Aurora Ave before southbound BAT lane: photo by Oran
Transit-friendly reporter Mike Lindblom at the Seattle Times has a detailed piece($) on the impending Highway 99 closure mess, focusing particularly on how bus riders will be impacted, and subtly pointing out that the bus riders might even outnumber the car drivers in the affected corridor. Five routes will be detoured Friday night through Wednesday morning for the Highway 99 replacement work. Lindblom gives a good run-down on where the viaduct and Aurora will be shut down.
I was on the E Line just this past Tuesday, heading south, and got to see how much of a bottleneck the highway work has already created, before this major closure. For about a third of a mile through the construction zone, there did not appear to be a functional BAT lane, causing the bus to crawl in general traffic for about 10 minutes.
Thanks to Lindblom for pointing out that the bus riders are roughly as numerous as the SOV drivers using this corridor.
The problem here is entirely political. Cities have the power to zone. Thus, supply depends entirely on whether local community leaders accept more housing. This housing, almost invariably, goes to outsiders, who would dilute the community’s politics, forming alternative social networks and possibly caring about different political issues.
When asking why things are the way they are, it’s always useful to ask, cui bono? In most American coastal cities today, developers like to sell expensive houses, current homeowners like to see their property values rise, and those who benefit from subsidized housing don’t want to have to compete against more outsiders for a fixed number of subsidized or rent-controlled units. Everyone wins, except the people who aren’t here yet: the migrants, the new college grads, and anyone else who is an outsider today but hopes to be an insider tomorrow.
For at least five years, the primary objective of City and County transportation lobbying effort has been new revenue authority for Metro, generally understood to be some form of Motor Vehicle Excise Tax (MVET). County leaders held back on “Plan B,” a flat vehicle fee via a Transportation Benefit District (TBD), until the last possible moment prior to cuts, partly because progressive voters would view a tax proportional to the value of the vehicle as fairer.
In hindsight, that was a mistake. An April election has an unfavorable electorate. Again, this is 20/20 hindsight — I thought saving Metro had a decent chance this year — but after the 2013 legislative session accomplished nothing, they should have immediately planned a November 2013 ballot measure via TBD. April’s result suggests that replacing a flat fee with an MVET wouldn’t have made much of a difference in a spring tally, but higher turnout might have.
This November, Seattle voters will vote on preserving most of their own service after experiencing the first swath of cuts. Odds are very good that they vote to keep buses running. Although Mayor Murray has said all the right things about the Seattle funding being temporary until there is a regional solution, in fact the stakes for future legislative action are quite low. Winning a countywide vote is about a better election turnout, the likely end of the myth that Metro will magically avoid cuts through “efficiency”, and convincing more conservative voters. Although MVET would be great, the precise structure of the vehicle taxes is unlikely to be decisive, and in any case the highest demand jurisdiction (Seattle) will almost certainly be in reasonable shape.
That’s why Seattle and King County should reorient their priorities towards something with a higher payoff. I’m referring, of course, to Sound Transit 3. As the legislature considers a large package to address the perceived transportation problems around the state, ST3 is the only project that will truly change transportation in dense urban areas and key regional chokepoints.
Moreover, action is urgent. There has been essentially no public discussion of the need for more authority for Sound Transit in Olympia, and there are only two more sessions before the November 2016 election. Sound Transit, wisely, strongly prefers votes in Presidential election cycles, and if we miss the 2016 opportunity it may have to wait till 2020. That would likely slide even early light rail segments to around 2034, and late ones near mid-century. If most of the people in the debate today are going to see its fruits in their working lives, it’s time for local leaders and our representatives in Olympia to not just play defense and instead focus on the right thing.
Downtown Spokane WA on approach to the airport by Ron Reiring – Spokane, WA
On this side of the Cascades, we don’t often hear much about transit in Spokane. That’s a shame, because Spokane is not just Washington’s second most populous city — and perhaps Washington’s most beautiful city — but it’s a place built around transit, whose center has survived the ravages of mid-century suburban flight, urban renewal and freeway building to become the slowly-regrowing urban center of the Inland Northwest. Its downtown is sprinkled with stunning railroad-era architecture (some of which would turn heads in San Francisco), its street grid is mostly complete, and the city and its suburbs are served by Washington’s most efficient transit agency, the Spokane Transit Authority.
Unfortunately, much of the transit news from Spokane has been bad, lately. One of the STA’s signature accomplishments is an attractive, modern bus station and customer service center in the heart of downtown, known locally as the Plaza. Photos of the Plaza are shown around the world by Jarrett Walker as an example of the kind of civilized, humane waiting-place that transit customers should expect, and which can be built even by not-lavishly-funded agencies. Such facilities are especially important to small-city transit agencies like STA, where there is no rapid transit system around which to organize the rest of the transit network, nor enough money to run a full grid of frequent routes out to the limits of the service area, and thus many customers need to make connections through a single central hub.
