Month: December 2014

It’s been another great year for us here at STB, and we’d like to thank you all both for reading our work and continuing to make our comment threads some of the most substantive and informative that you’ll read anywhere. As would be expected with something as specialized and nerdy as transit blogging, interest can sometimes be an inch wide and a mile deep, with posts occasionally striking a nerve and generating huge pageviews and comment threads. Our top 10 posts alone generated nearly 10% of our pageviews for 2014, almost exclusively on content related to improving or expanding transit capacity and performance. Seattle Subway, for instance, took 4 of the top 10 most read and 2 of the most commented. Without further ado, here they are:

Most Read:

10. 9 Ways to Make Seattle Public Transit Better (September 27): Frank’s post entering STB into the brave new world of listicles strikes a nerve with riders frustrated by all the little things that degrade the everyday experience of riding transit.

9. Let’s Build Rail to West Seattle (Option A6)! (July 22): Seattle Subway’s guest post arguing for quality over quantity when it comes to West Seattle Link.

8. U-Link Walking Tour Photos (June 9): I had a blast walking from Montlake to Westlake underground back in June. ULink is now <500 days from opening!

7. Sound Transit Listens to Public, Will Study Sand Point Crossing (September 29): Seattle Subway’s victory lap guest post announcing the inclusion of a Sand Point rail crossing in the Sound Transit Long Range Plan.

6. Let’s Build the Ballard Spur! (June 23): Guest author and Seattle Subway veteran Keith Kyle taps into an endless well of desire for rail between Ballard and UW.

5. Metro Cuts: When and Where (April 25): After the failure of Prop 1, my post lays out in detail the then-proposed-but-since-mostly-canceled cuts and their timing.

3. (tie) Visualizing Cuts to Metro’s Frequent Transit Network (March 31): By far the shortest post in the Top 10, but also one of the most effective. Oran creates a slider that uses his wildly popular Frequent Transit Map to visualize Metro’s proposed cuts.

3 .(tie) What Could $800 Million Do? (February 13): Ben kicks off what would be a year full of Bertha-related speculation, hand-wringing, schadenfraude, official confidence, and general turbulence, arguing that even with all the sunk costs already committed, the remaining $800m available (were the project to be cancelled) could buy the Center City Connector, a reconnected SLU/LQA street grid, make RapidRide truly rapid, and make up the difference between an elevated Ballard line and a Queen Anne tunnel.

2. Explainer: Why We Need to Save Metro (April 7): Frank’s post does an overdue and obvious thing, eschewing acronym-speak and insider language to distill and simplify the stakes of April’s Prop 1 for the general reader.

1. Let’s Build a Sand Point Crossing (Option SP1)! (July 8): Want to get people talking and reading? Propose visionary, highly controversial new projects. Seattle Subway’s guest post argues for the inclusion of a 3rd Lake Washington crossing in Sound Transit’s Long Range Plan, earning nearly double the pageviews of the other posts in the top 10, with just this one post getting 1.5% of our annual pageviews.

Most Commented:

Continue reading “Top 10 Read/Commented Posts of 2014”

[UPDATE: Bruce Gray now says “We’re still receiving and testing new data sets. If all goes well, we’ll deploy the new set into OBA on Monday, the 5^th.”]

You may have noticed recent persistent problems with OneBusAway reporting only scheduled arrivals on certain routes. I’ve certainly noticed them on the 24, 33, and certain other Lower Queen Anne routes over the last few weeks, as that’s what I ride the most. It turns out that this is related to an upgrade, according to ST’s Bruce Gray:

Yes, our folks have been working on a fix. We recently enhanced OneBusAway data to allow it to provide accurate information to users on reduced-service days (like the Friday after Thanksgiving). This enhancement created other problems with the data that we have been troubleshooting over the last month. We expect to have a fix in place early next year.

If it’s any consolation, the result of this disruption should be a better product.

