[UPDATE: The rezone passed 8-1. Only Bruce Harrell voted against.]
After a process stretching back to at least 2008, and arguably 1999, the Seattle City Council is set to vote on the North Rainier Rezone. The agenda, which begins at 2pm at City Hall, is here. The Planning, Land Use, and Sustainability Committee voted 4-1 to approve this bill, so if one of Councilmembers Sawant, Godden, Rasmussen, or Bagshaw vote for this, and no one flips, this desperately needed upzone of a car-oriented strip-mall district next to a light rail station will finally become law.
The Ballard to University District line is why I got involved in transit advocacy in the first place. In November 2011, I was frustrated with the lack of progress on getting rail to Ballard and created The Ballard Spur Facebook page with a nice graphic made by my friend Cathy Rundell. Within a week I was getting calls from local papers who were intrigued by the idea and wanted more information, a true testament to how starved this town is for high quality transit. Soon I joined forces with Seattle Subway, and with a lot of help, we got the powers that be to get moving on transit relief for our city.
When reviewing options for high capacity transit, Seattle Subway starts by throwing out all the options that are not 100% grade separated because any portion of the line that interacts with traffic subverts the speed, reliability, and utility of the whole line. Unfortunately, that leaves us with only one presented option: Alternative A3, titled “via Wallingford Tunnel.”
A3 is a very good start. It is fully grade separated and very fast. Travel time would be as low as just 6 minutes, ridership as high as 26,000/day, and the cost would be just under $1.4-1.9 Billion. This corridor is the highest performing in cost per rider of any corridor Sound Transit has studied so far.
The Ballard Spur (Alternative “A4”)
A3 does have one glaring weakness, however: it needs more stations. A density map of that part of Seattle shows that several dense areas along the A3 alignment would be ideal for walking, biking, and transit connections if Sound Transit carefully located the stations. A3 offers only one station in the 3.5 miles between Ballard and the University District. This stop spacing is too suburban for an area with many dense neighborhoods and attractions. Closer stops would maximize the utility for both pedestrian access and transfers from other modes. This corridor is dense enough to justify full subway spacing of stops — which would mean full coverage of the corridor by the new line, replacing the need for the slow-as-molasses 44.
The good news is that adding just two stations and moving the Wallingford Station would maximize connections to both attractions and transit.
The third study area staff presented at this month’s Sound Transit Executive Commitee meeting was Kirkland to Issaquah, to go along with Ballard to UW and from UW across 520. As with the 520 options, these plans commit to save costs by using existing right-of-way regardless of its proximity to ridership generators. Assuming some sort of subarea equity continues into ST3, the East King subarea is likely to have enough revenue to do better than what these options suggest.
The two light rail options both travel down from Totem Lake to Downtown Bellevue via the Eastside Rail Corridor, link with East Link at Hospital Station, and run along I-90 from roughly Eastgate to Issaquah. The difference is between downtown Bellevue and Eastgate. Option C1 (9-11,000 riders, $2.0-2.7 billion, 23-28 minutes) uses a mixture of elevated and at-grade track via Richards Rd, while Option C3 (9-11,000 riders, $1.9-2.6 billion, 22-27 minutes) uses I-405 instead of Richards Rd. The concepts have no difference in notional station placement, so C3 would appear to have the nominal advantage.
The bus options, by comparison, aren’t so bad. The exception to that is A2a, which runs in “managed lanes” on the two freeways. At less than $700m, it would attract only 6-7,000 riders. Though fastest of the buses at 23-28 minutes, reliability depends on WSDOT maintaining speeds of 45 mph in the lanes, which they haven’t done in the past.
Sound Transit’s Executive Committee met earlier this month and discussed preliminary analysis of the entire corridor from Ballard to the Eastside via SR 520. Unlike the Ballard/UW segment I discussed on Saturday, continuing to the Eastside involves extraordinary technical challenges, fundamental geometric dilemmas, and relatively mediocre ridership. In a few days we’ll report on the possibilities to connect Kirkland, Bellevue, and Issaquah.
The geometric problem is that no destination obviously dominates. Bellevue is the largest city but is already well served by East Link. Redmond is probably the cheapest to serve, but is also a peculiar place for two light rail lines to converge. Kirkland is the city with no planned high-capacity transit, but it is difficult to serve its dense areas.
There are three light rail options. All of them tunnel on 45th St. after U-District station, run elevated down Montlake Blvd, and elevated for a short run east of the bridge. All other segments are at-grade.
B2b turns north to serve Kirkland to Totem Lake, via the Eastside Rail Corridor. At $2.1-2.9 billion, this most expensive option would generate only 7000-9000 riders and take 18-23 minutes end-to-end. Although it makes sense to use existing right-of-way between stations, it seems this corridor will only make sense if the line deviates into dense neighborhoods near station areas.
