King County Metro is seeking highly motivated, detail-oriented individuals to join King County Metro Transit’s Speed and Reliability unit to fill Engineer II or III positions. This position represents Metro on technical matters pertaining to transit planning, capital project development, transportation engineering solutions, and traffic operation analysis.
The ideal candidate has knowledge of traffic engineering principles and is great at problem solving. We are looking for individuals who are detail- oriented and results driven who can work collaboratively with others across the organization and comfortably in a team environment. Project management skills and experience are a plus. The successful candidate will initiate and support transit projects to keep pace with unprecedented ridership, employment, and population growth in King County.
Will Mountlake Terrace still be named as such after 2023?
Even though federal funding for Lynnwood Link is up in the air, Sound Transit is continuing to work on final design of Lynnwood Link and its four stations in Shoreline, Mountlake Terrace and Lynnwood.
Sound Transit has posted this survey asking the public to help name the stations at NE 145th, NE 185th, Mountlake Terrace TC and Lynnwood TC. The options were selected from over 650 suggestions placed during last November’s design open houses, but there is also a write-in option for other suggestions.
Reflect the nature of the environment: neighborhoods, street names, landmarks and geographic locations.
Be brief, easy to read and easy to remember.
Avoid commercial references because they may change and prove confusing to the public.
Avoid similar names or words in existing facility names.
Limited to 30 characters (spaces count).
Comply with federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines and requirements.
The survey closes on April 5, and a final decision from the Sound Transit Board (who are the final authority in naming stations) is expected in spring or summer of this year.
Steilacoom Ferry Dock
photo by William Ward / Wikimedia Commons
Sen. Steve O’BanSen. Steve O’Ban (R – University Place) has been on the warpath against Sound Transit, prime sponsoring a series of Eymanesque bills.
Substitute Senate Bill 5001, as reported on at length on this blog, would replace the Sound Transit Board with a directly-elected board, gerrymandered so as to get an anti-transit majority on the board.
Senate Bill 5854 would allow cities and counties within the Sound Transit district to withdraw from Sound Transit’s property tax by action of their councils, or by petition of 8% of residents followed by a public vote.
Senate Bill 5893 would order the Department of Licensing to stop collecting taxes for Sound Transit.
O’Ban’s anti-tax zeal may not help him bring home the bacon.
O’Ban is the prime sponsor of Substitute Senate Bill 5403, which would allow ferry district money to be used to fund car ferries, as reported by Daniel Person at the Seattle Weekly. Currently, ferry districts can only fund passenger-only ferries. O’Ban’s district has a car ferry — between Steilacoom, Anderson Island, and Ketron Island — which has to be funded out of Pierce County general fund money. Pierce County does not yet have a ferry district.
To borrow a quote from O’Ban, if a countywide Pierce County Ferry District is set up, and is allowed to spend money on car ferries, it could “tax and spend forever”, without a public vote, and without ever having to go back to the legislature to get authority for more projects like Sound Transit has to do.
The bill passed out of the Senate and is scheduled for a hearing in the House Transportation Committee on Thursday at 3:30.
If you wish to weigh in on O’Ban’s bill before the hearing Thursday, you can contact your legislators using the district-finder tool.
A perceived tax burden is often less about the amount owed than it is about matching one’s prior expectations. In the recent Sound Transit Motor Vehicle Excise Tax (MVET) controversy, relatively little has been made about the quantitative burden – people generally aren’t parsing dollars – but much has been made about rate fairness. Sound Transit’s use of a traditional depreciation schedule based on the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) sufficiently differs from one’s everyday experience of their vehicle’s value that it feels like a punitive taking. But if ST3 had proposed raising the same amount of funds via a steeper depreciation schedule and a higher authorized rate, I am confident that the number of changed votes would have been negligible. People generally vote on the perceived merits of the projects in question, period.
Motor Vehicle Excise Taxes (MVET) have two strikes against them. First, their annual lump sum payments feel more viscerally punitive than property or sales taxes. Biannual property taxes are often embedded in rent or mortgage payments, and sales tax is a drip drip of a few dollars here and there. Second, using vehicles as a tax source intuitively feeds the War on Cars narrative, but it is little different than using gas taxes to pay for HOV/bus lanes. An excess of motor vehicles is a major reason for transit capital projects in the first place, and most of us who ride transit also own those cars. It is eminently fair to use one to help us transition to the other, and moving away from cars and toward transit is a spatial imperative if we are to continue to grow as a city.