As is becoming a tradition, there will be extended hours for New Year’s Eve on Central Link Light Rail, the Seattle Center Monorail, and Tacoma Link.

From the monorail’s holiday service page:

On December 31. 2014, the Monorail will be open until 1:00 AM for the New Year’s Eve fireworks at the Space Needle. Due to regulations, the Monorail will carry its last passengers from Westlake Center to Seattle Center at approximately 11:15 PM. We will resume service from Seattle Center to Westlake Center once we receive the ‘ALL CLEAR’ from the Fire Marshall (estimated to be 12:20 AM) – from this point we will carry passengers until 1:00 AM.

The last southbound Link train will depart Westlake Station at 1:13 am.

The last Tacoma Link streetcars depart Tacoma Dome Station at 12:36 northbound and Theater District Station at 12:48 southbound.

A full list of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day service reductions can be found here.

Cute animation showing Montreal’s plan towards a fully electric transit system. I like how the electric bus is assembled and plops down on the ground like a toy.

The stream of news from the deep-bore tunnel project has been uniformly bad: stuck for months for an unclear reason, the completion date has slipped to August 2017 at best ($). The rescue effort itself is causing the already brittle viaduct to sink, along with a chunk of Pioneer Square. It’s unclear, at least to me, who will end up paying the ballooning costs, but there certainly will be lots of litigation ahead.  Nothing catastrophic has happened – yet.

Back in 2009, I joined many others in thinking that the deep-bore tunnel project was a bad project at any price, and now that it is sure to take longer and more likely to cost taxpayers more than budgeted, that judgment looks better than ever. We believed Seattle could do just fine without another highway through downtown, particularly with alternative transit investments, and thought closing the viaduct would illustrate that for everyone. I continue to believe that.

In my circles, the new developments spawn some justified gloating, and renewed calls to both close the viaduct now and halt the project. Indeed, halting the project would be a fabulous decision for all the reasons linked to above. However, were I convinced that the project was critical to the city’s future, I wouldn’t let a few overruns or delays change my mind, just as I didn’t when Sound Transit ran into somewhat similar problems early in its first critical project. And much to my dismay, as it turns out we haven’t seen any of the defections that would indicate this project is really in political trouble.

As for closing the viaduct, everyone agrees that it isn’t safe in the event of an earthquake. For many people, that’s enough to shut the thing down, as even Gov. Gregoire threatened to do by 2012, and that’s an entirely reasonable viewpoint. But for many others, earthquake risk is worth avoiding whatever economic damage closing the viaduct would cause. Now that the viaduct is settling, WSDOT insists it is still as safe as it was.  WSDOT Secretary Lynn Peterson writes ($) that if it weren’t, they would simply apply stopgap techniques to shore it up. To claim that the measured settling demands closure of the viaduct implies at least one of two things: WSDOT’s engineers are incompetent, or managers are willfully ignoring technical advice for political or reputational reasons.

I have no special insight into what goes on at WSDOT, and for all I know a huge scandal revealing one or both of the above could surface tomorrow*. But functioning in a technical society requires placing at least a little trust in the judgment of trained professionals, and I think we have to give them the benefit of the doubt on this narrow matter.

* or – God forbid – a catastrophe proving their incompetence.