C2 and C2a both turn South on the Eastside corridor. C2 then turns east to interline with East Link to Redmond, and is the most cost-effective of these options: $1.9-2.5 billion, 18,000-22,000 riders, and a 25-31 minute travel time. C2a interlines in the other direction and stops at Hospital Station. It’s about the same in cost ($1.9-$2.6 billion) but much worse in terms of ridership (9000-11,000).
The gondola to Simon Fraser University in Vancouver didn’t make the region’s wish list but advocates are still pushing for it.
The partially completed Evergreen Point Freeway Station opened Monday. An eastbound half-mile bus-only lane is providing some relief for riders.
“… you can double the number of people in a public place either by doubling the number of people who are drawn to the place … or by doubling the length of time that people choose to stay.”
Another massive backup on I-5, this time due to a knife wielding man on the Ship Canal Bridge. I look forward to the reliability and redundancy that Link will provide in the not so distant future.
Kate Joncas, the CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association, will become the deputy mayor of operations for the City.
The Seattle Bike Blog has some great analysis of biking trends using data from the Fremont Bridge. Yesterday’s rainfall is almost as important as today’s rainfall when estimating daily bicycle volumes.
Bertha is beefing up to better deal with tunneling conditions.
Mayor Murray continues his impressive winning streak, removing caps on TNCs while evening the playing field. Let’s hope that he can keep up this kind of progress on the regional and state level.
The Washington Transportation Commission is looking more seriously at road-usage charges with three tiers. Implementation has always been the sticking point on this idea, and the three tier approach sound fairly implementable to me.
The state is restarting its search for the chief of Washington State Ferries
SDOT will construct more neighborhood greenways this summer.
A debrief on the First Hill Streetcar extension open house.
The comment period on the U-District Urban design has been extended until Monday, and I strongly encourage STB readers to provide comment on the documents as whole and the three zoning “alternatives” in particular. I’ll briefly summarise the three options below, as well as give my personal opinions, but I recommend you have a look over some or all of the documents if you have the time. Either way, please send comment to dave.laclergue@seattle.gov endorsing either alternative 1 or alternative 2. Thanks!
Sound Transit is updating its Long Range Plan later this year, and they have released their Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (DSEIS) for for public comment through July 28. Please take the survey here!
Though it may seem a distant exercise for the average transit rider and advocate, this is a critically important process because it determines the range of outcomes that are possible a decade down the road. This is the visionary, big picture stuff. If you want West Seattle-Downtown-Ballard rail, or eastside BRT, or a range of other options, this is your official chance to make sure the Board adopts them as options for the next round of development.
If you’re confused about the multitude of scoping studies, corridor studies, environmental impact statements, etc, you’re in good company. I mean, haven’t we been talking for months about Downtown-Ballard? Isn’t that already long-range planning? Yes, and it’s complex, but here’s an analogy.
Think of Sound Transit as a restaurant. Though it may be tempting to think of the long-range plan as the restaurant menu, it’s more like the wholesaler sheet. It’s the unconstrained list of all the things the restaurant could choose to order to make its food. Right now Sound Transit has had the same list of options since 2005, has bought a few of the items for its customers (U-Link, East Link, North Link etc…) and has passed on others temporarily (Federal Way Link). The current update will decide what if anything should be added to this master list. Because Sound Transit is owned by its customers, they are asking you to help them choose what to buy.
But Sound Transit isn’t just any restaurant, it’s a co-op. The restaurant takes out a bond for the approved amount, and co-op owners (taxpayers) pay an agreed rate (sales tax and fares) spread over a number of years. Because of this, Sound Transit knows roughly how much money they are going to get over the next decade or so. They also know that the co-op owners are usually hungry when they order and like to ask for more than is feasible, so the restaurant uses this master list to whittle down its choice to ones it thinks it can afford. But once the Long Range Plan is finalized, the Sound Transit Board will develop a system plan, and that’s more like the restaurant menu. They develop a series of menu offerings from the Long Range Plan based on their projected income and the peculiar legal requirement to spend equally on all to make sure that each of the 5 separate co-op associations (named the Pierce, Snohomish, East King, South King, and North King ‘subareas’) pay for only their own meals. Once they have their system plan, they present it to their Board to predict if 50.1% of the co-op owners will approve the plan. It may tell the North King co-op delegation that “We can serve you both the Ballard Link Souffle and the Downtown-Burien Custard, but you’ll have to agree to let the Pierce association have the 6th Avenue steak, the Fife cookies, and the Tacoma-Dupont truffles you so dislike. Oh, and they’ll want free refills to continue on Tacoma Link and they want larger Sounder portions.” And so it goes until the 5 subarea representatives and their constituents agree on what each other should eat, and ensure that all their meals cost the same the money raised by the subarea groups stays with them.
