Month: April 2015

More so than our neighbors to the north and south, a range of transit expansion options are before the Eastside. ST3 would almost certainly extend East Link to Downtown Redmond, but the Eastside is likely to have the revenue authority to do a great deal more. Unfortunately, a lack of consensus exists among elected officials, the transit community and the general public about what to do after completion of East Link. To a certain degree, this is reflected in the wide variety of projects studied by Sound Transit for the Eastside and SR 520 corridor.

To help unpack this question, several of us have been bouncing around ideas on what we think the overarching goals of a ST3 package should be. The possibilities include:

• Continue with Sound Move/ST2 projects including I-405 BRT and Link to Redmond. Advancing what has been started is important for the region. Redmond has been waiting for light rail since East Link planning began. I-405 is a central transportation corridor for the Eastside with a long-standing transit master plan. These long-anticipated transit investments need to move forward.
• Develop a high-capacity transit (HCT) network that strengthens the connection between all of the Eastside cities and Seattle. HCT needs to serve all Eastside cities including urban neighborhoods throughout each city. The cross-lake corridor is the strongest transit market on the Eastside and completion of East Link doesn’t obviate the need for improved transit service over SR-520.
• Leverage the Eastside Rail Corridor (ERC) for HCT service. The ERC, particularly between Kirkland and Bellevue, could be an exceptional resource for the Eastside. Sound Transit has an easement permitting transit use along this corridor and ST3 will likely be the best opportunity to use this corridor for HCT. The ERC, however, has a “last-half-mile” challenge: it does not penetrate the walkable urban cores of either Bellevue or Kirkland.
• Deliver meaningful HCT improvements within the ST3 time frame, including near-term congestion relief. Over and over again the voters have shown their support for transit, including near-term service improvements and long-term capital investment. Making sure ST3 provides timely benefits across the Eastside is important, particularly against a backdrop of double-digit increases in regional car travel times.

What do you think about these guiding principles? Do they resonate? And what’s the best way to achieve them? Sound off in the comment thread.

The Seattle City Council recently created a new Transit Advisory Board to oversee the city’s investments in transit. Applications to serve on this board are being accepted through Friday, May 1.

Seattle residents interested in serving on the board should submit a resume and a letter of interest to Bill LaBorde of the Seattle Department of Transportation at Bill.LaBorde@seattle.gov. STB readers, exposed to a system view of bus operations, are good candidates.

Last night, the initial ballot counts dropped for the Spokane Transit Authority’s Proposition 1, to fund STA Moving Forward. Prop 1 is down around 900 votes out of about 70,000 — 49.4% yes / 50.6% no — with about 8,000 ballots left to count. I don’t have any further insight into the precinct by precinct numbers, but informed locals suggest it’s passing in the city, and losing outside:

53.3% in the City of Spokane. 45.2% elsewhere. If you’re wondering, that doesn’t quite average out to 50%. #STA

— Adam McDaniel (@adamjmcdaniel) April 29, 2015

I’ll update this post as more news comes in. Here’s hoping urban procrastinators come through!

UPDATE 12:45: A nice map from the Spokesman-Review showing the precinct-by-precinct results.

UPDATE 17:55: The SR reports that late ballots did not significantly alter the overall vote difference. The measure is now failing 49.5%-50.5%, and while some ballots remain to be counted, the measure has almost certainly failed at this point.

My report on Sound Transit’s Conceptual ST3 study triggered a collective freakout, crushing STB’s former comment count record by a wide margin. Perhaps everyone is overreacting to a box-checking planning exercise; maybe the reaction will encourage better outcomes and they’ll claim that was the point all along; or perhaps enough stakeholders have decided on the plan that the future is (unofficially) already sewn up. It’s hard to tell from the outside.

Anyhow, because comment threads have a way of snowballing to the negative, and we’ve all had a weekend to reflect and cool down, here’s a little poll. Search your feelings and lodge an opinion.

Last week it was announced that Sound Transit has selected a developer to build atop the Capitol Hill light rail station. Since so many of our other light rail stations are sadly hemmed in by highways, constrained by density-opposing locals, or located next to giant sporting arenas, everyone seems to have pinned their hopes on Capitol Hill to deliver some actual transit-oriented development.

