Month: September 2015

Apologies for the short notice, but tonight (September 30) at 5:30 is your last chance to testify before the City Council on the HALA Grand Bargain and the Council’s related workplan. The Council’s Select Committee on Housing Affordability will hear public comment on the proposed Affordable Housing Impact Mitigation Program (aka the Commercial Linkage Fee).

After tonight, the budget and the election will consume the energies of the council, so your turnout tonight is important, especially if you did not have a chance to testify at the September 9 hearing.

Last Thursday at the Mercer Island Community Center, Sound Transit held a Listening Tour to give residents a chance to comment on just about anything related to the East Link project. The open-mic night was well attended with an estimated 200 residents, from which 35 speakers were allotted 3 minutes each to speak. The meeting was attended by many Sound Transit staff, Bellevue Mayor (and County Council candidate) Claudia Balducci, WSDOT Secretary Lynn Peterson, and many Mercer Island council and mayoral candidates.

The tone of the conversation was one of polite exasperation, seasoned with occasional bursts of anger or bewilderment. Many commenters came prepared with talking points loosely organized around a list of special accommodations for Mercer Island residents proposed by the Vision Mercer Island group, namely:

• Permanent SOV access to HOV lanes
• Permanent exemption from I-90 tolling
• Resident-only parking at the Link Station
• Complete abandonment bus transfers on Mercer Island
• Dedicated and guaranteed seats for Islanders on Metro and Sound Transit buses

Each of these 5 privileges would be completely unique to Mercer Island. Despite this, if you followed the #listen2mercer hashtag you saw that speakers overwhelmingly felt that this was the least Sound Transit could do on their behalf. Comments were overwhelmingly negative about Sound Transit, about parking, and about any type of bus facility being built.

From urbanist, transit, land use, and social justice viewpoints, the conversation was very disappointing. In asking for resident-only parking at the Park & Ride, they are asking for an unprecedented appropriation of public space for the private use of the most privileged. In asking for untolled SOV use of HOV lanes, they are asking for a privilege no one else in the state enjoys. In asking to abandon the idea of bus transfers on Mercer Island, they are asking to pay for their aesthetic preferences with other commuters’ time and money.

Two doctors used that day’s crash on Aurora to stress their need to get on and off island quickly, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they were asking government to grant them special rights on account of their choice to separate themselves from their patients by a large body of water.

Perhaps most egregious, the consistent “othering “of nonresidents – to dust off a grad school phrase – was both offensive and provincial. One commenter called on Sound Transit and other “off-Islanders” not to be “pigeons that just come here, drop your s__, and leave.”

All of this fundamentally misunderstands the general access mandate under which public facilities operate. No one at South Bellevue Park & Ride scans license plates to root out those “moochers from Somerset” claiming “their” parking. Most people understand that people have a basic right to move freely on our transit and highways. All other transit facilities exist for the general benefit of any regional transit traveler, including Mercer Island residents who use other facilities regionwide.

And whether restricted or not, parking is not the answer, as parking is a niche product that fundamentally cannot scale. The current Mercer Island Park & Ride has 447 spaces, less than the capacity of a single 3-car Link train. Mercer Island and Sound Transit could spend $50m to build to build an enormous 2,500 space facility – larger than Tacoma Dome Station ­– and it would still only fill 5 trains, less than an hour’s worth of Link service.

Fast, frequent bus service is the answer to connect to Link, both for Islanders and for the entire I-90 corridor. That means a big boost in frequency on Route 204 and Island Crest Way, ideally with timed Link connections. It also means a large, well-designed transfer facility for the I-90 corridor buses. Continuing peak bus service into Seattle on I-90 after 2023 would effectively be taking bus service away from others, a purposeful waste of taxpayer resources. Any diversion of buses to South Bellevue or Downtown Bellevue would directly trade Mercer Island’s aesthetic preferences for the time and money of those in Issaquah and Renton.

As for process, it’s very early. We are still 8 years out from East Link service, with plenty of time to design an excellent bus transfer facility that seamlessly integrates our transit systems and mitigates Islanders’ concerns while exponentially increasing their access to transit. But judging from the listening tour meeting, it will be a steep uphill climb to achieve good transit outcomes.

After a soft open on Sunday, yesterday marked the first full weekday of the I-405 Express Toll Lanes between Bellevue and Lynnwood. During off-peak hours, SOV drivers will pay between $0.75-$10.00 for the privilege of using the lanes, while HOV 2+ will use them for free. During peak hours – 5-9am and 3-7pm – only transit and HOV3+ will get free use of the lanes.

A quick scan of Twitter (using #405ETL) revealed an expected mix of praise of frustration from commuters. For a large portion of yesterday’s travel, the Express Toll Lanes saved drivers nearly an hour,with $0.75 buying a 20-minute trip from Lynnwood to Bellevue, compared to 70 minutes in the general purpose lanes. People who remained in the GP lanes for the 20-mile trip– rather than paying $0.75 to save 50 minutes – were effectively valuing their time at $0.90/hour.

In general, most urbanists support dynamic pricing to manage demand, and as a usage fee, tolls are a method of taxation that has some level of bipartisan support. Even as overall vehicle miles traveled are flat, peak congestion on our regional highways and HOV lanes has worsened significantly the past couple years, leading Sound Transit to quietly cut service back in June and requiring an additional $2m annual outlay from Community Transit to keep the same buses running on time. We wish the I-405 Express Toll Lanes all the best at keeping transit and carpools moving effectively. If you’re a rider on routes 237, 252, 257, 311, 342, 424, 532, 535, or 952, you can now look forward to a much faster and more reliable trip.

