Month: January 2015

Yesterday Sound Transit announced that the U.S. Department of Transportation awarded it a $1.3 billion below-market-rate “TIFIA” (Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act) loan:

This is the largest single TIFIA loan to a transit agency in the country and the second largest TIFIA loan overall, and at the lowest rate – 2.38 percent – in the 25-year history of the program.

The low-interest loan, which offers more favorable terms than traditional bonds, will increase Sound Transit’s financial capacity by an estimated $200 – $300 million. Over the coming years the capacity will enable the Sound Transit Board of Directors to potentially restore some voter-approved Sound Transit 2 projects that were suspended as a result of the recession and help reduce risks of scope reductions or delays.

By knocking over 3 points off the interest rate ST would usually pay, the loan both allows ST to bring projects forward and also afford more project in absolute terms. The loan size is based on the overall East Link project budget, but spokeswoman Kimberly Reason says “our impetus for applying for the loan was to address the recession’s significant impact on the 29% loss in projected revenues for ST2.”

Given the intended purpose of the application and the miserable optics of making up new stuff while voter-approved projects are unfunded, restoring ST2 losses seems inevitable. Within those constraints, the Sound Transit Board will decide what to do with the staff’s harvest.  It is not bound by subarea equity, although the funds to repay the loan will presumably come from whomever benefits. The press release helpfully lists some candidate projects:

• ST Express bus service hours – 50,000 of 100,000 ST2 service hours still to be implemented
• Light rail between Kent/Des Moines and South 272nd Street in Federal Way
• Preliminary light rail engineering and right-of-way acquisition from South 272nd Street in Federal Way to the Tacoma Dome
• Improvements for accessing Kent Station
• Improvements for accessing Auburn Station
• Sounder platform extensions
• Preliminary light rail engineering between Redmond’s Overlake and downtown areas
• A permanent multi-modal station at Edmonds
• Renton HOV improvements

Bringing forward new bus hours, as opposed to capital projects, actually increases program cost instead of merely shifting it. However, 50,000 bus hours amounts to only about $7m per year, small in terms of the absolute savings due to lower interest rates.

Next Monday, January 19, is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a holiday for many in the white-collar world, and another work day for most in the transportation industry.

King County Metro will be running a “Reduced Weekday & No UW” schedule (which really means reduced runs on certain UW routes, in addition to several routes and runs being cancelled throughout the county).

Sound Transit will be running regular weekday schedules on ST Express and Sounder. However, Central Link will be running the Saturday schedule, and Tacoma Link will be running the Sunday schedule.

Pierce Transit, Intercity Transit, Everett Transit, Washington State Ferries, and the South Lake Union Streetcar will be running on their regular weekday schedules.

Community Transit will run regular weekday levels on local service, but will only be running commuter routes 402, 413, 421, and 855.

Kitsap Transit will be running most services on a weekday schedule, except that certain buses serving the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard will not be operating.

The Seattle Monorail will be open 8:30 am – 9:00 pm.

The West Seattle and Vashon Water Taxis will not be in service.

King County’s media relations launched a full-court press to publicize the launch of their new Trip Planner app last week. Many people found it a surprising misallocation of resources given the underlying data problems. But how good is the app?

To this user of OneBusAway for his real-time data and Google Maps for his trip planning, the interface is (for the most part) pretty good, not noticeably better or worse than the alternatives. It adds some functions that don’t have a good mobile alternative. But the application is still hamstrung by a back end with deep technical flaws.

The Trip Planner App integrates four different functions: a trip planner (obviously), route schedules, real-time bus arrival, and Metro alerts. I’ll take them each in turn.

1) Trip Planner. Google Maps starts with a map, and there are a few additional taps to bring out transit and call up any time rather than right now. Trip Planner takes you right to the appropriate screen with Start, End, and time inputs. However — and this is crucial — it is much worse than Google at taking a random place name (e.g., “Facebook”) and turning it into a usable location. And only some of the screens replace internal route numbers (Link is the “599”) with their commonly known names.

