Reuven Carlyle’s Misguided ST3 Opposition
On Thursday, State Representative Reuven Carlyle (D-36) wrote a strongly-worded editorial on Publicola opposing Sound Transit 3 (ST3). By using much of the remaining property tax capacity, Carlyle says, ST3 “will suck the oxygen out of the room” and jeopardize the state’s ability to respond to the McCleary decision:
I am unsettled that the package consumes the oxygen in the room on taxes for virtually all other public services at all levels of government for years to come. The plan moves to among the very highest sales tax in the nation along with a major property tax increase. We need to be honest that the ability of cities, counties and the state to utilize the sales tax in the future as a new revenue source is effectively ended with this plan…
The Sound Transit financing plan arguably works well for Sound Transit. It’s reasonable and understandable that they feel strongly they are operating within their authorizing environment of our current tax system. But it’s a bold 21st Century spending plan with a lethargic 1990s financing plan. Why didn’t they choose to be as courageous and innovative on the revenue side as they at least attempted to be on the spending side?
As a state legislator I cannot in good conscience support an inequitable and unstable financing plan in one isolated silo of public services—no matter how valued and important to our future—that I believe will have substantial negative implications for public education in the years to come.
As well-intentioned as this is for Carlyle – he’s a long-time advocate for more progressive tax sources – it stings a bit more coming from a Democratic ally opposing a project with immense benefits to his own district. The 36th stands to get 6 new rail stations, a direct airport connection, and a traffic-free subway through Queen Anne, South Lake Union, and Downtown. Already set to take 19 years to complete, Carlyle would have us wait even longer on account of $.25 per $1,000 of property tax authority.
Let’s appreciate the deep irony of his criticisms. Carlyle is part of the only legislative body with broad authority to create new tax sources, and yet he is criticizing Sound Transit for not being “courageous and innovative” enough to reject the only choices made available to them. It’s a strange day when the cooks in the kitchen are upset that the diner orders off the menu they themselves wrote.
The property tax cap he cites as sacrosanct is not a constitutional amendment, but a simple legislative act like everything else, changeable with a simple majority vote in both houses. Passing ST3 surely complicates the McCleary funding puzzle, but the bottom line is that the legislature always has options, and Sound Transit doesn’t.
Carlyle was absolutely right to raise these issues during the funding debate over the transportation package that authorized an ST3 vote. But having lost the battle to implement an employer tax instead, opposing ST3 now doesn’t make a McCleary resolution any closer (and the highways get built regardless). Instead, failure on ST3 would likely stifle progress on both education and transportation, setting up a dangerous series of false choices in which every civic need is pitted against every other.
Our property taxes are not high, and are in fact below the median nationally. And sure, sales tax is regressive and 10% a psychological barrier, but places like Vancouver BC do just fine with 12%. Progressives and transit advocates will be there every step of the way to help representatives like Carlyle find more progressive tax sources, so it’s disappointing to see him give in to such zero-sum thinking.
Transit Oriented Development at Mt. Baker Station
Across the region, there is a conversation going on about what the area around the new light rail stations will look like. Will cities upzone and encourage more dense development to maximize the use of the stations, or will they leave things as-is? It is helpful to look back at ST1 stations and see how upzoning affected the development around the stations. The area around Mt Baker station has some lessons for everyone as ST2 continues and ST3 gestates.
Mt. Baker has had two upzones in 15 years. The first, in 2001, was a standard rezone for a light rail station. A more recent rezone in 2014 sent potential building heights even higher.
First, let’s look at the success. Mt. Baker station borders a 2 year old mixed use building, with 56 residences and ground floor retail, with artists getting preference for leases: how Seattle is that? Mt. Baker Lofts is the type of development that transit experts advocate for when they push for Transit Oriented development. Unfortunately, that’s it for anything approaching ideal.
The big employer in the area is the UW Consolidated Laundry Facility, a 65,000 square foot facility with room for parking that launders all of the medical clothing the university uses. It’s certainly a necessary service, but hardly an ideal use of valuable space around a valuable light rail station. Everything else around the station is low rise retail. A Lowe’s, QFC, and RiteAid all have huge surface parking lots. Franklin High School is a typical Seattle high school. A few abandoned buildings and fenced off lots are sprinkled between 1 story buildings that house banks, an auto parts store, a gas station, a pawn shop, restaurant and a laundromat. The only new building under construction is hardly mixed use: it is a underground water storage tank to help better manage Seattle’s stormwater.
