August 2015 – Page 2 – Seattle Transit Blog

North King Cities Focus on Three Points for ST3

August 24, 2015August 20, 2015 by Martin H. Duke

North 145th St, Shoreline (Google Street View)

In the institutional comment on Sound Transit 3 (ST3) from King County cities north of Lake Washington, the “522 Transit Now” coalition effectively rallied cities, the legislative delegation, King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski, universities, and private citizens around three requirements:

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) on SR 523 (N 145th St.) to connect the cities of Shoreline, Lake Forest Park, Bothell, and Kenmore to the light rail station.
BRT on SR522 towards downtown, and planning for light rail on that corridor in the future.
Structured parking on SR522, especially in the town centers of Bothell, Kenmore, and Lake Forest Park. The Lake Forest Park letter highlights the walkability challenges due to “natural features [that] prevent gridded streets” as a driver of parking demand.

These three points are strikingly consistent in almost all letters to Sound Transit from these areas.

Shoreline requested 10 minute and 15 minute headways in the peak and all-day, respectively. It says that although “Shoreline currently has no official ownership” of 145th, “it is willing to address access problems” to make the Link station successful. Multiple letters talked about transit lanes and other speed and reliability improvements. Encouragingly, the joint letter from all four cities (p.102) says HCT is important to “provide diverse opportunities for people to live without cars.”

Somewhat late in the game, these areas have figured out that organizing is the key to gaining priority at Sound Transit. Although park-and-rides aren’t as cost-effective per rider as other projects, the BRT proposals are quite worthy. Unfortunately, Shoreline, Lake Forest Park, and all of SR523 are in the North King subarea. To the extent that Sound Transit adheres to subarea equity, many of these projects will be stacked against some of the most coveted and most expensive projects in the entire ST3 package.

What Snohomish County Wants in ST3

August 24, 2015August 24, 2015 by Martin H. Duke

In the ST3 project list comments, Edmonds, Everett, Mountlake Terrace, Snohomish County, and Community Transit all sent their input. Here the key headlines:

Everyone Wants the Spine. All the letters cited extending light rail to Everett as a top priority, and both Lynnwood and Everett expressed a preference for service to the 55,000 jobs at Paine Field. The County supported Paine Field but hedged a bit, suggesting alternate options and alignments “should be retained… until funding and financing options are determined.”

Lynnwood and Everett also emphasized the extension beyond Everett Station to North Everett to access Everett Community College, Providence Regional Medical Center, and other educational institutions.

Interestingly, Lynnwood was articulate about all of these requests, suggesting perceived reverse-peak demand. It cited the jobs at Paine Field, potential commercial flights, and a plausible location for a maintenance facility as discriminators for the Paine Field alignment.

Lynnwood Embraces Urbanism. Lynnwood asked for three more stations: City Center, Alderwood, and Ash Way*. Encouragingly, for the first two the letter states that “Little or no on-site parking would be needed or even desirable” because the city prefers walkability, transit access, and to “increase development density.”

Everett Doesn’t. Everett’s letter announced it “does not support and will oppose” an SR 99 alignment because Swift already serves it, and SR 99 is a “fully developed, long-standing commercial center,” instead favoring an alignment that mostly hugs freeways. That they would consider Evergreen Way a finished product is, frankly, astounding in 2015.

Continue reading “What Snohomish County Wants in ST3”

Sunday Open Thread: BART’s Next 40 Years

August 23, 2015August 16, 2015 by Oran Viriyincy

Video is about renewing infrastructure and rolling stock but don’t forget about the operating plan.

Everett Transit Service Change Tomorrow

August 22, 2015August 23, 2015 by Matthew Johnson

Everett Transit, the aunt-who-moved-to-Florida-before-you-were-born member of the Seattle Transit family has it’s fall service change tomorrow, August 23rd. I’ve only used ET about a dozen times so cannot comment much on the particulars, but I would like to praise the underlying philosophy of the changes. Unproductive tails, trips and routes are being cut with the hours reinvested in core service. In fact Everett Transit will now have its first all day (well 8 am to 6 pm) 15 minute frequency route after this shakeup (Route 7). Bravo!