• Is the Times slowly going urbanist? Two articles about I-405’s traffic miseries this week, correctly diagnosing the problem as “jobs and housing too far apart” ($) and that [“freeways] destroy city neighborhoods and …are actually congestion generators.” ($)
• Want a good primer on the SEPA and EIS processes? Read the SonicsRising sports blog, seriously.
• Hyperbole of the week: proposals for 7-story zoning around the (still 9 years away!) 185th St Link station are “monstrosities” representative of “excessive and unbridled greed”.
• Bertha’s new best-case scenario? Seattle Tunnel Partners says late 2017, a date that WSDOT won’t endorse until repairs begin.
• New census figures show the wealth disparities among King County’s cities, with median family incomes ranging from $48,000 in Tukwila to $96,000 in Seattle to $230,000 in Clyde Hill.
• Business Vancouver looks into TransLink’s performance ahead of next year’s transit funding measure, noting that Vancouver has the “lowest light rail operating cost in the world”. Cough cough, driverless trains.
• Community Transit just won some planning money for Swift II.
• Long ‘out of scale’ for the traditional high-rise neighborhood, the First Hill McDonald’s is closing, replaced by a more neighborhood appropriate 17-story tower.
• Seattle Bike Blog pushes back hard on SDOT’s proclamation of Holman Rd as a “complete street”.
• 1 million bike trips over the Fremont bridge in 2014? We’re at 997,000 with one week to go.
• Whether it’s a sign of renewed cooperation or just plummeting oil prices busting the Bakken boom, Amtrak now thinks it can keep the Empire Builder on time. The old schedule resumes January 12th.

This is an open thread.

The limited release of the Seth Rogen / James Franco vehicle The Interview means that Columbia City’s Ark Lodge Cinema is the only venue in King County ($)  (at the moment) one will be able to see it. That makes it a fine choice for our light rail excuse of the week (LREOTW).

The premiere is Christmas night at 9:30pm, with showings at both 2:30pm and 9:30pm through January 1.

If you don’t have many occasions to ride Central Link, this is a good excuse to get into the Rainier Valley for something you can’t get many other places.

It was an up and down year for Seattle-area transit. Ultimately this may be remembered as the year the City of Seattle got back in the transit game in a big way. As the year winds down, I thought it might be good to recap the good stuff that happened in the last 12 months.  Thanks to STB staff for helping me remember all this.

• As employment improved, so did transit ridership. Metro hit a record 121M rides, and Link came achingly close to (the largely symbolic) 40,000 daily riders in August.
• Actually, if you count the Seahawks victory parade in February, Link and every other form of public transit in the city shattered one-day ridership records, while showing it is possible to run 4-car trains to Stadium Station and negotiate with BN&SF to run Sounder extra times for special occasions.
• Prop 1 failed… then passed. Seattle got more money for buses and SDOT is now in the transit planning game. The 6-year odyssey of Metro’s volatile revenue seems to be at an end… for now.
• Center City Connector will likely have exclusive lanes on 1st Avenue.
• RapidRide E & F launched, completing the (current) RapidRide network.
• In the spirit of Transit acting as One, Metro waives limit on number of 550s in DSTT during peak-of-peak, now running up to 12 550s an hour in the peak direction, and all are packed to the brim.  This bodes well for East Link ridership.
• The Monorail may start accepting ORCA.
• Our friends at Seattle Subway pushed for – and won – inclusion of Sand Point-Kirkland for study in the Sound Transit long-range plan.
• Life got a bit better for Downtown-Queen Anne buses and will get even better next year.
• The South Park Bridge re-opened, un-sucking Route 60.
• The city went on a queue jump and bus lane spree, installing some time-saving bus priority at 9th & Roy and 15th & Dravus.
• The worst of the recession cuts appear to be behind us, as Community Transit proposed restoring Sunday service, Snohomish & Puyallup added service, and Metro announced its cuts would be less severe than anticipated.
• Pierce county ended paper transfers.
• Snazzy new cycle tracks went in on 2nd Avenue and Broadway.
• King County Exec Dow Constantine began much needed work on bus-rail integration between Sound Transit and Metro.
• Metro proposed a low-income fare and installed a ticket machine at 3rd and Pine. ST will follow suit with a low-income fare for Link.
• The Bellevue City Council adopted a new Transit Master Plan, of which our own David Lawson said, ” If fully implemented, it could give Bellevue the most effective bus transit of any city in the Pacific Northwest.”
• Even though it was announced at the end of 2013 I’ll cheat and say that U-Link got pushed up to a January Q1 2016 opening date.
• Speaking of 2016, this was the year that all our local leaders coalesced around the idea of bringing ST3 to the ballot in 2016.  Authority from the legislature is still forthcoming.

