Month: December 2013

From all of us here at STB, we’d like to thank you for reading us in 2013. Over the past year we’ve had 665 posts, nearly 40,000 comments, and over 800,000 pageviews.  Our top ten posts in 2013 accounted for 10% of our web traffic on their own. Here’s a look at them:

Most Read:

• #1. Zipcar vs. Car2Go (2/12): My comparative breakdown of the revenue models and amenities for our two carsharing services was quite durably popular throughout the year, thanks largely to SEO. (23,000 views)
• #2. Your Bus, Much More Often (8/19): Nothing gets people as excited as dreaming about better transit options, whether rail or bus. David’s exhaustively detailed restructure proposals showed us how much more we can get out of our system. (12,000 views)
• #3. PSA: Standing the Right Way (12/04): David’s post on rider etiquette hit quite a nerve on STB, on Slog, and on Twitter. (9,100 views)
• #4. Sound Transit Refines Ballard Options (12/06): My description of the Tier II alternatives for Ballard rail. People love talking about subways, especially in this corridor! (6,400 views)
• #5. Alternatives for Ballard (06/27): Ben’s writeup of the Tier 1 Options. (4,900 views)
• #6. Option 9 (07/01): Ben proposed a hybrid 9th option that likely helped develop the mostly-subway Corridor 5 (Tier 1) into the all-subway Corridor D (Tier 2). (4,200 views)
• #7. Yes, Sound Transit and and Seattle Are Studying Subway to Ballard (03/12): Ben writing that the game isn’t fixed in favor of streetcars and that a full subway is possible. Sensing a theme here? People are clamoring for Ballard rail. (3,900 views)
• #8. Explainer: 2014 Metro Budget Cuts (05/02): Frank gave a great, non-wonky explanation of Metro’s budget predicament. (3,800 views)
• #9. A Better Ship Canal Crossing (04/12): Bruce’s exposition of what has become almost common wisdom, that a new Ship Canal bridge should be primarily for cars so that the current Fremont bridge can prioritize bikes and transit.  (3,600 views)
• #10. We Shouldn’t Build More Park & Rides (06/25): Ben writing against Park and Rides, touching off a debate that exposes strong faultlines within the pro-transit community. (3,600 views)

Most Commented:

• #1. Your Bus, Much More Often (8/19). (296 Comments)
• #2. Alternatives for Ballard (06/27) (238 Comments)
• #3. Sound Transit Refines Ballard Options (12/06) (229 Comments)
• #4. Waiting for Paris (226 Comments): A familiar quagmire of comments discussing affordability, density, and the causative/correlative relationship between them.
• #5. Option 9 (07/01) (221 Comments)
  
• #6. News Roundup: Openings (02/21) (221 Comments): A news roundup that evolved (devolved?) into extended debate over the merits of a new Fremont bridge and the etiquette of eating on transit.
• #7. Metro Cuts Posted (11/07)  (201 Comments): Bruce describes the bloodbath of the looming 600k hour cuts.
• #8. Mercer Island, I-90 Tolls for Thee (02/04) (195 Comments): Frank’s post elicited predictable and strongly felt opinions about privilege, subsidy, and fairness.
• #9. Build a Ballard Subway (12/13) (191 Comments): An all-subway route to Ballard is now on paper, and people get really excited. (Ben)
• #10. Talking Sense About Amtrak (04/18) (180 Comments): Bruce goes after everyone’s favorite indulgence — long-distance Amtrak routes — and (surprise!) passions run high.

Happy New Year to our community, and we look forward to the next few exciting years!

It can be hard to remember now, but Seattle Transit Blog took a while to back candidate Mike McGinn in the general election. Our first choice, incumbent Greg Nickels, received our primary endorsement based mostly on his historic personal achievements in building rail and passing new rail plans. That was in spite of our near total agreement on policy with challenger Mike McGinn, in particular a unique commitment to the idea that car access should not have absolute primacy in a city. We went with the candidate who had a solid record of effectiveness.

McGinn detractors might claim that the call was a good one; after all, Mr. McGinn’s efforts did not cause Seattle elites to seriously reconsider their commitment to an irresponsible* deep-bore tunnel. There are no new big transportation investments coming out of his time in office. The closest Seattle came was a 10-year, $60 vehicle license fee, which would have raised $200m. $100m of that would have gone to speed and reliability improvements for Seattle’s most important bus routes. Much smaller segments of funding would have gone to street repairs, bike infrastructure, pedestrian improvements, and streetcar planning. After it gained unanimous support of the Council, voters rejected this almost boringly worthwhile proposal.

