Month: March 2018

Yesterday, Mayor Durkan suspended almost all work on the Center City Connector (CCC) Streetcar that would join the First Hill and South Lake Union lines using dedicated lanes on First Avenue. The trigger was a jump in the cost estimate from $177m to over $200m, partly due to estimation “errors” and partly because costs for all construction projects are skyrocketing in the current economy. This is a setback for Downtown and its people-carrying capacity, obviously, but there are too many unknowns to really understand the long-range implications.

1. What is the impact on FTA funding? Seattle expected a total of $75m from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) for this project, and canceling it would forfeit this money. If this affects FTA awards for other transit projects like Madison BRT, as streetcar boosters warn, then it will be one of the more disastrous decisions in Seattle’s transportation history.
2. Is this a pause or a cancellation? The Deputy Mayor’s language clearly describes a mere pause to get a handle on costs by the June 19th project review. However, advocates on both sides reasonably see this as a prelude to killing it altogether. If it is just a short delay, this might have salutary effects. Construction would have coincided with the city’s period of maximum constraint, where the viaduct comes down, Convention Place Station closes, and so on. Although CCC will be an efficient way to move people in the long run, a slip short enough to stay on the FTA’s good side might allow Seattle to stagger the impact of multiple projects.
3. Where does the money go? Transit-oriented streetcar opponents mostly argue that the same amount of money would achieve much better outcomes if spent on buses. This is a great test of that hypothesis. There is now an extra $100m, minus the continuing utility work and costs to exercise contract cancellation options, in the transportation account. Can it go to more bus hours, which is hard to do with Metro’s capacity limits and leaves no legacy after it’s spent? Could we build more rapid bus corridors? Do the currently planned bus corridors need more money because of escalating costs? Or will the money be siphoned off to tackle homelessness, provide tax relief, or do something else unrelated to transit?
4. What would have paid for the overruns? If the streetcar never opens, we will never get the answer to this. But the $23m shortfall would have been filled from something, and this is the converse question to #3.
5. How will we move through downtown? A lot of Seattle’s job and residential growth is happening in greater downtown. ST3, when built out, will provide the capacity to move about 36,000 people per hour* through the two tunnel lines. That’s a colossal number of people — but it may not even absorb the growth in jobs in that area over the next few decades. Third Avenue is near its bus capacity. Although One Center City may yet piece together some right of way, the CCC’s dedicated chunk of First Avenue would have been very useful for moving people efficiently. Redistributing resources to bus routes that go further into the neighborhoods has its merits, but doesn’t solve the problem of the city’s most important bottleneck.

* assuming 60 trains per hour and 600 people per train on the five approaches to downtown.

• “Red paint” — SDOT collecting feedback on Broadway transit lane proposal.
• PLUZ committee moves parking reform. Almost all the debilitating Herbold amendments were defeated.
• This small Wallingford apartment building is fine-grained urbanism at its finest.
• Paris to offer subsidies to those who buy bikes, give up cars.
• New federal budget would likely keep money flowing ($) to Lynnwood light rail.
• Seattle’s plan to allow more homes near transit and shops doesn’t go far enough.
• Will Boston turn around its ailing bus system?
• Paris mayor floats free transit for all.
• Twin Transit’s purchase of electric bus stalled by WSDOT testing, “Buy America” Standards.
• SEPTA lost millions of bus trips last year. Proposed solutions are in the works.
• SDOT evaluates options to craft Magnolia Bridge alternative.
• Anti-bike lane group tweets that single moms don’t bike. It backfires spectacularly.
• SDOT collecting more traffic data for Lake Washington Loop Greenway.
• Chicago: Parking lots disappearing in ride-sharing era as downtown construction booms.
• How Boise could keep at least some Downtown housing affordable. Here’s an idea: an attractive, fast, reliable transit system that can extend outside of the downtown.
• Not one, not two, but three ($) takes on the MTA’s off-peak service.
• Portland: Two new plans to watch.
• Google Pay now handles transit tickets.
• Plan to dramatically increase development ($) would transform some L.A. neighborhoods. Where’s Washington’s Scott Weiner?
• Thirteen years after painful cut, First Hill still wants a light rail station.
• Transportation projects in Spokane area poised to benefit from federal spending bill.
• Documenting the dynamic black community ($) of 1940s Seattle.
• Slower speed is a service cut.
• You want congestion pricing? Be specific.
• Transportation projects in Spokane area poised to benefit from federal spending bill.
• Third Ryde Tube: Transfer troublesome.
• Georgia governor throws $100M behind metro Atlanta transit initiatives. “Is this really happening in Georgia?”
• As Puget Sound region grows, (free) park and rides fill up.
• Did Fort Collins grow too big too fast?
• NYC: More on weekend service changes and redundancy.
• Arizona governor and Uber kept self-driving program secret, emails reveal.
• Transit App: Now supporting accessibility information.
• Seattle’s Highway 99 tunnel could open to traffic ($) in October.
• Washington State Ferries to look harder at diesel to electric conversion. The shorter ferry routes (Lummi, Guemes, Cathlamet, Keller, Inchelium) also seem worth examining.
• Sound Transit settlement will subsidize ($) Uber and Lyft rides to Mercer Island transit center.
• Let’s not screw up Northgate, too: The redevelopment of Seattle’s oldest mall us a chance to get things right.
• Traffic, traffic everywhere — including rural Pierce County. Shocker: it turns out those big new houses are cheap for a reason.
• Everything is awesome! Southwest LRT officials make the case that the project isn’t the smoldering tire fire so many assume.