Service Change: Effective August 23, 2015

Changes include:
Route 7 – frequency is increased weekdays and Saturday, added trips
Routes 4, 5 – schedule changes and added trips
Routes 2, 5, 12, 17 – select trips eliminated
Route 18 – added trips
Route 701 – route eliminated
Route 3 – View Ridge loop eliminated
Route 17 – Mobile Country Club loop eliminated

Holiday service is restored on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day, reduced on Day after Thanksgiving.

Here is a link to the new schedule book.

Don’t Listen to the Times: East Link Will Be Safe

August 22, 2015August 22, 2015 by Zach Shaner

Over the weekend Mike Lindblom had an in depth piece discussing East Link’s need for an additional $20m for engineering the I-90 bridge section of East Link, the world’s first floating bridge featuring rail transit. The contract with Parsons Brinckerhoff will be expanded – from $36M to $56M – to solve the final 8 (of 23) technical issues that WSDOT raised in a 2008 letter. The $20M will be paid out of $97M in unspent surplus engineering funds at Sound Transit’s disposal.

While there was some disappointment on the Board at the additional cost, and some admittal of inefficient workflows and delayed problem solving of some East Link’s unique challenges, there is no scandal here. ST is spending 21% of a reserve fund, for a total that amounts to 0.7% of the project budget, to take a conservative approach and ensure due diligence on the safety of the design. It’s an entirely sensible course to take, and indeed the scandal would be if they failed to spend the necessary funds to ensure the safety of the project.

Blethen But while Lindblom’s reliably even-handed and fact filled article only once descended into sensationalism – painting a scene of a derailed train joining the fossil forest at the bottom of Lake Washington – Seattle Times Publisher Frank Blethen responded to the news of the $20M addition by stoking inaccurate fears about the East Link project. In a series of tweets last Saturday, Blethen’s accused Sound Transit of incompetence and implored future East Link riders to ‘carry a life jacket’.

To hear more about the bridge design, I attended a Sound Transit presentation to the Citizens Oversight Panel on Thursday about the interface between the bridge deck and the rails. I came away with the impression that, if anything, Sound Transit is being excessively conservative with their failure thresholds for the bridge design, giving me more confidence than ever in East Link’s safety.

Back in 2009, in order to reduce risk to the bridge deck and extend its useful life, an Independent Review Team asked Sound Transit to minimize any drilling or penetration of the bridge deck when securing the concrete blocks used in lieu of rail ties, and WSDOT later went on to ask them to eliminate drilling entirely if possible. So Sound Transit went back and successfully tested securing lighter weight concrete blocks (125lb per cu. ft. instead of the standard 150lb) with epoxy, and by all accounts those tests went swimmingly well. Prior to reinforcement, the concrete only cracked at 200% of its max design load, yet ST still decided to add circumreferential rebar to strengthen it further (obtaining about 400% above the design load). The threshold for failure is now so high that the rails and the clips that attach them would twist off well before the concrete itself would fail, which wouldn’t occur even if you ran freight trains on East Link in a severe windstorm. This is massive redundancy.

In addition, fears about uncaptured electrical current – causing corrosion in the obviously wet environment of a lake bridge – have likewise been solved. ST has tested and proven a wet system that meets WSDOT requirements on the floating structure, which is 5-10x the normal resistance required in other systems when they are dry.

So while the engineering is impressive and difficult, it’s well within our capabilities. In any case, while it is theoretically possible that some yet unseen engineering hurdle could scuttle the project, the likelihood of Sound Transit attempting to operate an unsafe system is effectively zero. Sound Transit’s Bruce Gray told me afterward that, “It is not a question of if we can do it, it’s a matter of how soon can we get started.” You can leave the lifejacket at home.

Let’s Bring Back the Employee Hours Tax, and Make it Good This Time

August 21, 2015August 19, 2015 by Katie Wilson

Seattle’s transit infrastructure is years behind what it should be to accommodate current ridership, let alone the thousand or more human beings sinking roots in our city every month. The Move Seattle levy, assuming voters approve it in November, will be a good step forward – but we’ll still be playing catch-up.