As you work through the survey, you’ll notice several previously unmentioned, somewhat bizarre proposed corridors. Corridor 21, in which a West Seattle to Ballard line is routed through both the Central District and Queen Anne, is a bit like a customer telling Sound Transit that yes, they really do want them to offer ketchup on their ice cream. STB asked Sound Transit’s Geoff Patrick if they consider all of these to be viable corridors or if they just aggregated public comment, and they said, “The latter. We studied corridors identified in comments during the scoping process last fall.” So if you’re a Tacoma advocate who’s been trying to get high capacity transit on Pacific, or Portland, or 6th Avenue, don’t be worried when you’re asked to review Tacoma to Ruston as a corridor instead. ST is asking you about it because someone asked them to ask you about it. Next time make sure you’re the one asking.
Once the restaurant decides what to offer its customers in its system plan, the co-op association (all of us!) votes on it. We’ve done this twice, and we ceremonially named these votes Sound Move and ST2. The next one will be ST3! If we approve an ST3, then Sound Transit will spend a couple years asking its angel investors (the federal government) and its hundreds of chefs (representatives from cities and counties) to give them recipes for just how each item should look and taste. These chefs negotiate about which menu items should go where, how much they should cost, which to debut first, how they should be salted and spiced, and even how to spend the 1% set aside for garnishes and presentation. It gets complicated when, yes, there are occasionally too many cooks in the kitchen. Tsk.
When it’s all said and done, the menu reflects the items least objectionable to the greatest number of co-op owners. The patron who really likes it spicy might find it a bit bland, the purist connoisseur will notice every cut corner, and the simple meat-and-potatoes diner might think the whole menu to be overthought and wonder what all the damn fuss is about. But the restaurant is looking for something both that it can afford and that 50.1% of its co-op owners will find tasty enough to give a thumbs up.
And that’s how you cook a train. Please comment by July 28, and tell them what you want to be able to order. Of course we’re pretty fond of Corridors F (Downtown-Ballard) and G (Ballard-UW), so we’d love votes for those.
The Mayor’s office says they’ve worked out a deal with various stakeholders to remove the caps on drivers for services like Uber and Lift. Key terms of the deal, from Mayor Murray’s office:
Transportation network companies and their drivers will be licensed and required to meet specific insurance requirements.
The City will work with the industry to clarify or change state insurance law to account for recent changes in the industry, similar to recent actions in Colorado.
There will be no cap on the number of transportation network company drivers.
The City will provide 200 new taxi licenses over the next four years.
Taxi and for-hire licenses will transition to a property right that is similar to a medallion in other cities.
For-hire drivers will have hailing rights.
An accessibility fund will be created through a $0.10 per ride surcharge for drivers and owners to offset higher trip and vehicle costs for riders who require accessibility services.
Just like with the minimum wage hike, Murray’s proven adept at a “Ducks Unlimited“-style approach to getting consensus by giving everyone something. The 200 new licenses and hailing rights for for-hire drivers were both part of the City Council bill back in March that instituted the caps. It’s not clear to me if this deal is 200 more licenses on top of the 200 proposed in March. I’ll have to get confirmation on that. But the main deal-sweetener for the taxi drivers is ownership rights and the fund for accessibility services.
The proposal will now go to the city council for approval.
Even though suburban growth is catching up, the multifamily housing boom that has characterized explosive growth in center cities for the last several years is still driving the economy. With winter finally behind us, permits for new housing grew 8 percent in April; construction on new housing jumped a full 13 percent. Most of these new homes come in the form of apartment units. In April, there were 2,000 new permits for single-family homes versus 81,000 new permits for multifamily units. Housings starts showed the same wide divide: 5,000 new single-family homes versus 124,000 new multifamily units.
But few of those multifamily units are being built in McKinney, Texas—a Dallas exurb that is one of the fastest-growing places in the nation. What explains the mismatch between the kinds of new homes we’re building and the places where we’re moving?
The answer, technically, is that families are filling in vacant houses in the ‘burbs while newcomers move in to the new multifamily construction. But there’s a deeper point here, related to the misleading term “multifamily.” The majority of new “multifamily” construction in Seattle and elsewhere consists of studios and 1BR apartments. Not really family-sized.
Suburbanists argue that families are destined for the suburbs – that yards and kids are inextricably linked (one might note that the nuclear family predates the manicured lawn by several millennia at least). In fact, many families would like to stay in the city, but are priced out. The fixed supply of 3BR+ houses in Seattle’s desirable neighborhoods are currently commanding multiple offers and sometimes selling for 20% over the asking price. Woody Allen’s Yogi Berra’s line about the crowded restaurant seems apt.
For now, overbuilt suburban housing from the last boom is providing an escape valve for demand. At some point, though there will be a reckoning as household formation rises back to pre-recession levels. What then?
