UW, from 2014 to this year. Note that this accleration also comes with a ton of other safety and repaving projects.

In context, right now design is under way for the downtown streetcar connector. The Seattle Times keeps calling this a “third streetcar line”, but as usual from them, that’s nonsense – it’s really taking our two streetcar lines and turning them into one! With a single line in place for one-seat rides from Amtrak, Pioneer Square, the ferry terminal (and future new waterfront), and Pike Place Market to South Lake Union, planning to extend that line to UW makes a lot of sense to me – and to the city council. As Publicola notes in their very inaccurate story*, council proposes a modification to the SLU-UW study – they want the study to consider short term improvements, especially on Eastlake Ave., in addition to HCT.

On the other side of the coin, councilmembers aren’t agreeing to fund the ship canal crossing study immediately. This would consider all the options between Fremont and Ballard: access for streetcar and light rail as well as safe bicycle and pedestrian routes, ranging from a new bridge, to a new tunnel, to reconfiguration of existing bridges, and combinations of options.

However, council staff tells me that council members realize that the ship canal crossing study is necessary for Bridging the Gap and Sound Transit 3. I’m hearing it may be funded in the 2014 budget, so it will still be complete early enough for the expected Bridging the Gap renewal in 2015.

Wednesday morning is a great opportunity to both thank council members for the UW-SLU study acceleration as well as make clear our support for the ship canal crossing. Please consider joining us in city council chambers at 9:00 am (to sign up for 9:30 am comments), at Seattle City Hall, 600 4th Ave. These things are practically STB meetups – I’ll be there at 8:30, and you can expect to meet several other regulars!

* There are a lot of issues with Publicola’s story. First, the headline states that the light rail study is scuttled, which is very incorrect (UPDATE: fixed that one). It also references the ship canal crossing study as a “new bridge”, when that’s only one of several options that could come from the work. It says the UW-SLU study is “scaled back”, when it’s actually being added to and accelerated. As noted in the piece, Publicola opposes SLU-UW rail.

Sound Transit did something really cool at their last board meeting. They updated their System Access Policy. Woo-hoo!

Seriously, though, this is kind of a big deal.  For the first decade or so of its existence, Sound Transit has muddled through without much of a formal policy about how to provide access to trains and buses. This is in part because the City of Seattle discourages parking lots at light rail stations*, and in part because land wasn’t really at a premium in many of the suburban stations where ST operates. So there hasn’t really been much to think about.**

But as Link expands outside the city limits and Sounder ridership grows, the agency needed a more formal way to think about how to balance the goals of providing access, maximizing ridership and responsible development.  The recent debates about parking at Northgate,  Mercer Island and Edmonds show how difficult such a balance can be to achieve.

Which brings us to the new policy. Currently, the agency has been building free parking lots at certain stations and not really enforcing whether or not the cars in those lots were transit riders.  Going forward, the agency will adopt a more comprehensive approach to station access, including:

• Enforcement of transit-only parking at the stations
• Potential parking fees (which would require specific board approval)
• Consideration of pedestrian, bicycle, and transit access
• Consideration of the total cost of ownership of its facilities

All good stuff. You can dig deep on the relevant documents here and here (.pdf). You should also check out Richard Conlin’s excellent blog post on the subject:

Current Sound Transit policy has emphasized providing free and open parking at stations with limited enforcement. Parking is a significant investment, is constrained in urban areas and has limited compatibility with dense development around stations. Providing free parking also encourages riders to use the private automobile to access light rail. While the private automobile has a role in accessing transit stations, particularly for those who are not well served by alternatives or have physical limitations, the Board agreed that this role must be only part of an access strategy, and that access investments should be developed based on how they meet ridership and community goals.

Obviously there will still be messy debates over the particulars of access to each station, but a formal policy from Sound Transit on the issue is a necessary first step.

*Tukwila / International Boulevard Station, one of two Link stations outside the city limits, has a parking lot. SeaTac Station is a unique case. 

** Though perhaps a more thoughtful access policy would have resulted in better intermodal connections at Mt. Baker?

This may be a good video for any visitors planning to use Link:

There is an annual political struggle in Washington, D.C. to keep the tax deduction for employer transit benefits at the same level as the deduction for parking benefits. Before 2008 it was (perversely) about half the size, and for most of the time since it’s been at the same level thanks to series of temporary Congressional acts. Most recently, the January “fiscal cliff” deal equalized transit and parking maximum benefits at $230 per month through the end of this year.

Fortunately, Congress may act to make the equalization permanent (now at $245/month) through the “Commuter Parity Act”:

The Commuter Parity Act would help make the transit benefit on par with what drivers receive in pre-tax parking benefits for the long term, according to transit advocates…

The bill was introduced in the House by Reps. Michael G. Grimm (R-N.Y), James P. McGovern (D-Mass.), Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), and Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.). Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced it in the Senate.

It’s not surprising that New York congressmen would lead this, as their commuter rail riders can easily pay this in a month. Here in Washington, it’s ferry commuters and a few ST long-haulers that would benefit. I think there’s a strong public policy case to equalize them by bringing the parking benefit down rather than the transit one up, but the important thing is that we not explicitly encourage people driving to work any more than we already do.

The bill is H.R. 2288. In the Senate it is known as the “Commuter Benefits Equity Act” (S. 1116). The bills are in the Ways and Means and Finance Committees, respectively.