Month: September 2014

After completing most of the necessary steps with the City of Seattle, construction for a new apartment building in Columbia City is set to begin sometime in December.

“We’re finishing up our building permit application, the project is phased, and we’ve already got a permit for demolition,” said Chris Weber of BAR Architects, one of the firms in charge of this project. “It’s been a fairly typical building permit and application process.”

The new Columbia City development at 4730 32^nd Ave South will have six buildings consisting of 244 apartment units. The apartment building is also expected to have a roof terrace, lounge, and a fitness center. Weber said the target date for the completion of construction is set to summer 2015.

With 215 parking spaces, 126 on the surface and 89 underground, the amount of parking is a major issue for a neighborhood with ambitions of being transit-friendly.

Continue reading “Columbia City Developers Believe They Need the Parking”

A must read for any fan of wayfinding and transit information design.

Mike Lindblom has the details ($):

[Amalgamated Transit Union members] have overwhelmingly rejected a contract offer to freeze wages for 2014 and 2015, followed by an inflation-indexed raise in 2016.

The count by Amalgamated Transit Union Local 587 on Wednesday was 839 yes, 1,595 no — a pass rate of 34.5 percent — to oppose union leaders’ call to accept the offer.

The next step will likely be binding arbitration between the union and the county.

Although by law the union cannot strike, this is probably bad news for riders, as it may put further pressure on Metro’s budget. On the other hand, perhaps the signal that the County is driving a hard bargain with organized labor will appease at least some critics, easing the path to a more general funding solution.

As I’ve argued before, drivers are entirely justified in advocating for themselves, but it’s hard to argue that the interests of riders lie with them in these cases.

Saturday night, come down to International District/Chinatown Station for the CIDBIA’s Night Market & Autumn Moon Festival. From 6pm to midnight there will be over 40 food trucks and a Japanese Beer Garden at the station, there will be merchants and an all ages dance party. I’ve never been so I can’t say much more, but it should be a good time. Look out for the red bearded man with a monster truck sized stroller and say hi.

See past Link Excuses of the Week here.

Don’t get me wrong, I love good ridership news as much as the next transit nerd, but at some point the wheel has to slow down. July’s Link weekday ridership was 16.9% higher than July’s of 2013. 16.9%. And July 2013 was no weak month, it was 10.7% percent higher higher than July 2012.

I’m going to say December. Looking at my charts, December of last year was when Link’s ridership growth really started spiking. Up until that point growth was pretty consistently averaging between 10 and 11 percent. Since then it’s been 5 points higher. What’s your prediction?

July’s Central Link Weekday/Saturday/Sunday average boardings were 37,354 / 32,873 / 27,135, growth of 16.9%, 0.1%, and 13.6% respectively over June 2013. Similar to June Saturday was low, however the weekend average still increased as a whole. Sounder’s weekday boardings were up 8.9% with ridership increasing on both lines. Tacoma Link’s weekday ridership decreased 3.3%. Weekday ST Express ridership was up 5.7%, with 22 out of 25 routes showing growth. System wide weekday boardings were up 9.2%, and all boardings were up 8.8%. The complete July Ridership Summary is here.

My charts below the fold. Continue reading “July 2014 Sound Transit Ridership Report – Where Does it Stop?”

Yesterday, Dow Constantine, King County Executive and chair of the Sound Transit Board, along with other regional officials, unveiled a high-level plan to improve integration between the region’s various transit agencies. The report covers a number of areas — station design, wayfinding, bus-train transfers, better trip planning and realtime arrival information through smart phones and displays — and the ideas there seem laudable. High-level political reports are less important for their details (which politicos usually just aren’t versed in) and more important for their sentiment, which tell staff and management which direction they should be heading with their work.

To me, though, the most interesting part are some of the ideas around network design, and there are more specifics here. Here’s a few, which stand out to me:

• Consolidate the 36 and 49 to create a connection between SE Seattle and the UDistrict via Capitol Hill, First Hill, and Beacon Hill. Some variation on the theme of strong north-south transit service on 10th Ave/Broadway/Beacon Ave has been floating around in post-2016 concept networks and the SDOT Transit Master Plan for some years. A complete amalgamation all the way from the U-District to Othello seems to me like it might have reliability issues, but at any rate, it’s good to have the idea explicitly on the table.
• Extend the 271 to Northgate via Maple Leaf and Roosevelt. This sounds, more or less, like connecting the 271 and 67, a variation on an idea I published once with the 48N and 271. Unsurprisingly, I think this is a great idea, although the 271 is currently infrequent on evenings and Sundays, so either 271 frequency would need to go up (an excellent idea, if expensive), or turnback trips would be needed, to provide full-time frequent service on the Roosevelt/Northgate corridor.
• Possible Route 8 revision to connect uptown, South Lake Union, Capitol Hill and Madison Valley. This sounds like extending the 8 to service the 11 alignment in the Madison Valley. When Denny is uncongested, this will work amazingly well, but Denny is a disaster on most weekdays. I want to like this idea, but it will need to be coupled with changes in SLU, or with some other way to make sure Denny’s unreliability doesn’t ruin Madison Valley service the way it’s ruining Rainier Valley service today.
• Provide opportunity to connect Link riders to South Lake Union and First Hill. This sounds like what the two streetcars we’ve built are supposed to do.
• Restructure commuter service from East King County — routes 252, 255, 257, 268 and 311  — with ST Express Route 545. Could be good, but we’d have to see what the details are.
• Extend some commuter service beyond U District to other areas such as South Lake Union or Fremont. The South Lake Union idea is excellent. The future 520 west-side reversible HOV ramp seems like a great way to provide great peak bus service to SLU from the Eastside, avoiding a three seat bus-U Link-streetcar ride that won’t compete well with driving. I’m less sure about Fremont — there’s no good way* to get between the U-District and Fremont in the peak without hitting a wall of cars somewhere.
• Create better connections to U District and Link light rail service at University of Washington station for Laurelhurst, Sand Point and Ravenna. Good sentiment, but other than Childrens Hospital, not sure I’d consider Laurelhurst much of a priority.

Sadly absent are ideas about infill stations along the existing light rail segment, or about converting any of the “potential stations” on the Lynnwood Link alignment, notably at 130th St in Seattle, and 220th St in Lynnwood, into actual stations. Each one of these, while expensive, would offer significant access and connectivity improvements for local transit riders.

Discuss!

* Well, there is, if you can ride a bike.

• Mercer Island City Council, reprehensibly, will withhold support for bus integration if Sound Transit doesn’t build parking exclusively for Mercer Island residents.
• Big plans for a parcel by Bellevue Transit Center.
• The enormous subsidy hidden in the sales tax exemption for gasoline.
• Opposing density because there isn’t enough transit is a long-run mistake.
• Welcome to the Second Avenue Cycle Track.
• Island Transit cuts hurting.
• New SDOT Director Scott Kubly fields questions from West Seattle.
• Tacoma City Council selects seven preferred new Link stations, asks to move Theater District Station 400 ft to the north.
• Pierce Transit CEO Lynne Griffith to take over Washington State Ferries.
• Capitol Hill Station development beauty contest gets some more rules. The “plaza” is a sticking point.
• I-90 Bellevue Way ramp closed for 15 days; HOV ramp will clog.
• An architect’s perspective on microhousing.
• Everett comprehensive planning.
• A report on the transit integration plan is coming soon.

This is an open thread.

When I last wrote to argue for express service on Amtrak Cascades, I used revenue by city pair because that was the best data to which I had access at the time. As I noted in the post, using city pair revenue as the basis for analysis was suboptimal, both because it unnecessarily privileged longer trips and also because it is vulnerable to distortions due to Cascades’ dynamic pricing. Ridership data would have been a more intuitive and human-focused metric, favoring “How many people travel between x and y every day?” as opposed to “How much revenue did trips between x and y generate?”.

Responding to the previous post, WSDOT graciously sent ridership data between all city pairs, allowing such a comparison to be made.

Continue reading “Amtrak Cascades Ridership By City Pair”

Now that a low-income fare is coming, it’s a valid question whether having a separate senior fare is defensible on social justice grounds. After all, seniors are the richest segment of society (see chart above) for all income quintiles, and the low income fare should handle any seniors who are truly in need. It’s hard to see why working adults should have to pay $2.25 and up for themselves and $1.25 for children while the senior fare remains locked at 75 cents.

Of course, seniors are a reliable voting block, but that’s an explanation, not a defense. Many businesses practice price discrimination to capture varying willingness to pay, including among seniors, so perhaps there’s business logic to the concept, if not the precise level. A better defense, at least from the perspective of local transit agencies, is Federal Transit Administration guidance:

For fixed route service supported with Section 5307 assistance, fares charged elderly persons, persons with disabilities or an individual presenting a Medicare card during off peak hours will not be more than half the peak hour fare.

So there is some capacity for the County to raise the Senior Fare, but not to bring it in line with what other adults pay. It’s notable that the first fare increase in the low-income fare era also inched up the senior fare, a process that if continued would bring it in line with the statutory maximum. This frees more revenue to either stabilize the low-income fare or buy more service.