To its credit, the City of Seattle sees a problem. The city funded North Rainier Urban Village Assessment concluded last year:
The North Rainier Urban Village, particularly the area surrounding the Mt. Baker Light Rail Station, has not advanced towards the vision of the North Rainier Neighborhood Plan of 1999. Rather than a thriving town center, the station area is defined by vacant lots and auto-oriented uses and lacks a defined character and sense of place
Ouch!
What’s the problem at Mt. Baker Station?
Continue reading “Transit Oriented Development at Mt. Baker Station”
ULink Ridership By Station
In addition to Metro’s recent release of preliminary bus restructure numbers, Sound Transit has also released a chart giving us a clearer picture of ULink’s station-level ridership through Q2. See above to draw your own conclusions, but here are a few noteworthy points:
- UW Station: At 9,200 boardings per day, UW Station has the 2nd most riders, and could soon surpass Westlake this fall as the busiest station in the system. Look for it to carry a proportionally heavier burden as tourist numbers fall off at Westlake and UW goes back into session next month.
- Capitol Hill: At a healthy 6,000 boardings per day, Capitol Hill comes in 4th place behind Westlake, SeaTac, and UW. It will be interesting to see if Capitol Hill has a lower ridership ceiling than other stations, as it’s much closer to having maxed out its zoned capacity, and transfers there will always lag behind UW for geographic reasons.
- Downtown: ULink has been a boon to the non-Westlake downtown stations too. While Westlake boardings are up 41%, boardings are up 82% at University Street, 80% at Pioneer Square, and 70% at International District/Chinatown.
- Stadium/Sodo/Beacon Hill: Both Stadium and Sodo still have low ridership outside of event times, but boardings are up by 50% at each station, to 1,900 per day. With event riders from UW/Capitol Hill boosting the average, Stadium is also no longer the least-ridden station. Meanwhile, Beacon Hill is enjoying 20% growth, likely a mixture of continued organic growth and riders choosing Link to Capitol Hill over Route 60.
- Rainier Valley: Ridership in the valley is mostly flat, with Mount Baker and Othello basically unchanged over a year ago. Columbia City and Rainier Beach have both grown by 25%. Columbia City has the highest ridership in the valley, with 2,300 boardings per day, while despite its growth Rainier Beach still slipped to become the least-ridden station, at just 1,800 boardings per day.
- South King: Ridership at Tukwila International Boulevard is up a modest 7%, with further growth likely curtailed by no new bus service, a very low density station area, and maxed out parking. Meanwhile, SeaTac/Airport grew by 9%, from 6,200 to 6,800 boardings.
News Roundup: Hiring
- Metro has a driver shortage, has to cancel trips.
- Lindblom tells all ($) about Link capacity and crowding.
- WSDOT looking for a spokesperson and a performance analyst.
- Our local clean air agency is also hiring.
- Feds will probably not allow continued privileged access of Mercer Island SOVs to I-90 HOV lanes.
- Shoreline wins an award for growth planning.
- Revised Burke-Gilman section opens today, easing Link access.
- Waterfront design is “a highway on top of a highway.”
- Tim Eyman lays out his case against ST3. Fact check here.
- Port of Seattle comes up with $5m for Lander crossing.
- ReachNow now available for airport trips.
- Developer-bashing is unmoored from reality.
This is an open thread.
Podcast #22: Useful Econometrics
- Ridership and Crowding ($) (2:40)
- Not enough housing construction (16:10)
- Madison BRT improvements (23:50)
- Parking permits (30:00)
- ST3 costs (44:05)
Note: apologies in advance for the microphone issues on Frank’s end.
Sponsored by Talking Headways
The U-Link Restructure: By the Numbers
The Metro restructure that accompanied the opening of Sound Transit’s University Link was the most significant service change in a generation. It undid decades-old travel patterns, killed a handful of routes, and created several new ones. It was rightfully controversial, and we covered it each step of the way (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). And though we’ve seen release after release of Link’s ridership numbers, we’ve been wondering how broader travel patterns have changed. Though the final report on the March 2016 restructure won’t be presented to the King County Council until March 2017, we finally have some preliminary ridership numbers.
Net New Boardings
Metro, Link, and Metro-operated ST Express routes are up by 6% overall, or an additional 27,900 daily boardings (through the end of Q2). Bus ridership on restructured routes is down by 9,100 boardings (as is expected when many routes are deleted), but the net effect of the ULink restructure is an additional 18,800 boardings per day, of which 15,000 are new boardings and 3,800 are bus-rail transfers.