However, just getting to the point of a ballot measure required significant achievements. People are quick to dismiss plans, but in fact by 2009 the region had nearly exhausted its actionable ones. Seattle’s Transit Master Plan dated to 2005 and still assumed construction of the Monorail; Sound Transit had finally realized its next-stage construction plan and had no firm idea of where to go next; and the state-of-the-art in bicycle infrastructure had evolved considerably.

The McGinn administration started and finished new bicycle and transit master plans that provide an excellent list of projects that the Murray administration would be wise to use as a guide. More importantly, by continuously advocating for rail to Ballard, by city-only means if necessary, McGinn encouraged the Sound Transit Board to accelerate its own planning in time for public vote as early as 2016 — at least four, and probably eight, years earlier than originally envisioned. Of course, you can’t ride a plan, and it’s hard to predict how those plans will evolve, die, or thrive in the future.

A considerably brighter result occurred on the land use front. Mike McGinn was a consistent force for turning as few people away from Seattle as possible, something that can only be done by building more units. More concretely, the city reduced or eliminated parking requirements ($) along frequent transit corridors, striking a blow for density, transit, economic efficiency, housing affordability, the environment, the pedestrian experience, and freedom all at once.

Although the big package of transportation improvements failed, many bus and bike improvements did happen on McGinn’s watch. The new Dexter Avenue is a revolutionary street design for Seattle. Road diets improved safety. Transit speed and reliability (bus bulbs, RTIS, TSP, queue jumps) on Rainier and Market/45th helped riders. Denny Way will get new trolley wire. RapidRide came with numerous bus stop improvements, signal priority, and miles of new bus lanes on Seattle’s most crowded roads. Except for RapidRide, these were all funded either directly by SDOT (including Nickels era Bridging the Gap funds) or through grants won by SDOT. More importantly, none of them could have happened without a sympathetic administration.

There’s a certain unfairness to blaming the results of a democratic system on specific elected officials. Morally, the failure to implement a transit plan lies with the Council that delayed and watered it down before voting for it, the people that campaigned against it, and ultimately the voters that rejected it. It doesn’t lie with a Mayor to whom we are grateful for taking the correct side of almost every argument he was in.

However, as our initial endorsement four years ago indicated, we judge our elected leaders on results, no matter who they have to run over to get there. Mike McGinn achieved more than most people will appreciate; although positive and lasting, the gains are subtle: people who can live in Seattle who otherwise wouldn’t, buses that now show up on time that otherwise wouldn’t, bicyclists and pedestrians not killed by speeding cars. Ironically, a man who came to office as a revolutionary will have an evolutionary legacy.

* Irresponsible environmentally, fiscally, and in light of declining vehicle miles traveled.

Matt Yglesias has hit exactly on what I was feeling when I read the city’s rideshare regulation proposal.

The regulatory issue around Uber is whether the rules governing rides-for-hire need to be drastically different than the rules governing driving-yourself-around.

…

And my answer is always the same: Of course there are significant public safety concerns about people driving vans. But the concerns are essentially the same whether it’s a delivery van or a dollar van. You need rules about what’s an acceptable vehicle, who’s an acceptable driver, and what’s an acceptable way to pilot the vehicle.

But you don’t need rules that specifically discriminate against rides for hire. The right way to think about this panoply of rules is that it’s all part of a regulatory structure designed to make single passenger automobile traffic and one-car-per-adult the normative American lifestyles. Anything you want to do around driving yourself is presumptively legal, and anything you want to do around hiring someone else to drive you is presumptively illegal. That’s a worldview that’s bad for the environment, bad for cities, bad for the poor, bad for many classes of physically impaired people, and all-in-all bad for America. But by all means, regulate cars-for-hire. Just regulate them the same way you regulate the other cars.