Many of these improvements listed above happened because the readers of this blog made their voices known. Thanks for reading, and keep it up in 2015!

Lightrail – Making mass transit more magical from michelebaggio on Vimeo.

In addition to the low-income fare program that has been in place in Kitsap Transit since 1985, the new low-income fare program for King County Metro Transit that will take effect March 1, 2015, and the low-income fare that will take effect on Central Link Light Rail on March 1, Seattle Streetcar and King County Ferries are jumping on the low-income fare bandwagon. Per Rochelle Ogershok, King County Department of Transportation spokeswoman:

As of March 1, a low income fare of $1.50 will take effect on both the South Lake Union Street Car and Link Light Rail. These low-income fares will be the same as Metro’s, as will be the reduced fares for Youth and Senior/Disabled riders. The King County Water Taxi will also implement a low income fare as of 3/1/15. The low-income fare will be $3.00 for W. Seattle and $3.75 for Vashon.

Continue reading “Low-Income Fares Coming to Streetcars and Foot Ferries”

 

• Earth: After a small mudslide hit a North Sounder train last week, there’s talk of pre-emptive winter cancellations. ($)
• Wind: last Thursday was a terrible day to be a Portland transit commuter.
• Fire: A car ran into a Lower Queen Anne Teriyaki shop yesterday, breaking a gas main and causing a wall fire.
• The Bertha saga continues: council bickering ($), fears about sagging Pioneer Square water mains ($), a new one-year delay (minimum) for waterfront redevelopment, a look back at McGinn’s tunnel consultant’s warnings (which we wrote about here), a Lynn Peterson op-ed ($), and the Stranger digging into claims that the project is “70% done”.
• A 65-mile segment of California HSR might be built for as little as $1.2B, or just $18m per mile.
• New PSRC Household Travel Survey reveals what most of us already know: most people have subsidized parking, and few have subsidized transit.
• Are the Sounders looking to leave Downtown and/or CLink?
• Dexter got new curb bike lanes Monday night between Denny and Mercer, with parking moved inward.
• Jobs: Development Director at Bike Works, 2 jobs at Cascade Bicycle Club (Accounting/HR, and Layout Designer), Program Manager at Commute Seattle, Communications Project Manager at Sound Transit, and Service Planner at Metro.
• First Level-of-Service (LOS), now this: the widely-used Trip Generation Manual turns out to badly overestimate vehicle demand generated by new projects.
• Amtrak nervously awaits what looks like a probable loss at the Supreme Court.

This is an open thread.

Yesterday Governor Inslee released the transportation plan that he will ask the legislature to pass next session.

The twelve-year program would spend a total of $12.1 billion on the following:

• $2.6 billion for “Maintenance, Operations, and Preservation,” most notably bringing all bridges and highways to “95% fair or better” condition. Almost half goes to the ferry system or the State Patrol.
• $2.2 billion for “Clean Transportation and Multimodal,” including about $802m in various transit grants, $150m in bike and pedestrian grants, and lots of money for electric vehicle incentives and various water quality initiatives like culverts.
• $5.9 billion in “New Construction,” over 99% of which will go to new highway capacity in places like SR520, I-405, SR509, SR167, and US 395 in Spokane.
• $1.4 billion is miscellaneous “local distributions” and, mostly, debt service.

But that isn’t the interesting part. There is no gas tax in this proposal, replacing it instead with a “carbon pollution fee” among myriad smaller revenue sources. Avoiding gas taxes also avoids the putative constitutional restrictions on gas taxes, opening the door for more direct state spending on transit.