Recently, a handful of well-connected downtown Spokane property owners have tried to force STA to move this flagship facility out of the downtown core. The events involved in the lead-up to this are a little complicated: there’s a recently-reactivated plan to refurbish the plaza, the removal (and then replacement) of a smoking area for plaza patrons, and a sudden flare up of concerns about crime, vagrancy and indigence in the retail core. The opposition’s stated reasons will be depressingly familiar to anyone who’s been involved in any major expansion of transit out to suburban areas: Putatively, transit facilities are full of ne’er-do-wells and criminals, loitering around waiting to rob or beg someone of their money, and the solution is to make these people disappear by making the facility disappear — and besides, all those buses are empty anyway. Of course, none of these things are actually true.
As our alert commenters pointed out, that’s a terrible assumption, as the passenger limits are likely limited by safety equipment. The point is, we didn’t check, and that’s on us. While the post isn’t exactly a falsehood — Frank is clearly speculating — we can do better.
As a concession to the various free on-street parking interests, many of Seattle’s Business Access and Transit (BAT) lanes only operate in the peak direction during rush hour. Unfortunately, the peak direction is defined by the downtown core, which is a mere subset of where the jobs are.
Witness the photo above, the situation in the evening going South on Elliott Avenue. The 24 is going in the “off-peak” direction and is therefore unworthy of adequate priority treatments. Traffic stopped at the light, combined with a handful of cars allowed to park in the right lane, mean that the bus has to wait until the light changes to come up and serve the passengers. Inevitably, this will take the entire light cycle and the bus will have to wait for another red light.
The dozen or so parked cars in the picture, allowed to use these spaces and saving their drivers perhaps a few minutes of walking, add to similar delays for substantially more people at this stop, and on this bus trip, alone. Multiplied over the many trips in the afternoon peak, the misallocation of space is staggering.
Within Central Seattle, the idea of “peak” and “contra-peak” directions is obsolete. Jobs are scattered everywhere in the triangle formed by Lower Queen Anne, Capitol Hill, and Sodo, and many cars and buses there have to travel back into downtown to get to where they’re going. It’s time to abolish these distinctions and make sure buses can operate reliably.
Transit users and STB readers use – and like to use – route maps. Routes are tangible, and are how we think when we actually use transit. This post uses some geographic analysis – focused on population and walking access – to show more of the big picture.
In April Metro recommended several phases of service cuts, for a total of about 16% of current service hours, corresponding to the estimated shortfall revenue following the defeat of county Proposition 1. It estimated loss of existing riders (10.8M rides – about 10%). This is indeed a key metric but I’ve not found quantitative answers to another seemingly basic question: what effect would the full set of recommended Metro cuts have on residents’ access to service (measured by 1/4-mile walking distance to service stops)?
So I’ve built some tools marrying Metro service details with a geographic information system (GIS). Here’s a sample map showing areas of 15-minute frequency service during commute hours, after the cuts (green) overlaid on current (orange). Compare this to route-oriented maps from Metro and Oran Viriyincy’s remarkable before-and-after route frequency map.
Translating this information to population impact for Seattle (county-wide to come soon):
Service hours cut
Loss of served population
30-minute freq.
15-minute freq.
Peak
16%
2.3%
6.4%
Off-peak
16%
6.4%
12.6%
Night
16%
9.1%
11.9%
On these results, Metro’s planning, following the Service Guidelines, looks to be quite effective, including restructures that increase the population that can be served with limited revenue.
King County Executive Dow Constantine held a press conference Thursday to unveil details of how King County Metro will roll out its low-income fare program. The press conference followed the submission of the Final Report of the Low Income Fare Implementation Task Force.
The fare will be $1.50 per Metro trip, available only through ORCA, and will require the rider to go through a qualification process to demonstrate her/his income is at or below 200% of the federal poverty level. Requalification will happen every two years.
The qualification process won’t be cheap or easy for the county. But the application process and the low-income ORCA card will be free for the applicant. Metro will partner with Public Health – Seattle & King County to administer the qualification process. Public Health will work with other third-party agencies to set up more places riders can qualify. 45,000-100,000 riders are estimated to be eligible. The cost of the program — reduced fares plus administration — is expected to be $7-9 million a year.
The qualfication process will start up in February of 2015, with the new fare taking effect March 1, 2015. Kitsap Transit and King County Metro will honor each others’ low-income ORCA cards. (See page 2 of the linked document.)
The County Council still has to vote to implement the program. The vote is expected to be unanimous, given the council’s unanimous vote to create the Low Income Fare Options Advisory Committee, and the council’s unanimous vote to set the fare level and create the Low Income Fare Implementation Task Force.
Editor-in-Chief Martin Duke was one of the first to publicly call for this program. The council’s decision to create the Low Income Fare Options Advisory Committee came about partially in response to social equity concerns when the Ride Free Area was discontinued in 2012, and partially at the behest of an organizing campaign led by the Seattle Transit Riders’ Union.