People have been talking about rail transit to West Seattle for a very long time.  The second Forward Thrust proposal in 1970 incorporated a rudimentary West Seattle rail line with just two stops: the Alaska Junction and White Center.  Two decades later, the Seattle Monorail Project’s first proposed line, the Green Line, covered Alaska Junction and Morgan Junction with a possible extension to Fauntleroy.  After ignoring West Seattle in the Long Range Plan process that led to the 2007 and 2008 ST2 votes, Sound Transit recently began a corridor study of Downtown-West Seattle-Burien for high-capacity transit; the agency has focused heavily on West Seattle during the current process to update its Long Range Plan.  Seattle Subway’s vision map includes a West Seattle line covering North Delridge, the Alaska Junction, the Morgan Junction, Fauntleroy, Westwood, and White Center.  Rapidly growing transit ridership ($) in the wake of the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project has only added to the idea’s momentum.

But all of these past and present discussions have one thing in common: a lack of specificity.  A West Seattle rail line, it turns out, is easy to draw as abstract points on a blank map and surprisingly difficult to envision at the block-by-block level.  Geography, topography, Seattle’s sharpest class divisions, strange current service patterns, an overall lack of density, and ignorance about most of West Seattle combine to generate a lot of ill-informed, likely ineffective West Seattle transit proposals.  Even among transit planners and advocates, there is a lot of haze in discussions of how to serve West Seattle, and a surprising lack of awareness of what West Seattle residents actually need from transit.

The map above shows how I think a Downtown-West Seattle-Burien Link line should look.  Below the jump, I explain why.  In the process of doing so, I also show why a West Seattle line will be a difficult financial proposition, which may or may not be worth the investment.

Continue reading “How Might West Seattle Link Actually Look?”

A few weeks ago, I attended SDOT’s open house on the proposed Westlake Cycletrack. While most of the public feedback has focused on safety and possible parking loss, transit is also part of the picture, and one of my items of feedback for SDOT was that the project should maintain or improve the speed and reliability of transit service, as Westlake is a major thoroughfare for bus riders to Fremont, Ballard and South Lake Union. I think there is an opportunity to combine improved bike connectivity at the south end of the proposed cycletrack with improved southbound bus service.

Riders at the south end of the off-street portion of the Westlake cycletrack (which will end roughly at Aloha) will need a safe, comfortable, and direct way to connect to bike lanes on 9th Ave, Valley St, and (once Mercer West is complete) a cycletrack to Seattle Center on Mercer St. Currently, there are no bicycle facilities on the street that could provide such a connection. Meanwhile, southbound buses on Westlake in the PM peak are regularly stuck in a southbound traffic jam on the same part of Westlake, caused by all the cars that want to turn onto Mercer to access I-5.

My idea is shown on the map to the right. The section of 9th Ave from where it splits from Westlake, down to Mercer, is wider than the rest of Westlake or 9th. With the removal of one lane of parking, the conversion of another lane of parking to a peak-period bus lane, and a bus-only signal at 9th & Valley, it would be possible to put in a southbound queue jump for buses on the west side of 9th, and a two-way, separated cycletrack on the east side of 9th.

While the queue jump would not completely eliminate transit delays in the PM peak, as traffic can back up to Aloha, it would probably allow each bus to spend one less signal cycle getting though Mercer — a significant time saving. Similarly, the cycletrack would not completely solve all the bike connectivity issues in this area, as there would be an awkward transition to the 9th Ave bike lanes, which, to fix, would probably require a complete rethinking of 9th Ave.

The loss of the current right-turn pocket at 9th & Valley would be mitigated with signs further north on Westlake directing eastbound traffic on Roy St (likely headed to northbound Dexter or Aurora) to use 8th Ave, which is uncongested, and provides good access to Roy St.

This section of Westlake/9th has needed improved bus and bike facilities for years, but construction on the Mercer East project meant the street space in this area was needed for temporary reroutes. Now that Mercer East is over, that road space should be put towards longer-term more optimal uses — transit and biking. The Westlake Cycletrack project provides a great opportunity to do so.

• Dow Constantine is your new Sound Transit Board Chair, replacing Pierce County Exec Pat McCarthy. Paul Roberts (Everett) and Marilyn Strickland (Tacoma) are the new vice chairs.
• 12,000 comments on Sound Transit’s Long Range Plan are largely supportive of further expansion.
• Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) rank-and-file reject contract proposal ($) from Executive Constantine and endorsed by union leadership.
• ST Board approves its 2014 budget.
• Census suggests Seattle has the lowest proportion of “cost-burdened” renters ($) among 50 largest U.S. cities, although people displaced out of the city obviously aren’t in that statistic.
• Car2Go raises prices to 41 cents per minute, up from 38.
• Auburn Mayor looking for Sound Transit to solve his station access problems.
• Video of last month’s RapidRide C robbery. Heroism caught on tape.
• In Vancouver BC, where elites actually care about transit, proponents are horrified that needed Translink expansion could face an additional veto point via a public vote; here in Washington, only new highways are too important to risk at the ballot box, and Olympia won’t take the risk that King County might vote to maintain transit service.