What if Seattle had another $20 or $30 million per year to accelerate the build-out of transit corridors and other BRT-related capital projects in the Transit Master Plan, and maybe add more service to boot?

Seattle can make it happen. With a little political will on the part of our City Council, Seattle can generate significant revenue from a progressive and comparatively stable source: a new-and-improved Employee Hours Tax (EHT). Let’s glance over the recent history of this tax before considering how to refashion it for today.

History of the Employee Hours Tax

The Seattle City Council first approved an EHT in 2006, along with a Commercial Parking Tax. Both complemented the Bridging the Gap levy, and were also slated for transportation maintenance and improvements. The EHT required businesses to pay a modest $25 per full-time employee per year, exempting small business and employees who didn’t drive alone to work. Over the 9-year lifespan of the $365 million property tax levy this would have brought in an extra $50 million or so.

In 2009, one year into the Great Recession, the city council repealed the Employee Hours Tax. Although $25 per employee wasn’t enough to actually discourage hiring (Councilmember Tim Burgess call the repeal “somewhat symbolic”), business groups complained the tax was hurting the reputation of Seattle’s business climate. Led by Burgess, then-Councilmember Richard Conlin and then-Mayor Greg Nickels, and despite resistance from sustainability advocates and groups such as Cascade Bicycle Club that saw no reason to forego millions in bike and pedestrian improvements for a symbolic gesture, the city council conceded.

Fast forward to spring 2014, when King County’s Proposition 1 went down in flames. As Seattle prepared to take action to save bus service, Councilmembers Nick Licata and Kshama Sawant teamed up to revive the EHT. Rather than simply rerunning the county’s ballot measure in Seattle, they proposed replacing the regressive sales tax hike with a 5% Commercial Parking Tax increase and an EHT set at a very modest $18 per worker per year, or less than a penny per hour. Interestingly, this EHT was projected to raise $7 million per year, significantly more than the repealed version, which in 2008 generated only $4.5 million. While the Licata-Sawant proposal also exempted small business (up to the current B&O threshold of $100,000), it dropped the exemption for employees who do not drive alone to work. This change wound not only increase revenue but also make the tax significantly easier to administer. In the end, to no one’s surprise, the council rejected the Licata-Sawant proposal 2-6 and Seattle’s Prop 1 went to the ballot in its original form.

Continue reading “Let’s Bring Back the Employee Hours Tax, and Make it Good This Time”

Dissent of the Day

August 20, 2015August 20, 2015 by Frank Chiachiere

From commenter colorfast in What the Eastside wants from ST3:

Parochialism will smother ST3 in the crib. The notion of restricting expenditures to within arbitrary geographic or jurisdictional boundaries that are invisible to real travel patterns is absurd. ST3 investments need to prioritize serving corridors where the highest travel demand exists today and in the future; these are pretty obvious because there aren’t that many of them.

The whole point of expanding the rail network is to bring higher capacity to the most densely crowded travel corridors. This does two things: it improves the quality of travel in those corridors, and allows the lower capacity mode(s) to increasea/improve/expand the overall network by deploying further afield in greater frequency than is the case absent rail. It also delivers a third benefit: catayzing the land use policy vision underlying GMA.

A regional — not parochial — view is needed to accomplish the right things in ST3. ST and KCM need to sit down and figure out which corridors are ripe for rail in King County and which aren’t, and then demonstrate how the two modes will complement each other in a network that provide intuitive connectivity.

[…]

I don’t think [parochialism is] imbedded in ST’s DNA at all. More like a ball & chain. It comes from the local politicans far more than ST. “We want ours and screw everyone else” seems to be the mantra eminating from sub-area transportation forums, with local council types leading the charge. It’s certainly ST’s problem to solve, tho. The basic problem seems to be an inability within this metropolitan area among local pols to view things through the lens of trips people are taking every day rather than brick & mortar facilities located in their boundaries.

