Month: October 2014

• SDOT releases the 5-year implementation plan for the Bicycle Master Plan, with year-by-year project maps. 2015 projects include Protected Lanes on Roosevelt between 45th and the University Bridge, Ravenna Blvd, Dexter Ave N between Mercer and Denny, S Dearborn St, and Rainier Ave S from the city limits to Rainier Beach.
• Crosscut writes up Weyerhaeuser’s planned HQ: “Occidental Square has, in a sense, been waiting for a fourth wall for 40 years.“
• Don’t get too close to your neighbors: 46% of Seattleites have moved since 2010. ($)
• New city polling is out. Takeaways: Murray is riding high, Sawant and Licata have the highest favorables, Sawant has the highest unfavorables also, and name recognition for Bagshaw, O’Brien, and Rassmussen is below 50%.
• Why no one shoots engagement photos in the suburbs.
• In case you were curious about Pronto’s mix of public and private funding, Publicola has a breakdown.
• The Oregonian’s commuting reporter has a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week of calamities costing him $1,200. Highlights include a broken down car, a busted Car2Go, and 2 bike flats.
• Seattle group crowdfunding through IOBY (‘in our back yards’) to bring mobile libraries to Seattle bus stops. They needed $4,000 by the end of the day Wednesday).
• JOBS: Commute Seattle is hiring a Commute Trip Reduction Coordinator, and WSDOT’s Public Transportation Division is hiring a Planner for construction mitigation.
• Seattle City Council gets one step closer to ‘linkage fees’ that would tax new development for an affordable housing fund. The vote was 7-2, with Rassmussen and Bagshaw opposed.
• The Washington State Office of Financial Management recognizes empirical reality, updating its travel demand forecast to recognize a long-term decline in driving.
• Sound Transit wants your feedback on their mobile website.
• Not just for single-family homeowners anymore: community solar project gets greenlighted on Capitol Hill.
• New Tacoma Amtrak station designs released.
• Where can you build a 21-mile light rail system for $475m? Ethiopia, apparently.

This is an open thread.

I’ve seen several complaints raised on the web and twitter that Pronto Bike Share only serves the wealthier neighborhoods of the city, and has ignored lower-income neighborhoods like the Rainier Valley. Certainly if bike sharing is going to be a vital part of the city’s transportation infrastructure, equitable delivery of service should be a top concern. But while much of the criticism of station locations is is well-intentioned, and equitable access to bike sharing could certainly be improved, any analysis needs to account for how bike sharing operates in practice.

To understand this problem, it helps to think about the kinds of trips bike sharing is used for. Washington, DC’s Capital BikeShare provides some great data about their system usage. One of the key take-aways is that most trips are one-way: pick up at one station and return at another. The pricing structure of bike share systems encourages short trips, further incentivizing this behavior. Renting a bike for a couple of hours while you go run errands or meet someone for lunch gets rather costly. Car2Go uses a similar pricing model: one designed to get the vehicles back into circulation as quickly as possible.

Therefore, a single Pronto rack next to, say, the Columbia City Link station, would likely be underutilized*. An effective bike sharing system requires a relatively dense mesh stations within a mile or so of one another. To get the ridership levels you need within that service area, the overall population density across the entire network has to be moderately high. This is why it works well in cities like London, Paris, and DC, with a relatively uniform density per square mile.

One major factor working against the expansion of bike share in Seattle (besides the hills) is the “urban village” strategy we’ve adopted to handle growth. By concentrating growth in dense nodes surrounded by a sea of single-family housing, we’ve created a non-uniform density pattern that limits bike share’s potential expansion (this also presents challenges for effective transit, but that’s an argument for another day).

That’s not to say that bike share programs can’t be made more equitable or accessible. Philadelphia is doing some interesting work removing barriers to payment, for example. And to the Mayor’s credit, he is planning to expand Pronto out to the Central District in his 2015 budget (the CD’s status as a lower-income neighborhood is also an argument for another day – but the adjacency to the existing network makes it an easy add).

Making bike share work in the Rainier Valley (or North Seattle, for that matter) would require more than installing a single bike station next to each light rail station. It would be require dozens of bike stations peppered throughout the area. And until the Valley (or the North End) gets much denser, that would probably be a money-losing proposition. Which is not to say that it shouldn’t be done! From an equity perspective it may be perfectly justifiable to expand access through subsidy, but that’s the conversation we should be having.

