Month: October 2017

STB endorsements for Seattle Mayor and other races will be out this week. If there is a campaign somewhere in the region that you think merits STB’s endorsement, this post is a chance to make your plug. As always, STB endorses solely on the basis of candidates’ records and positions on transit and land use.

Ballots should arrive in the mail Thursday. Your Washington State Voters’ Pamphlet should have already arrived. An audio version is available here. Local voters’ pamphlets are also linked there.

As high-capacity transit expands across the region, new data shows transit communities are growing at double the rate of the region as a whole, according to the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC).

The PSRC defines “transit communities” as areas one-quarter to one-half mile away from current or future (by 2041) high-capacity transit such as light rail, bus rapid transit, or ferries. The data also shows residents who live in a transit community are twice as likely to commute to work using public transit as those who don’t.

“We know when transit is provided — especially the high-capacity transit, light rail, bus rapid transit — people are riding it,” said Michael Hubner, principal planner with the PSRC. “This region has led the country in annual gains in transit ridership among metro areas eight years in a row.”

In 2013, the PSRC, along with a coalition of agencies, developed a strategy to promote transit-oriented development that encourages compact, walkable communities linked by mass transit.

Hubner said the strategy set out three goals:

• attract residential and job growth to transit communities
• provide housing choices affordable to a full range of incomes near transit
• increase access to opportunity

Hubner gave attendees of Building Transit, Building Opportunity, a day-long conference organized by the PSRC, a sneak peek at a forthcoming study by the agency that tracks job and residential growth around 96 identified transit communities. The event focused on techniques used around the region to build transit-oriented development.

Continue reading “Transit Hubs Attracting Density”

In September, King County Metro route 169, which serves a major business corridor on Kent East Hill, got a serious investment, going from half-hourly all day to running every 15 minutes from 7 am to 6 pm on weekdays.

Its north terminus is Renton Transit Center, from which riders have to transfer to route 101 to get to downtown Seattle, the F Line to get to more of the valley, ST Express 560 to get to the eastside, or route 106 to get to Skyway and Rainier Valley.

As it happens, route 169 is the only route in the queue to be converted to RapidRide that would not directly serve the region’s planned light rail network.

Route 101 is a peak-heavy commuter route that drops down to half-hourly off-peak.

Extending route 169 up to Rainier Beach Station could be done in a revenue-neutral manner that would also double frequency for riders living along Sunset Way between downtown Renton and Seattle. Just scavenge the off-peak service hours being used to run route 101 up to and through downtown, and roll them into route 169, with the route continuing on Sunset Way and MLK Way up to Rainier Beach Station.

Such a route restructure will make even more sense when route 101 is streamlined to run directly between Renton Transit Center and downtown Seattle, starting in March 2018.

Making route 169 an all-day connector to Link could also alleviate some of the bus traffic jam that will happen when route 101 leaves the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel forever in 2019.

Route 101 doesn’t have to cease serving downtown, however. For peak commuters, it could become one of several routes that go to the north end of downtown via the Seneca St exit from I-5, and on into the booming South Lake Union business district.

All-day frequent connectivity to the regional light rail system, peak express service to the fastest-growing job center in the state, and improved local connectivity would be a win-win-win for the residents of south Skyway, downtown Renton, and Kent East Hill.

[post updated with additional information about publicly accessible data feeds].

Out on the Pacific Coast, Grays Harbor Transit (serving the county around Aberdeen) is rolling out two major information technology projects: one for real-time information and one for mobile phone payment. In both cases, they’re contracting with companies that market to small transit agencies.

Real-time information is already live, although I found the interface to be non-intuitive. The listed times are scheduled times, but the arrow indicating the position of the bus is the actual position. The information is also available to third-party developers via the GTFS interface.

Mobile phone payments are, of course, incompatible with the Pierce Transit and Metro versions. They do, however, use the Token Transit app, which their twitter feed claims works for seven other agencies that are also clients. The app will go live October 23rd. And an app is superior to getting a pass by mail, or at a handful of retail locations.

If you use Grays Harbor Transit, you finally have some 21st century tools to save time and avoid cash.