My own car’s MVET cost $150 this year, and it admittedly was an unpleasant experience to pay it. But rationally I know that the total amount is fair, I voted yes with the majority, and that that’s the way democracy works. I also know that if I spend more than $8,500 this year on taxable goods, I will have contributed more in sales taxes this year than I did in MVET.
Sound Transit’s MVET is also surprisingly progressive. If through ‘defeasance’ we reverted to a 2006-era depreciation schedule, owners of cars less than 11 years old would see a tax cut and owners of cars greater than 11 years old would see a tax increase. So any populist uprising is a lot of smoke and mirrors. The dynamics nicely emulate the current healthcare debates in the other Washington. It may play well for legislators to stoke the fire, but reversion would be an effective tax cut for the rich, done in the name of the little guy.
Discussions floating around about a low-income MVET rebate are valid and promising, and Seattle provides the precedent with its $20 car tab rebate. The hit to ST’s revenue would not be severe, and those hardest hit by ST3’s taxes would get a welcome reprieve. But those of us who can pay should pay. Expensive vehicles are luxury goods that reflect our income status, and in a regressive state that already disproportionately taxes the poor, MVET is one of the most progressive sources available. It is progressive and fair for the Lexuses of Laurelhurst to pay more than the Toyotas of Tacoma.
UPDATE: Sen. Rebecca Saldaña (D – Seattle) introduced SB 5906 Tuesday night, which would allow a low-income rebate from Sound Transit’s portion of the MVET and property tax. It is the companion to HB 2148, by Rep. Kristine Reeves (D – Federal Way) that was introduced a couple weeks ago. Senators have the rest of today to sign onto SB 5906.
On March 1, Seattle Monorail Services and the Seattle Center proposed a fare increase for the Seattle Center Monorail.
Current
Proposed
Adult 13-64 One-Way
$2.25
$2.50
Youth 5-12 / Senior 65+ /
Disabilities / Active US military
One-Way
$1.00
$1.25
Adult 13-64 Monthly Pass
$45
$50
Youth/Senior/Disabilities/Active US military
Monthly Pass
$20
$25
Low-Income
not available
not available
All fares will remain cash only. In addition to not accepting ORCA cards, the monorail does not accept debit/credit cards or checks.
The monorail is celebrating its 55th birthday this Friday. It has been operated by Seattle Monorail Services since 1994 as a quasi-private specialty transit line, catering to tourists and event crowds willing to pay a premium to avoid slower local buses between downtown and the Seattle Center. Previously, it had been operated directly by the City of Seattle. The City still owns the line and funds the maintenance, while SMS makes an operating profit on the line. A portion of that profit goes to fund programming at the Seattle Center, which oversees SMS.
SMS won a 10-year contract to continue operating the monorail at the end of 2014, with a 10-year extension option that can be approved by the Seattle Center without coming back to the city council. After last-minute discussions about accepting ORCA, stipulations were added to the contract to complete a study about fare integration with the public transit system by the end of the 2nd quarter of 2015. That study led to an additional ridership study that was scheduled to take a year to conduct, and is still not available to the public. Seattle Center did not respond to questions about the study by time of publication.
UPDATE: Per Denise Wells at the Seattle Center, the ridership study will be available some time in the second quarter of 2017. Debit/credit card payment may become available this summer, and the age ranges of the payer categories will be aligned with the public transit agencies (i.e. 6-18 for youth fare). A Disparate Impact Analysis will be done on the fare proposal before it is enacted.
One of the stipulations is that if the City insists that SMS accept ORCA, then SMS will have to accept ORCA, but gets time to renegotiate fares or possibly opt out of the contract. If the monorail accepts ORCA, it would automatically have to have a low-income fare category, and extend its youth fare to age 18, due to the ORCA Joint Board’s agency sponsorship rules.
The new higher fares are scheduled to take effect May 1.
A public hearing on the fare proposal will be held at the Seattle Center Armory Loft #3 at 5:30 pm on Wednesday, April 12. Comments will also be accepted through Friday, April 14, via email at denise.wells@seattle.gov and via phone at 206-615-0258.
You know the drill by now. We’re taping in a couple of days. If there’s something you’d like Frank and me to answer, leave the question in the comments. If the thread turns into extensive discussion of that question, you’re just making it harder for us.
The media are full of stories of people mad about car tabs. Even though voters just approved them, and ST is applying them in accordance with existing law, there is no shortage of people that never wanted to pay higher taxes for transit in the first place. Olympia is anxious to respond, partly because their electorate is considerably more conservative. Also, a future revenue reduction is offset against “spending”, rather than any particular project or bus route that people care about.