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* Bike sharing can be successful for extending the walk shed around a transit station (54% of Capitol BikeShare trips start or end at a transit station) but it requires multiple rental stations to be effective. Adding more bike racks and lockers and Link stations is probably a better way to support last-mile access in Seattle, at least for now.

[UPDATE: the other locations are Wall St. between 3rd and Denny, Midvale Pl. approaching Aurora Ave, and Pacific St. approaching the Montlake bridge.]

SDOT is unveiling it at 3pm:

First Red Bus Lane Installed in Seattle

First of four locations with new red marking; More on-street transit improvements coming

WHAT:  First block of red bus lane installed in Seattle

WHEN:  Today – Tuesday, October 21 at 3:00 p.m.

WHERE:  Southwest corner of Battery Street and Fourth Avenue

Today Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) crews will be completing Seattle’s very first block of red transit lane. Scott Kubly, director of SDOT, will highlight this brand new bus facility, explain where you will see more red lanes in 2014, and discuss other improvements to help transit in 2014 and 2015.

This is one of those simple things that makes a big difference. A NYC study suggests that painting the road a noticeable color increases compliance. Four other locations (announced at 3pm) will get this treatment in 2014. One also hopes this would encourage conversion of part-time bus lanes (like 3rd Avenue) into full-time ones.

We’re on the eve of the biggest civic mistake in the history of our fair city. After 4 decades of protest following their narrow defeat in 1972, anti-freeway activists are poised to prevail at last. In just 3 weeks Seattleites will vote on whether to dismantle  the RH Thomson Expressway.

The fabled roadway — long thought dead after being defunded by the City Council, only to be resurrected at the last minute by the barest majority of forward-thinking citizens — may not win any prizes for aesthetic beauty. But the workhorse highway dutifully carries 110,000 vehicles per day, providing both critical capacity and mobility through Central Seattle and an essential bypass of Downtown for people traveling through Lake City, Sand Point, the University District, the Central District, the Rainier Valley, and South King County. Yet the seismically vulnerable structure is due for replacement, and in an act of unparalleled delusion, we are balking. If approved by Seattle voters in November, Proposition 3 would remove all 6 cloverleaf interchanges, sink the Union Bay tunnel, remove the median, and narrow the roadway to just two lanes between the Arboretum and Madison St, and four lanes (two of them parking) between Madison and the I-90 interchange. This is not a road diet, this is a road hunger strike. We must step back from the edge before its too late. We must save mobility in Central Seattle.

Imagine a Seattle without the RH Thomson. People commuting from Kirkland to Boeing Field would be forced against their will to funnel onto an already-congested Interstate 5. Those accustomed to the swift trip underneath Union Bay would be subjected to a long slog through the surface streets of Montlake instead. Vehicles headed for I-90 Eastbound will have to backtrack all the way to Rainier Ave S. And let’s not forget that the booming retail corridor in the Central District owes its very existence to the RHT: the Walmart Supercenter at E Union Street, the Cabela’s at S Massachusetts St, and the 13 car dealerships that make up Atlantic’s famed Auto Row. Imagine Seattle without these sales tax revenues, 19% of which of which flow directly to our overburdened transit system.

Continue reading “Save the R.H. Thomson Expressway: Vote No on Prop 3”

Tonight, Monday Oct 20 from 5-7 p.m. at Altstadt in Pioneer Square. More details.

Recently, councilmember Sally Clark bravely broached the subject of reexamining the Urban Village Model. It should be pretty uncontroversial that after 20 years we would step back and assess a policy, but in the eyes of NIMBYs even talking about looking at the possibility of change in Single Family Zones is considered a capital offense.

The Urban Village Strategy was developed during the Norm Rice era to ‘protect’ Seattle from change by concentrating all growth in existing urban areas. On the surface the idea is pretty sound. Put people and resources where there are already people and resources, the opposite of sprawl.

A lot has changed in the last 20 years. Both in Seattle itself and with the country as a whole. More people want to live in Seattle and more people want to live in walkable urban neighborhoods. PSRC predicts 1,712,000 additional people to be living in our region by 2040; for political, economic, social, and ecological reasons we need the majority of those people to live in Seattle or nearby dense, urban, walkable communities. Currently only 8% of Seattle’s land is multifamily with an additional 6% being commercial and mixed use. This artificial scarcity raises the value (and thus costs) of developable land in these areas resulting in higher prices. When you permanently remove three quarters of the city’s land (49% of the land is Single Family – another 30% is Industrial, Public Facilities and Parks/Open Space) from the developable pool this means almost all growth and change is concentrated in small slivers of the city. Not only do these neighborhoods experience artificially high prices, but they also experience rapid change as growth is artificially concentrated there.