Northeast Seattle Winners
Northeast Seattle travel patterns were altered drastically by the restructure, and the area saw the largest route-level ridership changes. Some routes were deleted (25, 30, 66, 68, 72), but most restructured routes doubled in frequency, bringing 15-minute service to NE Seattle for the first time.
New Riders in ST3
The completion of the Sound Transit 2 plan will more than double Sound Transit’s ridership from about 150 thousand today to 350 thousand, and ST3 will nearly double that again to between 561 and 695 thousand daily riders.
The ST3 plan would result in 657 to 797 thousand daily transit riders in the region in 2040. Bench-marked against a ‘no-build’ alternative, however, only 9% of those would be new to transit. Opponents of the measure repeat this factoid to argue ST3 will be ineffective in increasing transit mode share in the region, that it’s a poor value for money, and that it will not relieve congestion. Torture the data point enough, and it seems to yield a ludicrously high cost per added transit rider. But it’s a misleading number in several ways.
‘Cost per new rider’ is recognized as a terrible measure of value. The FTA discarded the measure in 2003 for a more comprehensive measure of system user benefits that includes travel time saved by all users. ‘Cost per new rider’ devalues the experience of existing riders and the time-saving and other benefits that accrue to them. Hundreds of thousands of riders will have a faster, more comfortable and more reliable journey.
Would anybody assess the value of a new highway only by counting new drivers? No. Any analysis of highway benefits would include time and money savings for all users, and so it is with transit. A focus on new riders also penalizes investments in core transit corridors (exactly where high-capacity transit needs to be). Providing alternatives to driving are important, but getting some people out of cars is not the only benefit of ST3.
Less obviously, the ‘no-build’ alternative is not the status quo. It is a highly optimistic 2040 scenario that incorporates all the long range plans of other transportation agencies and regional planners. The PSRC, WSDOT, Metro, and other transit provider plans are all completed whether currently funded or not. In this alternative world, bus service is far more ubiquitous and faster than today, and traffic is better managed to keep those buses moving reliably.
Why construct the ‘no-build’ this way? It maintains consistency between Sound Transit planning assumptions and the plans of all other agencies. But the assumptions underlying the ‘no-build’ scenario set a high benchmark that make rail benefits look smaller:
- In the ‘no-build’ alternative, drivers face per-mile fees across the region to manage traffic levels. With better-managed traffic levels, buses move faster.
- Travel times in HOV lanes are well-managed by raising HOV requirements as high as necessary for reliable transit speeds, or converting HOV lanes to bus only lanes. The political will to make these changes is uncertain, and not currently in evidence.
- The ‘no-build’ alternative also assumes the complete build-out of WSDOT plans, many of which are currently unfunded.
- Other transit agencies are assumed to complete their long range plans. Concurrent with the PSRC’s Transportation 2040 plan, the ‘no-build’ includes a doubling of local transit service. Those are only partly funded. The funding gap grows if ST3 is not completed and local agencies have to pick up the workload of the ST3 rail network.
In short, the no-build alternative isn’t free. It assumes large unfunded investments by other agencies, and those costs will grow if Sound Transit cannot build out the rail network after 2023.
Play out, if you will, an alternative where ST3 does not pass. Suppose other transit agencies are incompletely funded, or the political will for tolling and per-mile driver fees falters. In this very plausible scenario, failure to pass ST3 will reduce transit ridership by much more than 9%. In a world where buses are not faster or more reliable than today, the advantages of grade-separated rail are greater, and ridership gains are correspondingly larger.
Sunday Open Thread: Rio Commute Hell
Sound Transit June 2016 Ridership: Link Finding Its New Normal
Yesterday Sound Transit released its June ridership numbers, and Link appears to have found its new equilibrium: 65,000 weekday riders. Weekday ridership was nearly identical to may (down 0.7%), while total Link ridership of 1.8m boardings was up 1% over May 2016. These figures still represent 69% growth over June 2015. However, June did set one Link record, being the first month in which Link averaged 40,000 Sunday riders.
On-time performance has slowly degraded in 5 of the 6 months this year so far, falling to a low of 88.6%. Interestingly, since bus volumes are down due to the ULink restructure and because Link isn’t taking any additional tunnel slots, Sound Transit attributes the decline in performance to passenger crowding slightly increasing dwell times.
Sounder continued its healthy climb, with 16,000 daily boardings (up 11% over June 2015), while ST Express (slow growth) and Tacoma Link (slow shrinkage) continued their recent trends.