Our neighbors to the north are having a transportation referendum that could significantly expand transit options across all of Metro Vancouver. This video shows why it matters. Vancouver is a model for transit that Seattle should look up to.

57 Replies to “Sunday Open Thread: Our Story. Our Future.”

    1. for 4 and 75 it’s a start. Such a cruddy area to board at interstate and lombard. need to increase weekday frequency; once crunch loading occurs here it can be a miserable experience.

      1. I am all to familiar with the mess in that area. Lotsa stuff would be good to do. I’d like to see either a few added 75 or equivalent across the north side that would help feed the MAX station, or a better direct St. Johns to downtown route on Willamette Blvd and Greely.

        MAX can deliver a lot more passengers to Interstate Avenue than the 75 can handle. The now what? part of that needs to be addressed.

    2. Oh, and the length of time available on “transfers” (these days this is a date stamped ticket) is increased to 2 1/2 hours.

      1. Glen,

        Do you think it would be better if TriMet invested in articulated busses as KCM does? Personally I like that idea, but a better plan in my opinion would be adding double decker busses similar to what the RTC in Las Vegas has in it’s fleet. This way you increase seating capacity without adding that much length to vehicles. These enviro 500’s come in 40′, 42′ & 45′ lengths.

      2. I’m not sure articulateds would work too well on the 75. They would have to rearrange the stops for longer buses. It’d be really difficult to do parts of that route, like the traffic circle at Chavez & Glisan, with an articulated without blocking traffic.

        The other problem is it isn’t the entire route that has capacity issues.

        I’d love to see some double talks here. The 14 becomes much less of a service hour sink that way. There was an article in the Oregonian some months back that said they would have to go through a process of measuring all the utility wire heights to do that.

      3. Double Talls are not very satisfactory for in-city service. You’d be surprised how many of London’s Red Buses run around stuffed to the gills on the first deck while the upper deck is almost empty. People just don’t like to climb the stairs.

        On a commuter route where they will sit there for thirty to forty minutes, they are happy to do so. But if it’s only ten or fifteen minutes they tend to crowd the lower deck. So off-and-on inner city routes largely waste the extra capacity.

      4. Routes that have a mixture of people going further and shorter distances would probably work out well for a double tall though.

        Picture something like KCM 8 that takes 45 minutes just in city, for example.

      5. Not to mention it’s really painful to get off of the second floor on a double tall. If you’re going to be on the bus for a while, going up to the second floor isn’t so bad, but if you’re only on there for a short period of time, or most of the bus gets off at the same time, being stuck on the second floor can be a pain.

      6. I was in Vegas last week and I noticed how since I never was on there for any length of time that I NEVER went to the top deck of the deuce. Not when I get off in a few stops. On community transit when I go up there I jump at the chance.

  2. I just binged “Most expensive city in North America.” Vancouver is #1 on the list. It’s also one of the most densely populated cities in North America. I was told the denser a city it, the more affordable it is. Could Bing be wrong?

    1. The more desirable the place, the more expensive it is. Witness how completely unaffordable the San Juan Islands have become, with virtually no density at all to speak of.

      1. Bingo! And VanBC is an incredibly desirable place to live. It is the one city in NA I would trade for seattle (If I could). And the food is fantastic.

      2. It is also the area of Canada that has the most mild winters. Permanently moving to California or Florida isn’t an option for most.

        Maybe we could sell Puerto Rico to Canada to change that?

      3. A few years ago there was a baseball player who bought a home a few blocks from me while he was with the Mets. He was originally from a suburb of Vancouver & his wife is a Seattle native. He played for the M’s before retiring.

        I’m referring to Jason Bay.

    3. I bet the more dense a city is, the more affordable it is compared to if that same city were less dense, not compared to some other city that’s less dense.

      1. It’s not just density, rather you need to ask dense with what kind of properties. Are we referring to walkable neighborhoods with 24-hour activity? Or are we talking about low income areas without community support systems & food deserts.