Density most definitely has its benefits, but spikes of incredible density in a sea of single family might not be the best solution. This is especially true if you are worried about the lack of 3 bedroom ‘family housing’ which is best supplied through town and row houses and not towers. If we want more family housing we need to open up more of the city to family housing, allowing these homes to be spread around and not artificially concentrated on a few blocks.

Or at least we should talk about it. We are a growing, vibrant, intellectual city, not a religious cult. No past policy should have the status of unquestionable dogma. Hopefully other leaders and officials won’t leave Sally Clark out in the cold, but will join her in saying that no policy is beyond discussion, even Urban Villages.

Ode to an Incline (Pittsburgh’s Monongahela Incline) from STREETFILMS on Vimeo.

This Monday, the Seattle City Council is set to vote on a housing “linkage fee” — a tax on development to fund low-income housing. Given that it got all five votes out of committee, passage seems reasonably certain. As a member of team density, I’m supposed to hate this proposal. It does have its problems, but I think there are strong arguments ($) on both sides.

Only government subsidies can provide low-income housing. Even if we had a perfectly efficient housing market — and we’re not even close to that — anyone who can’t afford to pay the cost of capital of constructing a new housing unit is going to be out of luck. This is one of the few problems Seattle can’t solve by simply lifting caps on development. If we’re going to have a city open to all, there is an unavoidable role for government subsidy of housing costs, either through cutting checks for housing assistance or actually building social housing. This subsidy has to be funded somehow! However,

A tax on development is just about the worst possible revenue source. If the goal is to create the conditions for housing for all income levels, and it should be, then taxing new units is counterproductive. It’s true that landlords of new developments are unlikely to simply “pass fees on to renters,” as they’re already charging what the market will bear. But future supply is important for affordability too, and it’s not enough to simply allow developers to eke out a small profit.

At the very least, projects have to cover the cost of capital. The Council’s consultant report says that “all projects that DRA concluded would be financially feasible with no fee or performance requirement would still be economically feasible after paying the proposed fee.” (p. 4) But this assumes a threshold for “feasibility” of 6% return for residential projects and 10% for commercial ones (p.7).

The problem is that Seattle projects are competing for financing with ones in Bellevue, in Portland, and even in Jakarta, to say nothing of non-development investment opportunities around the world. Anything that impairs profitability deters construction of economically marginal projects, which are the ones Seattle most desperately needs to encourage. Indeed, the report (p. 11) later admits that

Continue reading “Seattle’s Proposed Linkage Fee”

It’s not very often that Seattle Transit Blog recommends rejection of a proposal to devote more resources to transit. Indeed, some board members voted for one or more of the monorail’s previous measures. However, the latest incarnation, “Seattle Citizen Petition 1,” attempts to address a real transportation need with a measure that is redundant, technically flawed, and that takes unnecessary organizational risks.

The petition, which would levy a $5 license fee to fund planning of a line between Ballard and West Seattle, is duplicative of recent Sound Transit efforts in the exact same corridor. Worse yet, the monorail plan would exclude promising underground options and alternative alignments like Ballard-UW.

These shortcomings lead to real technical problems. One reason that Sound Transit continually converges on underground alignments through dense cities is the intense opposition that elevated segments generate. Previous monorail plans never really solved this problem, and the current one envisions bypassing major activity centers and transit hubs downtown by traveling along the waterfront, a steep climb they hope to bridge with an added transfer to some other, unspecified, elevated technology, with the attendant transfer penalties and further political fights over elevated guideway.

The historical record suggests that new agencies running complicated capital projects will experience serious problems. Sound Transit had buy-in from local leaders and survived, but the Seattle Monorail Project did not, and didn’t.  Petition 1 will needlessly set up a new organization to learn the same hard lessons, and has not cultivated a broad base of support to get it through the tough times. The campaign is promising unrealistically short timetables, as if they are somehow immune to the Seattle process that afflicts every other public works project. Finally, the campaign rhetoric is very much in opposition to Sound Transit and the rest of the political establishment, which bodes ill for the joint planning and scheduling that creates a well-integrated transit system.

This measure’s probability of developing a high-quality transit line is virtually nil. Citizen Petition 1 is a waste of resources that distracts from much more promising and better-developed approaches to solve a real transportation problem. Vote No.

The STB Editorial Board currently consists of Martin H. Duke, Frank Chiachiere, Matthew Johnson, and Brent White.