With all that scrutiny came intense pressure to build affordable housing, family-sized housing, a community center, a farmer’s market, and other amenities. The site became a vessel for every neighborhood group’s dreams. One developer decided it was too constraining and abandoned their bid.

While the selected proposal looks nice, it’s actually quite short for being next to a rail station. In Vancouver, 25 stories seems to be typical for development around SkyTrain stations, even outside of downtown.

But you don’t have to look all the way to Vancouver to see 20+ story residential buildings. In fact, just half a mile from Capitol Hill Station there are several tall residential towers going up.  Developers seem to have realized that, despite being worlds apart culturally, sleepy First Hill and buzzy Capitol Hill are, geographically speaking, actually kinda the same place. For example, 24-story 1321 Seneca will be just two blocks from Pike/Pine.

All of which leads to a funny/sad situation, in which the tall buildings are not where the station is.  First Hill has been zoned for high-rises for a long time, while Capitol Hill has not.  And so we end up with a lopsided neighborhood.

Of course, First hill was initially slated for a light rail station. And yes, the First Hill Streetcar (opening soon!) is supposed to ameliorate some of the disconnect.  Still, it would be ideal to have the most intense land use adjacent to light rail.

[This is the fourth and last in a series covering Spokane Moving Forward, the Spokane Transit Authority’s proposed ten-year plan to improve transit in the Spokane region, which will go to an areawide ballot tomorrow. Previously I discussed the proposed Central City Line, improvements for Cheney and the West Plains, and Core urban service in Spokane.]

In my first post about Spokane Moving Forward, I wrote of Spokane, “It’s the city for a huge geographic swath of the northern United States … the most populous urban area between Seattle and Minneapolis. Only Boise, population 208,000, and 350 miles to the south, comes close.” There was a time, though, when Spokane’s regional prominance was vested not only in the power of urban agglomeration, but in infrastructure: the railroad era. Before ubiquitous automobiles and paved roads, it was difficult to get far in northern Idaho or far-eastern Washington without going through Spokane.

The 1928 railroad map above, which captures the Washington rail network close to its apogee, tells the story. From Spokane, a knot of railways unraveled north up the grand valleys of the Columbia Mountains, strung west over the endless wheat country of the Columbia Plateau, and wove south into the myriad hills of the Palouse; but it was to the east, Coeur d’Alene, that the railways pointed like a bundle of arrows. The obtuse angle formed by Cheney, Spokane, and Coeur d’Alene has been the principal axis of urbanization and travel since the beginning of European settlement, and just like in Puget Sound, much of the pedestrian mobility we seek to enable today is merely an echo of that past.

With a population of about 45,000, about half the size of suburban Spokane Valley, Coeur d’Alene is the second-largest city within typical commute distance of Spokane. A sizable commuter population drives to the half-way city of Liberty Lake, the easternmost extent of today’s STA service, parks, and rides STA Route 174 express into the city. Conversely, as a lakeside resort town, Coeur d’Alene figures in the minds of Spokanites as a pleasant get-out-of-town day trip. There is therefore, considerable and longstanding interest on both sides of the state line, in an all-day interurban service that could connect Spokane and Coeur d’Alene.

Reality presents some fairly significant challenges to this idea. Any permanent service between Coeur d’Alene and and Spokane would require a financial partnership with Citylink, the tiny transit agency which provides hourly service to the towns east of the Idaho line. Such a partnership would require a major increase in Citylink’s budget, and it’s not yet clear where that money would come from. With an travel time of 35-40 minutes, a nonstop service would unavoidably have a high cost per passenger. An interurban service could reduce that cost and provide more connectivity with intermediate stops at Post Falls, Liberty Lake, and Spokane Valley, but each stop would likely require a deviation from the freeway, chipping away at the service’s speed and directness.