    4. It’s the availability of housing relative to demand. Houston builds houses readily, so there’s never a bottleneck and prices don’t spike. Seattle should have built enough units to house the incoming tech workers without squeezing the existing residents, but it didn’t, so the vacancies went to the highest bidders and lower-income people were shut out. The reason not enough housing was built was restrictive zoning, and failure to recognize affordability as a major problem that must be addressed now. Vancouver is the Los Angeles of Canada, so it gets a lot of rich foreigners’ money. That adds a new factor because rich foreigners are endless, they could buy the whole city and there would still be more of them. The best thing Seattle can do is try to stay out of that. Take a page from Lesser Seattle, “It’s ugly here and it rains all the time. All those Seattle coolness fads fizzle out quickly. You wouldn’t want a condo downtown there’s not enough to do. You’ll be happier in Vancouver or San Francisco or New York.” However, what people also look for is schools, and those excellent public schools on the Eastside attract people, and there’s not much we can do about that except make the schools bad.

    5. There’s another factor in the calculation, Sam. In places where prices are high by the standards people in this country are used to, workers are sometimes paid wages to match them.

      In Sweden, it’s frowned upon to tip waiters- because their wages make extra gratuitous, capricious embellishments unnecessary. And the service levels correspond to the wage levels.

      I don’t like the word “affordable”- because in common usage it means quality brought down to the level that badly-paid people can pay.

      Instead, average wages should pay not only enough to live someplace comfortable and enjoyable- but enough that people can move, any time they want, to some other place equally good.

      And same for employment.

      I’ve heard the term “poverty” defined as the inability to fully participate in public life as a citizen by reason of lack of money. Good plank for both major parties and some new ones as well:

      “There shall be no such thing as ‘Working Poor’ in the United States of America.”

      Mark Dublin

    6. >>I was told the denser a city it, the more affordable it is.<<

      Ummmmm…..no. What idiot told you that? Dense cities are far more expensive than sparse cities.

      1. CC, he’s trying to satirize the explanation often given on this site that increased density acts as a relief valve for housing prices.

    7. “Bing” is ALWAYS wrong, Sam, simply because it uses three year old reverse engineered Google technology, while Google has rewritten the code three or four times since.

  4. Stemming poverty in Dallas requires rethinking mobility.

    http://www.dallasnews.com/news/transportation/20150306-stemming-poverty-in-dallas-requires-rethinking-mobility.ece

    Interesting article. One low-income transit user says she wants a car to improve her job prospects. Another low-income transit user says he’s limited to jobs on transit lines, and this prevents him from reaching higher paying jobs in outlying cities. But he doesn’t want a car because the expenses will eat away at any salary gains he would achieve.

    1. Have you looked at the Dallas population density?
      http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas–Fort_Worth_metroplex

      634 per square mile puts their metro area at 1/6th the density of Federal Way.
      http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Way,_Washington

      At the population density of Dallas, Seattle would need to blanket everything west of Yakima with freeways and parking lots. This would not be cheap at all to do.

      So, sprawl is definitely not the answer for creating economical living conditions. It just looks that way when you look at buying a house that is a two hour drive from anywhere. The housing is cheap because no one with any possible alternative wants to make that sort of trip every day.

    2. Sam, if you want to have an interview with a native Texan and lifelong Dallasite who lived in that sprawl, hit me up sometime. Sprawl isn’t the answer to poverty. (Witness how Plano, where two new, major corporate campuses are being built, is an inner-ring suburb that has had light rail service for a decade with density around that station to match. Nobody’s moving lots of jobs to Justin.)

  5. Thanks for this video, Oran. But Sam, look at the two people’s choices and situations.

    A woman making too little money moves to the suburbs because she cannot afford to live in the city. An old pattern in Europe. And the reason- along with simple European racism-as ominous as ours- that so many young Europeans are leaving to join ISIS.

    Which indicates that at this stage for us, we had better start taking strong active steps to see that the price of beneficial density isn’t pricing the majority of our people out of the cities.

    But also: The man has no choice but to use transit- what would he do if there were no transit to use? Increasingly, a poor person’s only choice is to move to the suburbs- where work itself demands a car, whether one can afford it or not.

    Again, while choice of transit modes is debatable, there is no arguing against the fact that the discussion has to start with assuring everyone’s ability to earn enough money to have a choice where to live.

    Canada? Forty-five years ago, young men from the US fled there to escape a forced service in a war that probably wrecked our own country. And and the pollutionary wealth-controlled political system increasingly responsible our the wreckage of our country.