Unfortunately, the budget passes up that opportunity by proposing transit funding levels not out of line with historical levels. Despite the lack of funding, there is significant new revenue authorization for transit. Most importantly, the Inslee plan fulfills the Sound Transit Board’s request for more authority, clearing the path for Sound Transit 3 via some combination of property tax, sales tax, and MVET. There is also a renewal of Metro’s expired “Congestion Reduction Charge” ($20 license fee) authority, but only through 2018. Community Transit would get much-needed additional permanent sales tax authority, and the license fee that Transportation Benefit Districts can implement without a public vote would increase from $20 to $40.

How an environmental and transit advocate feels about this program probably depends on their relative assessment of the damage of new highway capacity vs. the merits of the transit authority and the directly pollution-attacking revenue source. Personally, I think this is miles ahead of the totally unacceptable House Democratic package from last year, which didn’t have ST3 and spent much more on new highways without fully funding maintenance.

My immediate reaction is that this would be a decent compromise to come out of the sausage machine next session. Unfortunately, it may be the opening bid, positioned as the “left wing” proposal with negligible state funding of transit, a persistent emphasis on more highways, and no permanent solution for Metro. The document seems to recognize this, labeling itself as a “good-faith compromise to spark action.” We can only hope that a majority of legislators view it in the same light.

One of the advantages of actual rail transit over actual bus transit* (in this region) is that minor anti-social rider behaviors tend to be merely annoying, rather than actually impairing operations. So on the list of behaviors to fix, David Lawson’s opus on how to ride a bus remains the must-read, and some more emphasis on avoiding the front door at busy stops would help a lot.

On the other hand, I’m spending a lot more time on Link than on buses these days, so I’m all for this new ad campaign. The space under the seat is criminally underutilized on crowded Link trains.

.@beerabbey Yes, we do have a suggestion for seat hogs. “Can I sit here?” usually works. Interior train ads coming. pic.twitter.com/FwtCyZewCD

— Sound Transit (@SoundTransit) December 16, 2014

* as opposed to theoretical bus transit, which is always awesome and never has to make compromises.

The Seattle City Council voted Monday to take the first steps toward integrating the monorail into the ORCA pod, and annexing the unincorporated North Highline area, including parts of White Center and Boulevard Park.

The City of Seattle had previously deferred to the City of Burien on annexing the North Highline area, but residents voted down Burien annexation in 2012. The Seattle City Council was enticed to action by a state sales tax incentive program worth $5 million for 10 years, that would expire if the City didn’t take an initial action of intent by the end of the year. Councilmember Tom Rasmussen described the resolution as a “placeholder”, in case the City decided to move forward with annexation. The council passed the resolution 8-0. Annexation doesn’t quite solve the Route 120 problem but it gets us closer. The earliest White Center could vote on being annexed by Seattle would be 2016. White Center Now has more in-depth coverage.

The council also passed the bill containing the substitute version of the monorail concession contract, which was made available Friday, between the City and Seattle Monorail Services, 8-0. Thom Ditty, General Manager of Seattle Monorail Services, proclaimed that the new contract “puts the City in the driver’s seat on the ORCA pass.” Councilmember O’Brien asked the resolution sponsor, Councilmember Tom Rasmussen, whether it was his intent to include transfers and passes in the ORCA integration. Rasmussen repeated his previous refrain that he wanted the fare system to be “as convenient as possible, in all possible ways”.

Rasmussen explained why the study called for in the resolution wouldn’t be due until the end of the second quarter in 2015: The monorail needs a sponsor among the seven member agencies of the ORCA Joint Board, and the support of the rest, in order to participate as an affiliate.

The section added Friday in the contract contains a fallback plan in case the study shows fare integration to be a money loser for Seattle Monorail Services: The City and SMS can negotiate mitigation, and if negotiations fail that terminates the contract.

In a final charm offensive, the SMS team had in tow Kelly Pearson, Chief Development Officer of Wellspring Family Services, who lauded SMS for being Wellspring’s charitable partner for the past two years, increasing Give Big Campaign donations by 45%.

Regarding the last-minute effort to get ORCA into the contract, Ditty said, “I’m glad it happened. I expect both ridership and revenue will increase.”