What about the algorithm? The regional trip planning algorithm has longstanding, well-documented problems with nonsensical results, and my spot checking suggests that hasn’t changed. To get a taste of it, I asked Trip Planner to plan my evening commute from Lower Queen Anne to just west of the Columbia City Link station. Any sentient human would take any of a series of buses downtown and transfer to Link the rest of the way. Google Maps actually passed this little mini-Turing Test.

Trip Planner’s result encouraged me to say on the 33/27 and switch to the 8. This is because the path that involved Link is slower, and shown at right.

Getting off Link and switching to the 50 is crazy, but after checking the default Trip Planner settings, my home is actually more than the default 0.40 mile maximum walk from the Station. The settings force me to transfer to a bus anyway, so these results are at least understandable.

Continue reading “A Review of the New Trip Planner App”

• Pierce County wants to consolidate its services into one location, but won’t locate in Downtown Tacoma because of how much parking it says it’d have to build.
• Sound Transit has approved its ST2-funded Station Access plans for Sumner and Puyallup. Though the plans include a new bike/ped bridge and nonmotorized improvements to the SR410 interchange, the bulk of the $93m will be spent on 820 parking spaces, or roughly $100,000 per space.
• Parking is usually abundant, even if hard to find. Seattle is no exception, with 40% of (mostly garaged) Downtown spaces unused every day.
• The new seawall is starting to take shape south of Colman Dock.
• Just like the old “Coyote on Max” story, people love stories of animals on transit. The most viral story of the week concerns a dog who rides RapidRide solo.
• Pronto is 3 months old. How’s it doing? Pretty well in Capitol Hill and Downtown, less so in Eastlake and the UDistrict.
• Washington Bikes needs your help in getting bike/ped funding through the legislature.
• The Roosevelt protected bike lane (UBridge to 45th) is just about done.
• As tensions between WSDOT and SDOT increase, Seattle will do its own review of viaduct safety. ($)
• And the biggest news of the week for transit advocates: ST3 legislation has dropped as SB 5128 and HB 1180. We’ll have more info soon.

We (well, at least incorrigible transit nerds) have been waiting with bated breath since the passage of Seattle’s Proposition 1 in November to see the contract between the City of Seattle and King County Metro which is required under the text of Prop 1. It’s finally here, posted to the King County Council’s website as an attachment to the ordinance through which the Council will most likely approve it.

There are all sorts of interesting details in the contract language which we will probably poke at in future posts.  But for now we wanted to share the good stuff: specific service improvements.  The improvements affect most routes in the city of Seattle.  About half of them will be implemented in June, and the other half in September.  Many of the June improvements are subtle schedule changes to improve reliability (mostly increasing run time and recovery time), while the September improvements are a bit more visible.

The City of Seattle chose the improvements in two ways.  First, all of the reliability and overcrowding improvements identified as necessary in Metro’s 2014 Service Guidelines Report were included.  Second, once those needs were taken care of, city staff selected improvements after analysis applying the county’s Service Guidelines, the city’s Transit Master Plan, and Metro route performance data.  Broadly, the improvements fit into two categories: 1) reliability improvements on existing service, and 2) new trips on existing routes, including both peak and off-peak frequency improvements.  There are no restructures in this initial round of improvements, for obvious reasons of speed and ease of implementation.  Nevertheless, these improvements will make the system significantly easier to use, especially nights and weekends.  They should also relieve some dysfunction during rush hours.  Specifics below the jump.

Continue reading “Final Prop 1 Contract and Seattle Bus Improvements”

After a successful 2-year pilot period, the Seattle City Council’s Transportation Subcommittee voted today to significantly expand car sharing services like Car2Go within the city limits, authorizing more permits and allowing up to 4 companies to provide services.

Car2Go has been very popular in Seattle. The service is reportedly approaching 60,000 members within the city, meaning nearly 10% of the Seattle population is a Car2Go member. According to SDOT, the cars are used for 6 trips per day, so they spend relatively little time parked in the same spot on the street, a fear when the service launched. Cars spend about 70 minutes/day in paid zones and 2.5 hours in restricted zones such as RPZs. There is no data on how much time the cars spend in unrestricted residential zones.