    Now, for a very long time, Canada’s Prime Minister has been someone whose career has been in the oil industry- whose oil used to more accurately be called “tar”.

    For both his country and ours, “cities in lands of green” are rapidly becoming “gated communities in a desert of crap.” From which no one one has a place to flee to for a decent life. So overriding question on both sides of the border is: “What are we going to do about it?”

    Mark Dublin

      1. Already called The Hague about that, Glenn. Sentencing anybody to spend a minute in Texas is a human rights violation second only to giving Texas back to Mexico.

        Imagine Mexico’s UN ambassador in tears as he pleads for military assistance to save the millions of Mexicans fleeing in terror across the Guatemalan border to save themselves from a worse fate than ISIS.

        Like everybody having to think what Billy Joe Jim Bob is in Spanish every time they meet somebody.

        Marcos

  6. Don’t let anyone fool you. There’s sprawl in Vancouver, and low-income people are forced to live an hour or two from downtown, just like in car-centric cities. And that’s taking public transit! At night when there’s little traffic! So maybe more and better transit doesn’t solve everything? One woman’s transit hell in wonderful Vancouver.

    http://thetyee.ca/News/2015/03/05/Vancouver-Transit-Odyssey/

    1. Okay, so Vancouver is both too dense, and not dense enough. Got it. Very consistent argumentation. Proud of you.

    2. Over a lot of years spending vacations observing transit systems for lessons that Seattle can use, I’ve come to this conclusion:

      In any country where the average person can afford an automobile, in the same kinds of places and around the same times, car traffic will be seriously slowed down.

      So the statement is true that in many or most situations, the best transit cannot “cure” congestion. But what good transit can do is assure that as few people as possible get involuntarily stuck in it.

      I think the truth came to me- like the time in the church when Blues Brother John Belushi saw the light and went cartwheeling down the aisle like a circus bear- aboard a packed BART train headed for Richmond.

      Passing a motionless freeway full of cars on a train high above sixty mph. Without BART, if the freeway hadn’t been structured another storey, the cars would have done it themselves.

      Incidentally, my train was part of service recovered in fifteen minutes from a fire one station south from Embarcadero. The freeway didn’t need a fire to be jammed much longer.

      In addition, though, it’s asking a lot of transit to be sure that a worker at the bottom of the pay scale on night shift can use it comfortably. In this individual situation, several things come to mind:

      First, as many residences as possible should be built around every station- which is now being done. But also, I wonder what would happen if taxi service became part of the transit fleet. Could fares be any lower, and service better?

      But one way or another, most of the all the problems in this woman’s life would become easier to solve if her wages were what her skills should earn her.

      And if the damned student loan could be either forgiven or adjusted in recognition for the public good achieved by her use of her schooling. There used to be a time when Government paid for people’s education and training as a public utility like water and firefighting.

      And when business was proud to pay the taxes for it because the arrangement freed business of having to do this work themselves. Thereby securing their own profits as they provide what well-paid people choose to have. By having a strong public sector to provide what people need to have. And for business to stay profitable.

      Mark Dublin

      1. The exception is that there are cities in Europe that have been able to get transit systems so they are competitive with driving. It requires a good base of a regional rail network that can operate at significantly faster speeds than driving. Then, you need good quality feeders.

        Trams in Strasbourg operate at over twice the average speed of the streetcar (doesn’t matter if we are talking about Portland or SLU), so they are reasonably competitive with driving on city streets.

        If you can’t get the good quality feeders right, then you’re never going to get there with the regionals as the even with quick regional service, you can’t make up enough time with thunderously slow connections at each end to be competitive with driving.

        Those cities in Europe that have figured out how to be reasonably competitive with driving have increasing percentage of trips by transit. Those that haven’t figured it out yet have a declining percentage of trips on transit.

    3. Sam, I’m concerned about your health. Perhaps you need glasses? The article you linked to specifically says that the lack of late night transit is a big problem in Metro Vancouver. Even the rider profiled by the article says that more and better transit is the answer.

  7. A follow-up question from the epically long U-Link restructures article: I noticed that that the 49 is proposed to use Madison. Does this mean no 60 ft buses on the 49? Just curious as to your thoughts or are the new buses better with the break over angles along Madison?