The Moving Forward ballot measure includes funds to operate a Spokane-Coeur d’Alene service on a pilot basis, although it will be several years before the pilot could take place, as the measure involves no debt financing, so in the early years, much of the revenue would be dedicated to capital projects. For all the challenges, there are good reasons to hope that such a pilot, if it happens, could eventually turn into a permanent feature: All the local governments involved, plus WSDOT, strongly support the idea, and like airport service, it’s an idea whose utility registers immediately, even to people who don’t habitually ride transit.

This concludes STB’s series on STA Moving Forward. The election is tomorrow. If you are voting in this election, get your ballot in as soon as possible; if you have friends or family who are voting, remind them!

Smashes, SMASHES! into that poor little car. :(

Alternative title could have been: Driver weaves around car sitting in the left turn lane, ignores the red light, tries to turn left from center lane, ignores train signal, inevitable happens.

It has come to my attention that even some STB staffers and commenters with kids and some who qualify for the senior-citizen ORCA were unaware they could order regular, youth, and senior ORCA cards via postal mail. Given that reality, it is unreasonable to expect that the general public knows this option exists. And so, today, I offer a public service announcement.

If you have kids 6-18, and they don’t qualify for a youth ORCA through the public school system or any other program, you can fill out this form, include age verification (copy of a student ID, a driver’s license, a state ID, or a birth certificate) and a $5 check, and mail them to the address listed on the form.

Likewise, any of you trying to get a senior (65+) ORCA just have to fill out the front side of this form, include a copy of one of the following — your state ID or driver’s license, your birth certificate, your passport, or any state or federal document that contains your name and date of birth — then mail these and the $3 check to:

Metro Transit
KSC-TR-0102
201 S Jackson St
Seattle, WA 98104-3856

Getting a regular full-fare ORCA is even easier. Fill out the form, include a check for $5, and mail it. You can also order the regular ORCA card online, or buy one at many locations all over King, Pierce, Snohomish, and Kitsap County.

For those trying to get a disabilities ORCA, a little more work is involved. You will need a Medicare card or proof of disability, $5 $3, and will need to go to one of the sites where the transit agencies sell all pass types. For Metro, that means visiting the King Street Center at 201 S. Jackson St between the hours of 8:30 and 4:30 on a regular business day (i.e. a weekday that is not a holiday).

For those who qualify for the ORCA LIFT (the low-income card), you will need to take income-verification documentation to one of the several sites that vet people for income qualification and give out LIFT ORCA cards. The LIFT ORCA is free. The fare is not.

If you are considering which card to get, the disabilities and senior ORCA (also known as the Regional Reduced Fare Permit) gets you the cheapest fare on all services that accept ORCA. The youth or LIFT ORCA get the same fare as each other, wherever LIFT is accepted (currently Metro, Kitsap Transit, Link Light Rail, the South Lake Union Streetcar, and the King County Water Taxis). However, the youth ORCA gets you a discounted fare on all services that accept ORCA. A complete list of current fares for all payer categories is here.

[This is the third in a series covering Spokane Moving Forward, the Spokane Transit Authority’s proposed ten-year plan to improve transit in the Spokane region, which will go to an areawide ballot on Tuesday. Previously I discussed the proposed Central City Line, and improvements for Cheney and the West Plains.]

Spokane’s two biggest transit corridors, Sprague and Division, will feel familiar to residents of Seattle or Tacoma: they are the old highways, just like Aurora or Pacific. Essays in the nascent craft of highway building circa 1930, these streets are wide, noisy and fast; but for much of their length they retain a street grid and a street wall (if not good sidewalks or safe crossing points), before transitioning to strip malls and box stores at the periphery. When 1970s freeways rendered* them obsolete as thoroughfares, people and businesses with money abandoned these streets to lower-income people, and the businesses, and the buses, which cater to them.

Connect Spokane, the Spokane Transit Authority’s long-term plan, identifies Sprague and Division, along with several other Spokane streets, as High Performance Transit corridors. STA’s HPT taxonomy lays out three types of HPT service (I described them in my last Moving Forward post, and you can see a complete map of the desired HPT network here), but essentially, in the medium term, the agency would like to get all urban HPT corridors up to a “lite BRT” service quality that’s something like King County’s RapidRide lines; in the long term, light rail or “heavy” BRT is contemplated for Sprague and Division.