As the city gets more information about where car share vehicles spend their idle time, it has adjusted the fees it charges accordingly. With this new legislation, car share companies will pay the city $1,730 per car per year, up from $1,330. The change is largely due to an increase in the cost of parking in Residential Parking Zones (RPZs). The Committee argued that more money was needed to pay for the full costs of the RPZ program. Josh Feit did the math in his writeup if you’re interested. Car2Go’s Walter Rozenkranz spoke during the public comment period to say that the increase in fees “may result in increase in fees to our members.”

Under the new law, which will be voted on by the full council, up to 4 companies may apply for permits. Each company can get 500 permits, or 750 if they choose to expand their services to the entire city Limits (currently Car2Go’s service area excludes the far North and South ends of the city). That means that there could be as many as 3,000 car share vehicles available to city residents by year end. In practice, however, the number is likely to be much smaller. BMW, which operates Drive Now in several cities, is keen to expand to Seattle. Zipcar may also be investigating such a service, although it’s unlikely to launch this year, Councilmember O’Brien noted.

As a Car2Go member myself, I’d be excited to see more cars and more competition. I’ll be curious to see what the overlap in membership is. Will car share customers own 3-4 company cards, and hop to whatever service has one available? Or will different services appeal to different consumers? Will we see airline-like loyalty programs emerge? It will be interesting to watch.

If there’s one area I’d direct SDOT and Car2Go to work on, it’s making it more clear on the street where exactly car shares are permitted to park. The legislation spells it out pretty well, but I rarely have a copy of the Seattle Municipal Code with me when I’m circling Capitol Hill looking for a spot to ditch the car.

Martin did a great run-down of the Governor’s transportation proposal before the holidays.  There’s a lot of new highway construction in there that transit advocates and people who care about the future of the earth should be concerned about, but I think it’s important to distinguish between types of highway construction.

One thing most transit advocates agree upon is that transit should run in uncongested lanes (when not grade-separated of course) and that roads should be priced to help ensure that free-flow.  So it’s worth noting that about a quarter of the highway expansion money in the proposal would go primarily towards completing the system of express toll lanes on I-405.  Through downtown Bellevue, 2 of the 5 lanes in each direction would be tolled.  This is hugely significant, since the current HOV lane often fails to maintain consistent 45MPH speeds in the afternoon peak, hurting transit.

The first express toll lanes will open between Bellevue and Lynnwood this year.  The lower half, between Bellevue and Renton, is currently unfunded, but would presumably receive the bulk of the funding from Inslee’s proposal.  Completing these projects will create the largest stretch of congestion-priced roadway in the region, stretching from Auburn to Lynnwood.

Photo via user mspdude on Flickr

Last month King County Metro launched a new transparency/ridership campaign. The page is located here, it’s worth checking out.

While they provide their own bar charts showing the last year of growth, I took their provided data from the last 4 years and plugged it into the charts I regularly produce based on Sound Transit’s ridership reports. The results are startling. Seriously, wow. I don’t want to pat myself on the back too hard, but in terms of visualizing success, I haven’t seen stronger.

First a bit of refresher. In September 2012 KC Metro undertook a aggressive restructuring in Ballard and West Seattle around the introduction of Rapid Ride. These restructures were based on the County Council’s new service guidelines. And Metro’s restructures freakin’ produced. Yes, they were contentious. Highly contentious. Taking away transit, even lowly utilized transit, is a highly politicized action. However the results show that if you put those hours into high demand corridors you get amazing results. Assuming your goal is to provide the most amount of people the best possible transit options it works. It really, really, works. After looking at the below charts everyone reading this should write their KC councilmember and thank them for their courage and leadership.

To me, this seems to argue for more aggressive reorganizations. Fast, frequent, all day routes bring in riders. Who would have ever guessed? Hopefully now that Metro is in the position to be adding service they will put those hours where it will do the most good, the routes, corridors and services that people have voted for with their feet.

More charts below. Continue reading “New Metro Ridership Report – Up, Up, and Away”