Month: September 2014

Author’s Note: The title of the article has been changed. The author apologizes for any unnecessary confusion and alarm caused by the original title.

Due to popular demand, and the fact that the Mariners are in contention for the playoffs, Sounder will be serving the remaining Sunday games, September 14th and 28th.

But first, there will be an unfortunate scheduling convergence: The Mariners and Sounders will be playing at home simultaneously, 7 pm Friday evening. The two events combined could eclipse last Thursday’s Seahawks attendance. Thanks to Matt for pointing out the scheduling convergence collision course.

While the schedules for all of Sound Transit’s trains and streetcars will remain unchanged with the September 27 service change, a few of the ST Express bus routes will have schedule tweaks, with only weekday service impacted. The new schedule books can now be found on Sound Transit vehicles.

Route 522 will have some northbound runs terminate at UW Bothell for the first time, balancing out the morning runs that were already starting at UW Bothell. The impacted runs are every other afternoon peak-direction run starting from 6th and Atlantic from 4:22 pm to 5:55 pm. This will help enable the addition of a morning and afternoon peak-direction run.

Route 555 will have two new mid-morning runs leaving Northgate TC at 8:49 and 9:24, terminating at Bellevue TC. Previously, all 555s continued on to Issaquah Highlands P&R.

Route 590 is losing its first morning southbound run, which is being converted to a 594 run which will go to DuPont Station instead of Commerce St. The first morning run of route 590 will now be departing Eastlake and Stewart at 6:00 am.

Route 592 will have both of its morning counter-peak runs from Seattle to DuPont Station eliminated. Also, morning service from Olympia will be starting a half hour later (4:42), and ending a half hour later (last bus departing Olympia TC at 7:12).

Route 594 will have one of its evening northbound runs start from DuPont Station at 4:44 pm, and its first morning southbound run continue to DuPont Station, leaving Eastlake and Stewart at 5:30 am and arriving at 7:12 am.

Next month, noted transit planning consultant Jarrett Walker is hosting another session of his firm’s Transit Network Design course in Portland:

“Transit Network Design: an Interactive Short Course” is designed to give anyone a grasp of how network design works, so that they can form more confident and resilient opinions about transit proposals.

The course is ideal for people who interact with transit planning in their work but don’t necessarily do it themselves — including land use planners, urban designers, developers, traffic engineers, sustainability advocates, transit employees of all kinds, and people who work on transportation or urban policy generally. Advocates who want to be more realistic and effective will also find the course valuable, especially as a companion to my book Human Transit.

Jarrett’s firm consulted on Seattle’s previous Transit Master Plan, which first outlined the goal of a citywide frequent-service Urban Village Transit Network; on Spokane’s 1998 transit network redesign, which dramatically rethought a failing streetcar-era radial network; and Bellevue’s recently-adopted Transit Master Plan, which promises to do similarly for that city. If you regularly ride transit in Washington, you’ve almost certainly benefited, directly or indirectly, from the clarity of thought Jarrett’s work has injected into contemporary service planning, and if you want to go from reading about this stuff to really understanding it, taking this class is the fastest way.

To improve accessibility of on-street paid parking in the city, Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) is looking to make minor adjustments to the prices, paid hours, and time limits for Fall 2014.

SDOT published the 2014 version of the annual paid parking occupancy report earlier this month, which showed the occupancy rate and the Fall 2014 changes of on-street paid parking areas in core and peripheral areas of Seattle neighborhoods. The data collection effort is part of the Performance-Based Parking Pricing program that was established by the city in 2010.

“Doing this data collection allows us to know if adjustments are needed,” said SDOT’s senior transportation planner Jonathan Williams.

The report explained that SDOT makes these adjustments in rates, time limits and paid hours as means of helping customers find parking within walking distance of their destinations and to increase access to businesses by ensuring turnover of parked cars.

SDOT bases its assessments of occupancy on whether or not the parking areas were between 70 to 85 percent of capacity. Areas that were five percent over or under the range were included in the watch list, meaning the adjustments will wait for at least another year. Occupancy rates below 65 percent mean SDOT will consider lowering rates, splitting the zone into subareas, and increasing time limits, while rates above 90 percent will lead to decreases in time limits and increases in prices.

“It’s a constantly evolving process,” Williams said. “We’ll adjust in 50 cent increments, which is not a really big change. We’re going to count these [occupancy data] every year, and if it’s above or below target, we’ll make these changes.”

Williams added that in addition to changing the prices, hours, and time limits, SDOT in the past has encouraged drivers to seek parking in the city’s edges or “periphery” areas, rather than the neighborhood’s core areas. He recalled an example from 2010 when the entire Ballard neighborhood was struggling to reach its target zone with 61 percent occupancy rate, despite having extremely full spaces in the area’s busiest blocks.

Continue reading “City to Enact Changes in Paid Street Parking”

Whenever Seattle’s various master plans (Transit, Bicycle, Pedestrian, Freight) are the subject, it’s fashionable to decry segmentation of transportation plans into “silos,” because who could be against a holistic, unified plan?