    1. Two thoughts:

      One is that the 60′ coaches aren’t needed with Link and the FHSC.

      The Second is perhaps the new coaches can indeed handle the break over angles.

      1. When we visit Vancouver, we do the entire trip by transit. Metro to King Street Station, Amtrak to Vancouver, the wonderfully inexpensive day passes on SkyTrain and buses. We discovered that a store that used to be in downtown Vancouver had relocated to a part of New Westminster with which we were entirely unfamiliar. It took a long SkyTrain ride and a relatively short bus ride to get there. And that neighborhood we’d never heard of is denser, with well-appointed shops lining the streets for blocks and blocks, than anywhere in the State of Washington. it makes Capitol Hill look like a suburb. And it’s not served by SkyTrain. From the store fronts, the vast majority of the residents are new immigrants, mainly from various Asian countries, but it’s the opposite of a food desert and while not wealthy, it’s prosperous. It’s not a unique place for Metro Vancouver. Yet we have nothing like it here. It’s what Tukwila might have tried to be if they hadn’t fought light rail going through their town.

      2. And then there’s North Vancouver.

        In addition to its own iconic “mini-downtown”, complete with skyscrapers and marketplace attractions and a high-volume transit terminal, North Vancouver boasts a fully urbanized, three-dimensional continuum of high-density housing and local many-per-block service-industry businesses stretching for more than a mile and a half northward. The outermost reaches of Lonsdale are palpably more active with pedestrians and commerce than the dead center of Alaska Junction.

        The City of North Vancouver (proper) is home to 50,000 people at a density of 10,550 per square mile), with well-used gridded bus connections to its own even more populous suburbs.

        And yet no reasonable person thinks North Vancouver is going to get the multi-billion-dollar rail crossing that West Seattleites see as their divine right.

        Seattle’s definition of urbanity and sense of urban scale are, quite simply, off to an egregious degree.

    2. I can’t imagine Metro downgrading the 49 without proof that articulated buses are half empty. The 49 regularly fills up from a single stop at 4th & Pike and it goes up from there. A third or a half of those will switch to Link, but others will probably take their place after two or three years. That’s what happens in cities that add rail and maintain complementary frequent buses: both of them are well used after an initial drop. Many more apartments are being built, and better transit will both encourage people to go to Capitol Hill and to take transit there. I suspect Glenn would say the same about Portland and MAX.

      1. It’s hard to compare.

        Westside MAX? It was built on the old Oregon Electric Railway main line from Beaverton to Hillsboro. There never were any true parallel transit routes because there were no true parallel roads for the bus service to run on in the first place. Tualatin Valley Highway was the closest, and that was far to the south. Route 57 got chopped at Beaverton Transit Center as there was no need for it to go to downtown Portland. On Tualatin Valley Highway the 57 ridership probably never showed any sort of decline because most of the areas served are so far from MAX. The Washington Park route (currently turned into a route 63 and a seasonal 83) suffered the irreparable losses in ridership with the new zoo MAX station and should probably be completely rethought (again).

        When airport MAX was built, the 12 was completely altered to serve a completely different area that had never been served by transit before or previously had inadequate transit service. The 12 stopped serving the airport completely, but you can transfer between the 12 and Airport MAX at Maywood Park if you want. So, there is no way to really know what would have happened with that had it continued on its old route.

        Interstate Avenue MAX has stations that are frequent enough that there is really no need for a directly parallel bus route. The 5 completely went away. Service to downtown Vancouver previously supplied by the 5 became handled by the tail end of a C-Tran core route, and to serve Hayden Island they extended the 6 across the bridge. Other than the eliminated 5 I don’t think any route really took a hit in ridership.

        The Green Line parallels the 72, but the 72 is a heavily used connector route between a bunch of other routes. I expected to see less passengers on it due to MAX being a somewhat parallel (approx. 15 blocks further east) faster connection between all those east-west routes. However, there was no real impact as far as I can tell. Whatever the 72 might have lost to those going longer distances on the Green Line were replaced by those going to destinations local to the 72.

        With these types of alterations in service happening after the MAX lines start it is difficult to say what happens to parallel bus lines since there really isn’t any such thing.