• Seattle tops nation in new apartments — and they’re expensive ($) and full of millennials.
• NY MTA refurbishes subway cars with fewer seats, more preschool wallpaper; at least one of those seems like an improvement.
• Crown Hill pedestrian overpass to stay, but people on wheels will still get a crosswalk.
• Alon Levy tells DC and WMATA how they can make their buses better.
• C-TRAN and WSDOT experimenting with shoulder-running on SR 14 I-205.
• There was a brief window where car-free households grew as a fraction of the population, but it’s over now.
• Probably not a coincidence, we’re also in the middle of the worst spike in traffic deaths since the ’60s.
• The price of parking on Capitol Hill is being further adjusted to align with demand.
• Another terrifying report on the seismic risks of Seattle’s Unreinforced Masonry Buildings.
• Crossroads, the most interesting part of Bellevue.
• A disused gas station in the U-District will soon be a 24-story, 229 unit tower.
• Federal judge says driver’s union can advertise on Spokane buses.
• LA Metro is writing up an RFP for a microtransit service: smaller than 40′ buses, bigger than a car, intended for lower-density areas.
• Denver’s Colfax Ave slated for decent-looking BRT. It’s about time RTD built an urban line that’s not in a freeway trench.
• Downtown Spokane’s abandoned Ridpath Hotel is being renovated into mostly-affordable apartments.
• Tacoma getting a major new mixed-use development across from the Seven Seas taproom.
• HeraldNet sums up the Senate Republican’s nothing burger: Hearings fail to find Sound Transit duped lawmakers, voters.
• I’m in awe of both the analytical chops and amount of free time these Boston transit nerds have demonstrated.

This is an open thread.

With the Tacoma Link Extension design at 60 percent, the Sound Transit Board has approved a baseline budget of $217.3 million for the light rail expansion project, 25% more than previously estimated.

By 2015, Sound Transit had already grown the project from a 1.3-mile expansion with two new stations in 2008 to a 2.4-mile extension with six new stations. At the end of the preliminary engineering stage of the project, the agency submitted a cost of $175 million for the extension.

“That [$175 million] reflected the scope at the time, at a very preliminary level of design and the market conditions suitable for that year,” Madeleine Greathouse, a construction management specialist with Sound Transit, told the board at its September 28 monthly meeting. “The baseline estimate before you today is based on the latest information with regard to current market conditions as well as the evolution of design from earlier stages of planning and scope refinements.”

Greathouse emphasized the cost estimate was still within the range identified in ST2 when escalated to year-of-expenditure dollars.

According to Kimberly M. Reason, spokesperson for Sound Transit, further design refinements between the preliminary engineering and 60 percent design stage included “changing from ballast to embedded track at the Operations and Maintenance Facility, larger track power substations and associated equipment and utilities, and increased quantities of Overhead Catenary Supply poles.” And additional engineering from the city found the need to install 40 new ADA curb ramps not previously identified.

“Real estate acquisition was not a significant driver of cost growth as the project does not require complete or full parcel acquisitions,” added Reason in an email.

Continue reading “Expanded Scope and Rising Costs for Tacoma Link”

A couple of months ago, I blurbed a survey for King County Metro’s Community Connections project, which was seeking input from people who work in Seattle’s SODO district, a mostly-industrial and commercial area immediately south of downtown. I noticed that the SODO Connections project seemed very focused on alternative service — i.e. not fixed route bus service — and I had some questions about that. Here are my questions and the answers I was given; I have some comments at the end.

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Seattle Transit Blog: One of the approaches mentioned on the page — flexible-route service — is typically used in low-density suburban or rural environments, which don’t look much like SODO. The other — on-demand ridesharing — seems already to be covered by a thriving private market.

Scott Gutierrez, King County Metro: These are just some of the options Metro has developed as part of the Community Connections program. Our main program website has information on the kinds of services we’ve developed so far as well as current pilot locations.

We’re still early in our outreach process for the SODO project, so we have not yet determined what specific services we will pilot there. Based on the results of our outreach, we might propose something similar to services we developed in other communities, or we might come up with a transportation pilot that is completely new to Metro.

STB: What’s the niche Metro is trying to fill with these alternative service methods?

