Month: April 2017

Among advanced industrial nations, Canada is the worst in passenger rail. At least in the U.S. we already have faster trains and are building a new high speed train in California.

(h/t Michael Hoffman)

With the whirlwind of news, One Center City, potential restructures, and proposals for fare policy revisions, there has been no shortage of public surveys lately. Below are five surveys from Metro and Sound Transit that you should spend a few minutes of your Saturday filling out.

Link Customer Satisfaction

A general survey of Link customer satisfaction, covering fares, access, speed, reliability, and more. (Link)

SR 520 Link Connections Survey

A survey encompassing all riders in the SR 520 corridor in the context of One Center City and possible Link truncations. (Link)

Sound Transit 545 Riders Survey

Similar to above, but a Sound Transit survey limited to riders in the 545 corridor. (Link)

King County Metro Fare Revisions

A survey asking riders to respond to Metro’s Options A and B for fare simplification. (Link)

King County Metro General Bus Satisfaction

A coordinated survey done with 14 other transit agencies for comparative purposes, this survey gauges general customer satisfaction with Metro’s services. (Link)

It tells you something about an agency’s workload when a $130m purchase of light rail vehicles isn’t the headlining agenda item. At Thursday’s packed-agenda Sound Transit Board meeting, the Board approved the vehicle buy, discussed the recent controversies relating to MVET valuations and Mercer Island litigation, and defended its record hiring disadvantaged businesses.

But the big news was a draft release of the agency’s blueprint for ST3, the System Expansion Implementation Plan (watch beginning at 51’00” in the video below). The plan details timelines for project development, design, and construction phases of all 24 concurrent projects, including remaining ST2 projects. Given the layer cake of local, state, regional, and federal jurisdictions with veto points over various aspects of construction, the report spends most of its ink discussing process improvements needed for further expediting of projects. These include streamlined permitting, earlier and more intensive public outreach, and significant internal shuffling for efficiencies. ST will also attempt to shave a year off of the time each project takes to get to an FTA Record of Decision (the final step in the environmental process), from 5.5 years to 4.5 years.

Continue reading “ST3 Kicks Off”

• Zach Shaner, front page, above-the-fold ($)
• A peek at Tacoma Link’s new stations.
• Erica asks Mayoral candidate Mike McGinn a lot of questions about density.
• Governor Inslee noncommittal on car tab changes, says some good things about limiting Carbon.
• The “Seattle Partners” Key Arena proposal is the less car-centric ($) of the two.
• Move Seattle spending ($) a little behind schedule.
• WSDOT opens I-405 shoulder lane to general traffic, probably making it harder to eventually dedicate to buses.
• ST hiring a consultant for Ballard to West Seattle. It begins!
• If you’re going to commit a serious crime, best to have your ORCA card fully charged well in advance.
• Silicon Valley redoing its bus network.

This is an open thread.

Over the past month the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has been quietly testing their new Intelligent Transportation Systems program on the Mercer Street corridor. Usually shorthanded to “signal retiming”, the $13m Move Seattle project creates a dynamic corridor that adapts to traffic conditions in real time. 32 signals have been updated with the new software on Mercer, Roy, and Republican Streets from 3rd Ave W to Fairview Ave N.

The primary management imperative seems to be to shorten signal times in periods of heavy traffic, theoretically reducing the cascading gridlock that occurs as queues form during lengthy cycles and spill over into neighborhood streets. In times of heavily asymmetric traffic, such as the end of major Key Arena concert late at night, the system could keep eastbound lights green far longer, and make the lesser amount of north-south traffic wait. Anyone who has ever driven Mercer Street on a sleepy Sunday morning will attest that the current system has been rigid and static, slow to drive even when no one is on it if you miss the green-light wave.

SDOT’s early data shows significant improvement in travel time reliability for most drivers, significantly better eastbound flow, and slightly worsened westbound flow (see SDOT images below). Eastbound in the PM peak, when volumes are highest and delays worst, travel time has decreased by 2.7 minutes and average speed has increased by 1.4 mph. Doing a little math, for a 1-mile corridor this implies travel time improvement from 12 minutes to 9.3 minutes, and average speed improvement from 5mph to 6.4mph.

These are significant relative improvements, but put another way $13m just went to making peak car traffic go from barely faster than brisk walking to about half the pace of casual cycling. To the average observer, or to the driver whose sense of time is dilated by rage, the corridor will still feel very slow. SDOT estimates that the average peak driver will save about $4 per year in reduced fuel costs.

So signal timing can work to improve east-west vehicle flow. But when it does so, it must also impede north-south traffic, and all transit in the area is north-south. A total of about 13,500 vehicles use Mercer during the PM peak, and their prioritization can’t help but downgrade the priority of the thousands of peak commuters on Routes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 40, 62, 63, 63, 70, 309, C, and the SLU Streetcar. If aggregate flow improves sufficiently that total systemic collapse is avoided, then maybe everyone actually will be better off. But even at its best, it tinkers at the margins at great expense. The fundamental space constraints that generate traffic will remain, and those who think tech will save us from traffic will continue to be disappointed.

Adoption of the conference committee report on the two-year transportation budget bill, Engrossed Senate Bill 5096, by the House 82-14-0-2 Thursday and the Senate 48-0-0-1 Friday sends the budget bill to the governor’s desk, unusually on time.

Here is the text of the conference report bill.

Staff analysis should be out within days.