This is an open thread.

Throughput the region, all transit agencies will operate Sunday schedules on Christmas and New Year’s Day. Schedules on the weekend of 28-29 December are unchanged. Aside from that, each agency’s revisions differ.

At Sound Transit, Link, Sounder, and ST Express will operate normally. The one exception is late Link trains for New Year’s celebrations:

Central Link light rail will operate on an extended schedule to accommodate holiday revelers. The last southbound Link train leaves Westlake at 1:13 a.m. and arrives at Sea-Tac Airport by 1:53 a.m. The last complete northbound trip from SeaTac leaves the station at 12:20 a.m. and arrives at Westlake by 12:58 a.m.

Tacoma Link light rail will also run on an extended schedule. The last Tacoma Link train from the Theater District Station will depart at 1:12 a.m. The last train to depart the Tacoma Dome leaves at 1:00 a.m.

From today through January 1st, Metro will be operating its “reduced weekday” and “No UW” schedules. Even on many extremely important routes, an “H” by a trip in the schedule indicates it will not operate for the next 7 days. OneBusAway warns that they do not have this schedule data, so tracking will be unreliable on the reduced weekdays (and today):

Heads up. Because of the holidays and reduced bus service, OBA info will not be reliable for Sound Transit and KCMetro routes Dec. 26 – 31.

— OBA Puget Sound (@oba_pugetsound) December 23, 2013

Community Transit has canceled most 400- and 800-series commuter buses on December 24th and 31st. The 402, 413, 421, and 855 will the only CT buses that serve Seattle on those two days. Local buses are operating normally.

Pierce Transit is running normal service.

I can certainly understand the rage that the Seattle Council inspired by threatening to severely restrict, if not strangle altogether, a ridesharing option that many people find valuable. However, the problem is not that ridesharing rules will be aligned with conventional taxi rules; instead, the problem is that existing taxi rules are terrible.

The ridesharing proposal actually consists of two components: “safety” regulations that enforce minimum standards for insurance, maintenance, and so on; and a limit on size of the ridesharing fleet, hours driven, etc. Although no set of rules is perfect, there are enough information asymmetries that the case for some health-and-safety regulation is strong.

What’s indefensible is the limits on supply, which are a recipe for both high prices and the shortages and poor service that Andrew experienced. According to a report in The Stranger earlier this year, “The city limits the number of taxi licenses in order to maintain a ‘competitive, safe, fair, and viable’ industry… ‘The concern is if you flood the market with too many cabs, no one will make a living.”

What’s actually keeping taxi drivers from making a living is having to pay a rentier class for the right to drive a cab.  It is the opposite of the “competitive” and “fair” industry the city desires, and completely orthogonal to whether or not it is “safe.” Unfortunately, the decades under the current system means that someone is going to take a hit to make the system better.

If we simply eliminate the cap on licenses, then current license holders take the loss. In some cases, these may turn out to be cartoon villain businessmen; in other cases, they’ll be immigrants who started with nothing and dutifully saved until they no longer had to rent a license. The second option to take the hit is taxpayers; the government could simply buy out license holders at current market prices. The third option is to maintain the status quo, which screws consumers and non-license owning operators.

Seattle last experimented with taxi deregulation in 1979 — and the experiment was not a happy one. I would summarize the three core complaints in the report as (i) rates increased, although less than the very high inflation rate at the time; (ii) there were too many taxicabs, clogging up the airport and the approaches to King Street Station; and (iii) opaque prices due to rider ignorance, preventing the price signal from operating properly. The second item obviously is a “good problem to have” from the current perspective, where it’s hard to get a timely cab. The third is exactly the kind of opacity that modern information technology solves, or at least mitigates. It’s time to give price and supply deregulation another shot.

CAPACITY: Downtown Los Angeles from Gensler LA on Vimeo.