The money required to achieve the full HPT network set forth in Connect Spokane is almost certainty not obtainable with the funding authority that remains available to STA under state law. Instead, for this ballot measure, STA has chosen three corridors to implement “HPT lite“: Division, Sprague, and Monroe-Regal, shown on the map above. A HPT lite treatment is a package of rider amenities, branding and reliability improvements, on a corridor that already meets, or is close to meeting, the frequency standards of the HPT network. Seattle riders, again, can think along the lines of RapidRide, although STA’s idea of rider amenity extends quite a bit beyond the bus stop, and includes building significant amounts of sidewalk in areas while have little or none — expensive and unsexy, but essential for the safety of riders.

Speaking only of service which can realistically compete with owning a (second) car — there are other, meritorious parts of Moving Forward that I won’t get to discuss — what the voters of Spokane will buy, if they pass this measure, is HPT lite radiating out of downtown on the major points of the compass; a flagship HPT line connecting the ridership centers of Spokane Community College, Gonzaga University, and downtown; an interurban HPT line connecting Cheney, West Plains, and downtown; and (non-HPT) frequent service to provide a couple of crucial crosstown connections, and radial service on the remaining points of the compass. A person who lives and works in Spokane (or Cheney) could get around for their daily needs on that network.

Finally, on Monday, I’ll discuss the most tentative, but most attention-grabbing idea in STA Moving Forward: a possible interurban connection between Spokane and Coeur d’Alene.

* I’m cheating a bit with Division: this is the current north-south highway. In the not-too-distant future, it will likely be replaced by the North Spokane Freeway.

At yesterday’s ST board meeting the most interesting presentation was a staff discussion of an imminent conceptual study that will help inform board decisions in an ST3 package. It’s the first document that scopes projects based on overall package sizes.

The stated purpose is not to create a project list, but instead to evaluate certain package sizes as required by statute. There are four levels of spending, from an almost negligible amount of rail, to using the whole $15 billion revenue request (which amounts to about $25 billion of projects in year of expenditure dollars). The higher spending plans allow variable amounts of emphasis on completing the light rail “spine” (Everett/Redmond/Tacoma) vs. additional corridors in Seattle and on the Eastside.

Staff will evaluate the representative packages for each funding level and spine emphasis according to the following criteria:

• Completing the Link Light Rail Spine
• Ridership
• Connecting the Region’s Designated Centers with HCT
• Socio-Economic Equity
• Integration with other transit operators/transportation systems
• Multi-modal access
• Promoting transit-supportive land use and TOD
• Advancing “logical next steps” projects beyond the spine; within financial capacity

Both the slides themselves and the ST press release are emphatic that this is focused on high-level tradeoffs, and “the scenarios are not draft system plans and do not encompass all of the projects that will be considered for a ballot measure.” And that’s a good thing, because there are possibly fatal problems with all of them:

Continue reading “Sound Transit’s Conceptual Study: Should You be Worried?”

Maybe I just hang out with the wrong kind of riffraff, but it seems every couple of months I find myself in a conversation about whether or not automobiles should be allowed on Pike Place. Once and (likely not) for all I’ll respond.

Cars belong on Pike Place.

Yes, I said it. I don’t think we should ban automobiles from Pike Place.

Saturday my family and I joined some friends downtown for an aquarium visit. Walking through the market with my stroller, I of course used the street, the sidewalks being too crowded. Hundreds of people were doing the same. Cars, bikes, strollers, people, all jumbled together but surprisingly no mass casualty situation emerged.

Judging by the ‘WTF?!? How the hell do I get out of here!?!’ expression of most drivers I made eye contact with, many did not mean to be there and wished they were anywhere else. However, there are legitimate reasons for driving on Pike Place. Maybe you are dropping off someone with mobility issues, or you’ve got a dinner party and don’t want to haul 2 cases of wine from Pike and Western Wine Shop up the hill and back home on Link, or maybe you even work for a business in the market (yes it’s not just a tourist photo op, but an actual market) that needs a delivery.