What the Eastside Wants in ST3

August 20, 2015August 19, 2015 by Dan Ryan

Riders wait to board ST Express buses at Bellevue's busy downtown transit center — Riders wait to board ST Express buses at Bellevue’s busy downtown transit center

Several Eastside cities (Bellevue, Redmond, Issaquah, Kirkland, Renton, Sammamish) submitted a joint interest statement to Sound Transit that lays out a shared vision for the ST3 project list. Each city also submitted comments with respect to their particular interests. The joint interest statement was developed in response to concerns that the draft PPL would serve the Eastside poorly, and that the relatively compact central Eastside needed a more comprehensive vision for regional mobility.

A plan for ST3, the Eastside cities argue, must do the following:

“Fund Eastside needs”: ST3 must fully fund investments necessary to meet Eastside transit needs. This is, of course, a shot across the bow of other regional leaders who have looked at the Eastside’s tax revenues as a funding source for spine expansion. Concerns about subarea equity were loudly voiced in several of the City Council meetings where letters to ST3 were approved.

“Connect regional growth centers within the Eastside”: Two projects are called out here; East Link to Redmond, and light rail from Totem Lake to Issaquah. Obviously, extension of East Link is the Eastside’s highest priority, and quite uncontroversial. BRT should be built between Totem Lake and Issaquah if light rail is beyond the financial capacity of the Eastside. Investments in Regional Express within the Eastside are also called for.

“Connect the Eastside with the region”: Here the cities advocate for strengthened connections with the neighboring subareas, including I-405 BRT and Regional Express. The statement is careful to call out how these are multi-subarea investments, implying that East King should not bear the entire cost of I-405 BRT. With the BRT corridor likely to extend from Lynnwood to Seatac, a large portion now lies outside the East King subarea.

“Provide an integrated regional transit system with access enhancements”: The cities are looking for a regional network that integrates ST rail, BRT, express bus and Metro bus services. They also call for TOD and non-motorized access planning as part of ST3. Performance-based initiatives for more efficient use of parking are supported, adding capacity as needed.

“Support system expansion”: This is a call for planning and studies for future system upgrades (and for ST to plan facilities like OMSF early in the process).

The individual cities submitted their own comments, describing their particular needs in greater detail:

Continue reading “What the Eastside Wants in ST3”

Amtrak Cascades Timetables Have Been Fixed

August 19, 2015August 19, 2015 by Zach Shaner

AmtrakScrewUp Just four days after a slow-news-day Saturday rant about Amtrak Cascades’ illegible timetables, the timetables have been fixed. Amtrak Cascades’ Twitter account sent out the update Wednesday afternoon. They’re still not perfect, as the inclusion of the Empire Builder is useless for trips along the Cascade corridor, and the tables are still very difficult to read on mobile. But the main problem, the backwards timetables reading right-to-left in the Southbound direction, is now fixed.

Score another one for transit blogging creating more urgency than months of public requests getting lost in the bureaucratic ether. Thanks to WSDOT to their attention to this small but important matter.

New Trolleys Hit the Streets Today

August 19, 2015August 18, 2015 by Zach Shaner

Today the first 5 of Metro’s 174 new trolley buses hit the streets. From here on, Metro will steadily roll out 110 of the 40′ coaches, while the 64 articulated 60-foot trolleys are anticipated to start rolling next year. All in all, the entire legacy fleet will be replaced within the next two years.

Metro’s spokesperson Rochelle Ogershok says that for the first 3 days (today through Friday), the trolleys can be spotted in service on Routes 1, 2, 3, 36, and 70, and will thereafter go into general rotation on all trolley routes. If you’re so inclined, please take some photos if you see one in service and add them to our Flickr pool.

These trolleys will be smoother, quieter, and greatly improve the rider experience in ways that really matter. They feature user-initiated back door opening, off-wire capability to detour around obstructions or construction, air conditioning, all low-floor boarding, and more. The days of waiting for the wheelchair lift to go down, while sweltering on a 95° bus, unable to get out the back door without yelling? Soon a distant memory.