In response to legislative staff inquiries, Sound Transit staff have finally produced an initial estimate of the impact. Unfortunately, it’s too vague to make the connection to real projects that would successfully counter the rhetoric. Nevertheless, we get a sense of the scale of the problem.
There are a lot of bills out there, so the memo covers a few different possibilities.
The most extreme case is “defeasance”, which is the technical term for, in effect, replacing the existing stock of bonds with a new set of bonds tied to the alternate, 2006 car valuation system.* This would immediately eliminate the 0.3% MVET from Sound Transit 1, because the legislation related to I-776 would apply once the bonds are gone. Borrowing costs would likely rise. ST assesses the overall revenue reduction as more than $6 billion.
As longtime readers know, in a long project it’s hard to know how much $6 billion is without knowing what year suffers those costs. The memo isn’t particularly clear on that point. But it’s about 11% of the entire $54 billion project budget. To get a sense of the limits, the whole segment from Ballard to Chinatown is $4.4 billion in 2014 dollars. In dollars from the opening year of 2035, that’s $6.6 billion assuming 2% inflation. So $6 billion is Ballard-Chinatown money, roughly speaking.
A more moderate legal outcome would require using the 2006 valuation system on all future bonds. The memo expects higher borrowing costs without being specific at all.
Finally, a 40% rebate for low-income households would not impair the bonds at all. ST has asked Seattle for the financial models from the city’s rebate and does not have more details at this time. But the memo seems particularly optimistic about this option.
Except for the draconian defeasance scenario, we still don’t have good impact estimates. Ultimately, though, Sound Transit has significant project risk buffers, and cutting ST’s revenue increases risk rather than immediately canceling projects. Of course, if there’s a time in the next 25 years where that added risk threatens project delivery, the same people who were so eager to hack at the taxes will be the first to condemn Sound Transit’s “mismanagement.” They certainly won’t take responsibility for their own recklessness.
* I was tempted to call the 2006 Kelley Blue Book system the “lower valuation” system, but as the memo points out “Owners of vehicles that are less than 11 years old would receive lower bills under the 2006 depreciation schedule while owners of vehicles older than 11 years old would receive higher bills.” Yes, Olympia’s strike for the common man would make the MVET less progressive.
Sound Transit has released its list of Sounders football matches and Mariners baseball games that will be served by special Sounder trains, through early July.
Leading off will be rare late evening service Sunday to the Sounders’ home opener against the New York Red Bulls, which will feature the raising of the MLS Cup Championship banner. This Sunday’s South Sounder departs Lakewood Station at 1:15, arriving at King Street Station at 2:28. North Sounder departs Everett Station at 1:45, arriving at King Street Station at 2:44. First kick is scheduled for 4:00. Return trains depart 35 minutes after the final whistle. (Thankfully, regular-season football matches can end in draws rather than going into extra sessions. Baseball, with its extra innings, wasn’t designed with transit in mind.)
Be sure to check out the Sounders’ new clear bag policy. Don’t get stuck having to pay $10 to store your daypack.
For those coming by Link Light Rail, my standing advice is to stand toward the tail end of the platform and board the third car, which is always the most spacious. Sound Transit runs 3-car light rail trains all day on most weekends, especially ones with a Sounders match, Mariners game, or other special event.
This year, you can buy your train or bus ticket before getting to the stop / station using the new mobile ticketing app. Try it now, as the mobile ticketing pilot project may go away at the end of the year if it doesn’t get enough use. If you buy your ticket at the station, be sure to get a day pass and skip the ticket line coming back.
The special Sounder schedule only runs through early July, so more games and matches may be added as the seasons progress.
If you work in an office, you probably take for granted the little things. Standing up to walk to a coworker’s desk. Multiple runs to the coffee machine. Off-site meetings to stretch your legs. The ability to use headphones. Availing yourself of legal pot.
But being a transit operator affords you none of those things. Imagine sitting for 4-8 hours at a time. If you drive a bus or streetcar, your bathroom breaks depend on the whims of traffic. If you’re really late on one run, you may not get a break at all in order to keep your next run on time. Your daily work life consists of hundreds of micro interactions with strangers, asking random questions as you navigate a 40′ or 60′ machine through tight city streets. For many part-timers who work only the peak periods, think about it: you hate traffic, but traffic is what they do for a living.
The pay is decent and the benefits are top-notch, but the work is hard and often thankless. They work hard for you every day, and are far more often the object of scorn than praise, as angry people lash out at them as a captive outlet. Just about anything you’re tempted to be mad about on a bus ride isn’t their fault.
Today is Transit Driver Appreciation Day. As you board a bus today, give your driver a quick thank you for freeing you from having to drive yourself.
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