Well, a plan that tries to solve every problem won’t do very well at any of them. In any case, the SDOT staff I talked to about the Freight Master Plan were very eager to tell me how much they were cross-checking all of the other modal needs at every step. But in the comments in that piece Al Dimond offers a very reasonable defense of silos:

It is, of course, important to think about how all modes work in a corridor when that corridor is being designed.

It is also important to think about how all the city’s transportation corridors combine into a network for each particular mode of travel. It can reveal gaps that corridor-based thinking misses. One of the most glaring examples in Seattle is the gap in our cycling network south of downtown. In every specific corridor a combination of weak cycling advocacy and strong trucking opposition has doomed bike facilities. But when we look at the cycling network as a whole it’s clear that a bike route is necessary in the general area, even if none of the individual corridors cry out for it.

Of course the example that comes to mind first for me is a cycling example, since I get involved in that more than other stuff, but it wouldn’t be hard to come up with driving, freight, and transit examples where whole-network mode-specific thinking is needed to identify weaknesses and inform and prioritize improvement projects.

Over at crosscut, Anthony Robinson has a moving first hand account of the most recent incident of a runaway automobile smashing into Columbia City storefronts. While I agree with his main point, the need to lower speeds, I have to disagree with his conclusion, that the answers are to simply lower the speed limit, increase enforcement, and install bollards. Those steps simply won’t go far enough. Speeders ignore speed limits. Enforcement only works if you have police out every day. While bollards can be useful, a wall of them cluttering up the pedestrian environment because automobile operators can’t be trusted to drive safely is not the answer. There must be physical changes to the roadway itself to alter drivers’ unsafe behavior. 

Which brings me to my main point. I strong disagree with the title. Density is not dangerous. I think it might help to remind ourselves that density is nothing more or less than people. And when you have tons of steel moving at high speeds through a lot of people, the people aren’t the danger, the people are in danger.

If you live, work, or play in the Rainier Valley, or you are just passionate about safe streets for all users, please join the Cross “Walk-in” for Safe Streets at the intersection of Rainier Ave. South and S. Ferdinand tomorrow, Friday the 5th, from 4:30-5:30.

• Island Transit loses its Saturday service.
• Thanks to ST and City of Redmond, a new bike/ped bridge will serve Overlake Village Station, reducing distances “by up to a mile.”
• ST buys the Bonney Lake Park and Ride from Pierce Transit, which no longer operates any service there.
• You can’t just move job clusters to lower-cost locations.
• ST board says “all of the above” – parking, bike, and ped – to improve Puyallup and Sumner Sounder access. But the 820 new spaces at the two stations seems to be the most solid part of the plan.
• The local stats on walking to work ($).
• Smart Growth Seattle’s appeal against downzone wins procedural motion.
• Sound Transit has a planning position open.
• Raise height and FAR limits. Better yet, start over on the whole zoning code.
• It’s a shame the Times discussed walking to work ($) as something only for those who live very close to major job centers, or an “extreme” pursuit, when transit is an excellent walk extender.
• Kitsap Transit running a passenger ferry survey.
• Bus drivers need bathroom breaks, too.
• 60 more units on Capitol Hill.
• Ditch the helmet law.
• New Mukilteo ferry terminal gets federal approval.
• University Link 87.2% done.
• RideScout now supports Car2Go.
• In praise of infill stations.

This is an open thread.

When we last checked in on the King County Council’s erratic treatment of Metro’s budget crisis, the Council — after a veto by Executive Dow Constantine of a plan that would have postponed nearly all of the cuts without providing any new revenues, acting only on hope — passed a compromise ordinance which implemented this month’s cuts and provided for additional cuts, yet to be specified, in February 2015.  The ordinance established an “ad hoc committee on transit reductions” to make specific recommendations for those cuts, which (the ordinance provided) were to be consistent with King County’s Strategic Plan for Public Transportation and Metro’s Service Guidelines.

The ad hoc committee, consisting of Executive Constantine and Councilmembers Joe McDermott, Jane Hague, and Rod Dembowski, made its recommendation on the February cuts last week.  (UPDATE: Councilmember Rod Dembowski’s office reached out this afternoon to tell me that the ad hoc committee’s recommended cuts were entirely devised by Metro staff.) Yesterday, the Executive transmitted that recommendation to the Council, and Metro published the specific proposed cuts.  The cuts and restructures are generally similar to those proposed for February in Metro’s original plan, but there are some interesting differences which we will look at below, particularly for Wallingford and Fremont residents.

If the “Plan D” Seattle-only measure on the November ballot succeeds, then the Executive would postpone the February cuts to June 2015, in order to give Metro and the City of Seattle time to determine how to proceed.  The Seattle ballot measure includes language saying “the first priority for the funding is to preserve existing routes and prevent King County Metro’s proposed February 2015 service cuts and restructures.”  The cuts proposed yesterday continue to include multiple restructures, and it is not clear whether the City of Seattle would or could allow those restructures to be implemented with increased service levels at a later date than February 2015.

Some specifics of the new cuts below the jump.

Continue reading “Constantine and Council Members Try Again with February Cuts”