Both King County Metro and Sound Transit will be conducting a flurry of public outreach this month. Metro is finally climbing out of its multi-year revenue hole and is in a position to start thinking about how to grow service for the first time in a long time. Sound Transit, meanwhile, has a little initiative called ST3 they’d like you to weigh in on, as alluded to in Monday’s guest post. There will be multiple opportunities for public commentary, online and in-person. Here’s the Metro site and here’s Sound Transit’s. Four of the six open houses will be joint ST/Metro affairs. There’s a wealth of information at both sites.
Found a bug in Metro’s survey:
“Indicate what percentage of resources you would allocate to each type of service.”
The survey won’t allow two service types to have the same percentage, so you have to split resources 50/30/20 instead of 40/40/20.
Bug notwithstanding, be forewarned that the survey is extremely vague.
What’s more, it gives you no idea how much service of each type 10%, 20%, or whatever amount of resources will buy. If I allocate 40% to frequent service (say), how large a Frequent Network will that buy us under the current budget?
Incidentally, the same bug lets you allocate well north of 100% of service in total
Thanks for spotting the glitch! All fixed now. You can select the same value for more than one response. We appreciate everyone’s feedback!
Rochelle Ogershok
Metro
I’ll be at the Sound Transit meeting at midday on June 25.
What’s the prognosis looking like for ST3 at this point, anyway? The fact that they’re having these outreach meetings and sending out mailers and so forth is encouraging, but have we heard anything from the legislature at this point?
The bill is still in play as of May 29. It’ll prob pass this session bc the legislators want to go home. You can follow the bill on the WaLeg website: ST3 is in bill ESSB 5987.
Looks like we have a real subway! Love this.
I will be at the Everett meeting at the 18th. Being I have three photo assignments between the 19th & 20th, it might be a while before I post a write-up of it.
But figured you’d want to know. Closer to the 18th, I’ll post a North by Northwest special so folks can plant questions in my mind.
Everyone who goes to ST’s public meeting needs to bring up the PSRC Ballard numbers. We need the updated numbers ASAP to make rational decisions.
I would like to plug Metro’s survey. It’s on the dense side but that’s because it gets to the heart of the trade offs necessary when planning a transit system.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/kcmetrovision2
I’d like to see this approach usher in a permanent habit of the two agencies working together. However, I do question the value of public surveys in general in regard to technical projects.
Probably the worst failing with the Monorail project was its demand that voters decide mechanical and structural questions about which the average person had no knowledge whatever.
At this stage of our planning, a year or two of concerted effort should be spent informing people, in layman’s language, about aspects like like vehicle specs, construction techniques, geology and the like.
The more people understand about real world realities underlying every transit project, the more valuable subsequent surveys will be.
Mark Dublin
While joint public outreach is good, there is a risk. Many citizens don’t understand why there are two agencies with two different boards and two different funding sources. If each has a separate station, they will naturally be asking why the transit system is integrated.
With Sounder and Express, the public “gets” the difference. However, as U-Link opens and Link becomes more established with Metro transit integration, the differences are much more blurred. How the two agencies show a seamless system to the public is going to be interesting.