Month: February 2016

• Broadway businesses having second thoughts about the Aloha streetcar extension.
• Metro and SDOT hatching a plan to fix Route 8 on Denny. They should also look at the ideas Zach floated years ago.
• Three more Sounder round trips coming, plus previously deferred Kent and Auburn station access improvements.
• Pronto needs a bailout.
• Shoreline to present three concepts for the N 145th St corridor on February 24th.
• Metro experimenting with new pedestrian alarms ($).
• West Seattle tries to organize for light rail.
• New bill would tighten distracted driving laws.
• By modern standards, the destruction wrought by I-5 ($) is astonishing.
• Vulcan has plans for the Central District.
• SDOT’s 23rd Ave work doesn’t include significant mitigation money ($) for businesses, unlike ST work.
• It turns out Surrey Downs has yet more veto points to potentially delay East Link construction.
• A fun reflection on fringe benefits of riding the bus ($).
• A shooting on the 132 ($).
• No defectors yet from the Deep Bore Tunnel coalition.

This is an open thread.

This is the first in a series of summaries of Sound Transit 3 jurisdictional feedback letters. Future installments will be South King, East King, North King (minus Seattle which we’ve already covered), Snohomish, and Stakeholder Organizations. 

City of Lakewood

City of Tacoma

Continue reading “Pierce County’s ST3 Letters”

Rep. Dick Muri (R – Steilacoom), has introducted a bill to triple the sales tax lid for transportation benefit districts, from 0.2% to 0.6%. HB 2816 will be getting a hearing in the House Transportation Committee Thursday at 3:30 pm. The bill faces a quick deadline of Tuesday, February 9 to pass out of committee.

In addition to a sales tax, TBDs may already impose

a local annual vehicle fee of up to $100 on vehicle license renewals, $50 of which may be imposed without voter approval;

excess property taxes, for a period of up to one year, with voter approval;

tolls, subject to legislative authorization if on state routes and approval by the Washington State Transportation Commission if only affecting state routes, with local voter approval;

transportation impact fees on commercial and industrial development, without voter approval.

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Seattle’s 2014 Proposition 1 (Move Seattle) (to fund more Seattle bus service) imposed a 0.1% sales tax and $60 vehicle license fee through the TBD mechanism.

King County attempted to enact a 0.1% sales tax and $60 car tab earlier in 2014 through this mechanism, but voters turned it down.

While these districts have been used for transit funding locally, there is a long list of city TBDs using them to fund a wide array of transportation projects.

Last year’s Tacoma Proposition A imposed 0.1% of additional sales tax in Tacoma and will fund local street improvements through Tacoma’s TBD.

The 0.3% sales tax voters in the Community Transit district passed last year was not from this mechanism, but from a special authorization contained in the ST3 authorization bill.

Last week’s story about a new bill to switch Sound Transit to a directly elected board got a surprisingly positive reception from some commenters. It entirely escapes me why pro-transit people might have this reaction, even if they’re prone to dismiss the Sound Transit Board’s decisions as “political.” That choice of words is irritating enough — implying that their preferred decisions are an objective ideal above politics — but the idea that more elections somehow makes the process less political is befuddling.

I’ve made the general case against directly elected boards before. The explicit justification for this bill is to make Sound Transit more “accountable.” However, the Sound Transit 3 plan will be very “accountable.” If people think it’s full of good projects, they should vote for it. If it’s full of rotten projects, they should vote against it. If it’s a mix of good and rotten projects, then this is a fine introduction to the process of legislating.

A common STB comment thread critique is that completing the spine to Everett and Tacoma is a poor investment. Depending on what you value, that may even be the case. But the project reflects a coherent objective: to deliver fully traffic-separated transit to as wide an area as possible, without sacrificing existing auto right of way. That may be too responsive to hyperlocal concerns, but board members solely responsible for representing their district in a Sound Transit context will amplify this dynamic, not neutralize it.

There is one perceived problem that a direct election would address. For people that object to the entire light rail project, the current architecture makes it hard to overcome County Executives that won’t nominate dedicated rail opponents. There are certainly pockets of the district that might elect anti-rail candidates that would do what they could to sabotage the process. Indeed, at the edges of the district the alternative to the spine is not focused investment in the core, but rejection of the entire project. It certainly wouldn’t result in a better light rail system. That’s why the usual Republican suspects are backing this bill, as they have past “governance reform” bills.

It’s possible to imagine a governance model that produces better results, and certainly possible to imagine a rail proposal better optimized for whatever value you choose. But introducing more elections will push that kind of focus farther away.

At Tuesday’s Transportation, Economy, and Environment (TrEE) Committee, Councilmember Rod Dembowski will introduce three motions that respond to directives from the major ULink restructure that passed last autumn. In order, they are:

• Motion 2016-0089 presents the results of the traffic study commissioned by Dembowski to study the general-purpose traffic impacts of adding a northbound bus stop on Montlake Boulevard for routes 65 and 78
• Motion 2016-0092 establishes a multiyear workplan for improving bus-rail transfers at Capitol Hill, UW, Roosevelt, and Northgate
• Motion 2016-0093 directs Metro to analyze ridership change and solicit feedback on the March 2016 restructure no later than March 2017.

Details on all three motions after the jump…. Continue reading “Metro to Present Workplans for Link Transfer Improvements and Restructure Feedback”