On this side of the lake we’re still waiting for any type of HOV priority between Northgate and Downtown Seattle, especially reverse peak, but it is encouraging to see the Eastside open these new lanes and inch us toward the systemwide tolling and transit priority we need.

Are you an I-405 commuter? How was your experience yesterday?

The reconstituted STB Editorial Board is beginning its endorsement process for the general election. We have the information we need on Seattle City Council races, Move Seattle, and the Community Transit measure, and are looking at some races outside Seattle. If there are any you’re afraid we’re going to miss, please say so in the comments.

As always, we are solely interested in the relevance of a candidate and office to land use and transit.

For quite some time now, the debate over density has immersed itself in the language of affordability. Density advocates, quite reasonably, cite supply and demand, while unsophisticated detractors correlate development with rising rents. More sophisticated detractors instead cite displacement as a downside, as development indeed sometimes displaces existing tenants on a given property.

While there are technical definitions for various bands of affordability, to ordinary people “affordable” means “affordable to my peer group.” An apodment isn’t affordable if your peer group is families with children; it’s not part of your housing universe and doesn’t address your difficulty in finding housing. Likewise, there is inexpensive market-rate housing in Rainier Beach. It stinks to have to move there if you’re on Capitol Hill, but “I’m not rich enough to avoid a poor neighborhood” might not be a humanitarian crisis worthy of a policy response.

Although it’s obvious that increasing rents have forced some people out of their homes, their neighborhoods, or even their cities, the problem with the affordability formulation is that is suggests bad solutions. A higher minimum wage has many merits, but more affordable housing is not one of them.

At root, Seattle has not an “affordability” crisis, but a housing shortage. Rents increase not because ownership and construction have become much more expensive, but because demand outstrips supply. Any “solution” that doesn’t dramatically lift supply is simply rearranging whose desire to live in Seattle is denied. In a pure market system, the high bidder wins. A rent-control system favors the longtime resident and the well-connected. And socialization of all housing (to take an extreme no one is proposing) will benefit whomever the politically favored groups are at the time. In any case, someone is left out, and that’s a damn shame from an environmental, economic, and compassionate standpoint.

The only way out is to maximize unit construction. That means neither single-minded focus on market-rate construction nor on public housing. A policy response that doesn’t address supply for the whole range of the market — housing for all income levels; students, retirees, large families; newcomers and longtime residents  —  is an incomplete one.

Featuring a Seattle Transit System bus driver.

(h/t Erik Griswold)

University Link won’t be open for a couple of months, but the outline is already on Google Maps. The stations aren’t yet labeled, but the rest of the tunnel is there in all its glory.

Feast your eyes, and then take a moment of silence to mourn the phantom stations at Summit & Pike and Volunteer Park, senseless casualties of The Great Race to Snohomish County. 

In March, Seattle DOT’s Move Seattle plan included two streetcar lines. The Center City Connector (CCC) is a tram in dedicated right-of-way along First Avenue that would join the First Hill and South Lake Union Streetcars. It scores well on cost per rider metrics, partly because it’s quite short, at a cost of roughly $110m. Extending the First Hill Streetcar to Roy St., a $25m project, is a longstanding demand from nearly residents and businesses.

Alert readers noticed that the final $930m Move Seattle ballot measure announced earlier this month mentioned neither project in the promotional materials or the ordinance itself. I asked SDOT director Scott Kubly what this meant for the rail plans:

Both are priorities.  The Levy isn’t planned as a funding source for either project. Both are listed in the Move Seattle strategic vision.

As it turns out, both projects have reasonably solid funding plans that don’t depend on Move Seattle. For the CCC, Seattle applied for a 2016 $75m Small Starts Grant from USDOT. Sources at the city say they hope to fund the remaining $30m or so by bonding against on-street advertising revenue. Construction would begin in 2017 or 2018. If a $7m Local Improvement District (LID) materializes for the Roy Extension, it will start construction as soon as 2016.

This actually might help Move Seattle’s electoral prospects, given the faction in city politics that reacts severely to the slightest whiff of streetcar funding. Critics pilloried the failed 2011 vehicle license fee* for spending on streetcars, although  their share of the budget was a mere 9%. In June retiring Councilmember Nick Licata unsuccessfully tried to forbid any money from Move Seattle going to a streetcar, no matter how much conditions change. But even before his maneuvering, there was no streetcar funding in the program.

So will any part of Move Seattle ultimately fund one of these two projects? Realistically, SDOT has to deliver the signature projects in the measure before it thinks about using any savings or surplus on other stuff in the master plan. Most of the streetcar funding will come from other sources, and with good fortune it all will. In any case the gap would be a tiny percentage of the Move Seattle package. In the end, the projects actually on the ballot are so badly needed that it’s worth passing, no matter how you feel about streetcars, and whether or not Move Seattle becomes relevant to them.

* Sadly (?), links to these arguments are lost to bit rot.

A Ride the Ducks amphibious vehicle has collided with a Bellair Charters bus on the Aurora Bridge. As of 1:00pm, 4 have been confirmed dead, with dozens more wounded. Injuries were likely exacerbated by the lack of seatbelts on either vehicle. The historic 6-lane, 57′ bridge has anomalously narrow 9.5′ lanes and no median or barriers.

The Aurora Bridge will be closed into the late evening for investigation of the incident and care for the wounded, and the Fremont and Ballard bridges will be closed to boat traffic. Routes E, 5, 5X, 16, 26X, and 28X will be detoured until further notice.

Most local television stations are carrying live video of the incident and its aftermath.

Our hearts go out to the wounded and the families of those who lost their lives.