Metro: Community Connections focuses on partnering with communities to meet unique transportation needs that fixed-route transit isn’t able to serve. When the City of Seattle applied for this Community Connections project in SODO, they described gaps in the neighborhood as follows:

• SODO is a significant employment center, including the highest concentration of manufacturing and industrial jobs in the city. The drive alone rate for employees in SODO (66%) is far higher than the rate in Downtown which lies immediately to the north.
• Employees who travel to the target area have schedules that do not correspond with when transit service is running/frequent (e.g. during the weekend, or early in the morning/late and night).
• A lack of east-west mobility options exists in the neighborhood.
• A difficult pedestrian environment combined with diffuse destinations makes accessing the existing transit service difficult

Before we determine what specific niche we can best serve, we need to better understand these transportation gaps and barriers that exist for workers in SODO. The information above, and feedback from a stakeholder group, informed the survey we are asking people to take. Results of this survey will help our stakeholder group to articulate a set of transportation needs for our Community Connections pilot to address. Those articulated needs in turn will inform our solution design.

More interview and commentary after the jump

Continue reading “SODO Connections Project Focuses on Alternative Service”

Yes, when it’s busy and the escalators are so long most don’t walk.

In August Frank reported that “by the end of the year” the Pt. Defiance Bypass would open to Cascades trains, shaving 10 minutes off the trip to Portland and allowing a 13% increase in on-time arrivals. WSDOT is also using this occasion to deploy its new locomotives on two daily round trips to Portland. Now we have a date: WSDOT announced that service on the bypass would begin on December 18th.

The changes were funded by the Obama-era stimulus. There will be minor adjustments to the Eugene-Portland schedule to better accommodate through trips.

Now riders have more options for holiday trips to Portland. You can find the full timetable here.

• Minneapolis gets a $1 low-income fare.
• Helsinki is in the vanguard of the war on cars, and I’m jealous.
• Bremerton fast ferry still struggling with mechanical issues.
• Tacoma planning for growth in the Tacoma Mall area.
• Transit is a key part of not loving city-accessible trailheads to death.
• Tri-Met contemplating a $1.7b property and vehicle tax measure to pay for Southwest Light Rail and other projects.
• The rail that fails.
• Rideshare companies are trying to figure out how to serve elderly people. This turns out to be more challenging than serving the mostly-affluent, younger urbanites who have hitherto comprised their primary clientele.
• Vancouver for a day: Take a crazy, fun round trip from Seattle in 16 hours ($). Not discussed in the story: the writer took BoltBus; a day trip on Cascades would make your time in Vancouver short indeed.
• The Times Traffic lab writes up ($) Tacoma’s proposed fast ferry study, surveys the recent history of passenger ferries.
• Local VC group Madrona Ventures, who are fond of releasing speculative reports on regional autonomous vehicle adoption (here’s a writeup last year’s ($)) have released another ($) (direct PDF link). For no stated reason, and without reference to the fact that I-5’s HOV lanes carry up to four GP lanes worth of people at rush hour, they propose that HOV lanes be opened to AVs within the next year.
• Bellevue Reporter blurbs Metro’s Eastside RapidRide plans.
• Utah senior citizens find more freedom on public transit ($).
• Curbed Seattle goes deep on how cities and local agencies prioritize surplus land for affordable housing.
• Port of South Whidbey really wants more parking at Mukilteo. Hot quote: “It doesn’t make any sense to me that this Washington State Ferries multi-modal facility is being built with no plan for [more] parking.” Results from multi-agency parking study due soon.
• West Seattle Transportation Coalition had an SDOT rep over for a monthly meeting.
• DC is the next bikeshare challenges-of-success story.
• Thanks to SEPA, the city will spend more than a year on an EIS to catalog all the possible impacts of liberalizing backyard cottage construction before voting on the idea. The EIS now is in the scoping phase, where you can comment on what should be included in the study. Among the things that won’t be studied: the deleterious effects of our NIMBY housing culture and the endless procedural filibustering that perpetuates it.
• On the brighter side, the city has proposed some very, very good parking rule changes.
• Metro GM Rob Gannon touts ($) Metro’s laudably aggressive electric bus adoption efforts. The biggest hurdle: incompatible charging systems between manufacturers.
• The Economist discusses dockless bike share.
• The Senate Republicans’ ST witch-hunt goes to Everett.
• Small Uptown upzone approved.
• Spokane parklets to be made permanent.
• Amazon finally leases some office space that’s truly convenient to Link.
• Someone has finally written a paper showing what people who understand transit have known for ages: most recent streetcar projects, aren’t particularly effective transit.

This is an open thread.