    3. I hear the new buses still won’t be able to use Madison in regular service (they may be OK for one-off trips). So no 60-footers on the 49. Link will certainly take away a few of the 49’s passengers, and Metro must be calculating that Link + the frequency increase will bring loads down to acceptable levels.

  9. Yes! Sam, Mark, keep it up! Pure gold! I love it!

    Like ive said before, you two need to be on radio!

    1. Just so neither of us has to be either David Brooks or EJ Dionne. Sam can be Larry King, however, as long as I get to be Max Ferguson, the Nova Scotian Canadian Broadcasting Corporation talk show host- who unfortunately died.

      In the mid ’60’s when CNC was Radio Free Europe broadcasting to the captive peoples of the United States, Max did sketches where he did howlingly funny voice imitations of the politicians every Canadian knew.

      But matters at home first. Pioneer Square still needs a skilled waiter with a big gold key around his neck that is also a can opener to recommend the latest vintage Night Train and a piquant Prestone to the connoisseurs crashed out on benches and in alleys.

      And I’m still trying to find out, for the sake of science and public health, what kind of roasted Spanish leather footware is paired with an adult wine that tastes like a blackboard eraser.

      Also have to learn what French is for “Down the Hatch!”

      Mark

  10. That’s a really well-made Vancouver video.

    A question: Anyone know what the shuttle bus signed “Center Park” is all about? I see it some weekends in Columbia City and Mt. Baker.

    1. Seattlehousing.org website:
      “Located in the northern end of the Rainier Valley, Center Park provides living accommodations for physically or mentally challenged individuals and their caretakers and is completely wheelchair accessible. QFC and Grocery Outlet are located nearby, as are Martin Luther King Jr. Park and Colman Playground. In addition, the on-site STAR Center offers an inclusive computer lab with adaptive technology for people with disabilities.”

  11. Random infrastructure question: Which agency owns the poles that trolleybus wire hangs on? I’m referring to the metal poles, not any wooden poles that might be used (I haven’t seen any but just in case). Originally I thought it was the county but I see school zone signs, cable television wire, traffic monitoring cameras, and other things hanging from them so now I’m wondering if it’s the city and the county has the right to use them.

    Any ideas?

    1. I suspect that the city owns them. NB that trolley wire also “hangs” from eyelets on private buildings that are required to have them.

  12. And by the way, that’s CBC. 1965 unfortunately keeps getting to be a longer time ago.

    Mark

  13. The proposed Route 38 should use Pike Street instead of Pine. That way it could serve the northbound Broadway stop just south of Pine Street. That would give people wishing to travel from the Broadway/Pike/Pine area to the Broadway/Roy area three options:

    49
    60
    38

    And eventually (in a few years) the streetcar.

  14. Has anyone else had problems with completing the Metro restructuring survey. I have started it three times and each time it just vanishes after asking for my opinion on Alternative 2.

  15. I agree, Vancouver is a model. They don’t spend as long on public process as the Seattle area does. I think they got their light rail extension to Vancouver airport completed quicker than Sound Transit did.
    One of the successes of Vancouver is having one transit agency. Instead of having years of meetings amongst stakeholders with different objectives, they speak with one voice. Here in Puget Sound, we have the equivalent of several legislatures, each with the foremost aim of protecting their own turf/jobs. It’s no wonder that ORCA was delivered years late and how much of a challenge it must be to program in the fare policies and changes to them from several different agencies instead of just one.

    Check out this recent article that was a rebuttal to the “no” campaign’s criticism of Trans-Link.http://www.vancitybuzz.com/2015/02/no-transit-tax-myths-lies-translink/

    Then, realize that we pay just two of our transit agency chiefs – sound and community – almost what Mr. Jarvis is pulling down (pierce and metro are sub-$200K).

    I’m in the minority here, but I believe that there should be minimums for transparency and accountability rather than leaving it up to the agencies to decide what they “need” and what’s best for us. That’s when you find millions of dollars – as Metro did in their audits – or discover financial deficits that need drastic service cuts to remedy, as Island Transit did. I’d sure be more comforted, as I believe most taxpayers who support these endeavors, if they knew that regular, independent performance audits were conducted and findings released, if there were minimum levels of disclosure (e.g., meetings online, staff reports, project progress, etc.), and where proposals for new money were accompanied by clarity in costs, projects promised, and follow-up progress reports.

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