As long as automobile drivers recognize the priority of non-motorized users (which they obviously do in Pike Place), what is gained by banning automobiles? The only change I would make to Pike Place would be to either lower the sidewalks or raise the street. In Seattle’s only real woonerf* it would be nice if the street engineering matched the usage. Aside from that, leave it alone, why fix what isn’t broken?

*when people ask me what a woonerf is, I say ‘Pike Place’ and they instantly get it. Seriously. Not an exaggeration. How else would you describe the concept to a Seattleite?

• As part of a broader “9 1/2 block strategy” to crack down on low-level crime, the city and Metro will temporarily relocate the bus stops at 3rd/Pike in early May. The stops will be moved a block south, between Union and Pike. ($)
• In a unrelated closure due to construction on Virginia St, Route 36 will skip 3rd/Pike and Route 40 will skip 3rd/Virginia, both until June.
• There’s a lot on tap at the Sound Transit Board meeting today: selecting a final alignment and stations for Lynnwood Link, the East Link MOU, Capitol Hill TOD, and a first look at potential projects in the System Plan that will make up ST3. Watch live here at 1:30pm.
• Sound Transit has selected Gerding Edlen as the Master Developer for all the TOD sites at Capitol Hill Station. 418 apartments are planned.
• Planners love bikeshare. The APA conference (combined with great weather) meant that Pronto set ridership records over the weekend.
• Stakeholders have come to a broad agreement on the design for the relocated Tacoma Amtrak station at Freighthouse Square. But the only architecturally interesting feature, a clock tower, is being resisted by the FRA.
• Your summer forecast: construction.
• WSDOT is holding an open house on May 5 to discuss the latest plans for redeveloping the JBLM corridor. The gist: adding HOV in both directions, adding a bike path, rebuilding 3 of the 4 JBLM intersections, building a local access road, and keeping the ability to double track the Point Defiance Bypass.
• SDOT is also hosting an open house the following day, May 6, to display updated plans for Madison BRT.
• Goodbye, First Hill McDonalds. Hello, 17-story tower.

This is an open thread. 

[Update 11:15am: The Seattle Light Rail Review Panel agrees that 130th is important too.]

At tomorrow’s Sound Transit Board meeting, the agenda includes final approval of Resolution No. R2015-05, “Selecting the route, profiles and station locations for the Lynnwood Link Extension.” As it stands, the preferred alternative has a station at N. 145th St., but none at N. 130th St. You can let whichever board member(s) represent you know what you think of this.

Sound Transit’s own Final Environmental Impact Study (FEIS) showed, somewhat confusingly, that although 145th alone would attract 600 more riders than 130th alone, if both stations were present most people would select the latter. Moreover, the study did not seem to consider the relative ease of bus access via 130th, unclogged by cars trying to access the freeway, which will dramatically affect the plausibility of cheaply delivering riders. STB has hosted two extended arguments for this station.

Having both stations would be fine, but really if there is to be only one it should be at 130th. one of the two stations has to be deferred, it should be 145th.

In 2012, Metro sponsored a study of parking ratios for multi-family developments in urban King County. By counting vehicles parked overnight, the Right-Size Parking study created a model of current parking needs and demonstrated that parking is 40% oversupplied.

Several pilot demonstration projects were developed in partnership with various cities. However, only one, in Kirkland, made recommendations for changes in policy. It hasn’t gone well. The challenges encountered point to the difficulties in reducing suburban parking requirements.

Fundamentally, right-size parking is a conservative approach. It does not defer to developers to build what the market requires. (Suburban cities are too concerned with spillover parking to be comfortable with that). Neither does it look forward to a less car-dependent future. It only brings parking minimums into line with current use.

Kirkland’s base parking requirements are high, far above even comparable suburban communities. They’re so dated that nobody remembers how they were derived. In downtown, 1 stall per bedroom is required, with a 1.3 minimum per unit. Most other neighborhoods have a 1.7 requirement per unit. Up to another 0.5 stalls per unit are required for guest parking. But overnight parking counts found just 1.27 parked vehicles per apartment. Indeed, the average multi-family unit only has 1.57 residents, so the code requires more parking than there are residents.

Continue reading “Right-Sizing Parking”

The original Mark I trains still sound the same but the areas around the station have developed greatly.