This is an open thread.

Thanks to a sponsorship deal with the Mariners, for the first two months of the season both digital and printed baseball tickets also serve as a valid Link fare. Until June 3rd, riders can present the ticket for that day’s home game to fare enforcement up to 3 hours before first pitch (typically 1:10 or 7:10) and through the end of the day.

To further eliminate excuses for skipping the train, Uber is discounting rides to the two Link terminal stations (UW and Angle Lake). Even though Sounder and ST Express aren’t included in the deal, a broad segment of the region now has an inexpensive means of avoiding game traffic entirely.

ST spokesperson Kimberly Reason says that the arrangement with the Mariners is a pilot. The finance staff estimated the agency makes about 24 cents per Mariners attendee (whether or not they take the train). At the end of the pilot, the team will write a check based on the attendance over the entire period.

A fare-free transit system isn’t good for most transit riders until other revenue streams fund transit service beyond the point of diminishing returns. However, an ideal (but unenforceable) framework would charge regular users a flat fee to fund the system while letting everyone use the system occasionally for free. This gives more people a stake in the system, makes the marginal cost of riding zero, and eliminates the friction of handling fares from those infrequent users.

Deals like this one provide small glimpses of that ideal system. By (in effect) giving Sound Transit a cut of baseball ticket revenue, a large number of novice riders don’t have to mess with fares and have strong incentives to ride. Let’s hope it makes enough of a measurable difference that all parties decide to continue the experiment.

With over a quarter of blocks missing sidewalks and a backlog of street projects, the city is contemplating adopting a transportation impact fee as a way to help pay for new infrastructure needed to handle growth.

Last week during a meeting of the Seattle Sustainability and Transportation Committee, Councilmember Mike O’Brien instructed city staff to begin developing a transportation impact fee schedule for these one-time charges paid by new development.

Impact fees were authorized by the 1990 Growth Management Act, and today most urban jurisdictions have adopted some kind of impact fees for roads or parks. The City of Sammamish has adopted some of the highest transportation impact fees, charging new single-family homes close to $15,000.

Seattle has considered impact fees for years. A 2015 staff report recommended further study of park and transportation impact fees, but competing priorities delayed the work. Councilmembers sitting on the Sustainability and Transportation Committee received an update on the progress last week.

These funds must be used within ten years of collection and spent on projects that provide capacity for future growth. Impact fees cannot be used to pay for existing deficiencies, but they can be used for transit or greenway projects, according to Kendra Breiland, a consultant from the firm Fehr and Peers.

“When you start thinking through all these parameters, many cities have started moving towards recognizing they can spend these funds not just on those traditional auto capacity projects, but we can spend them on much more multimodal projects,” Breiland told the committee.

She said transit projects could include off-board fare payment, transit signal priority, rapid ride corridors, in-lane bus stops or curb bulbs.

Continue reading “Seattle Edging Closer to Implementing Impact Fees”

Video by Welwyn22

For those of you who, like me, have been caught miscounting taps before boarding Link Light Rail or Sounder, Sound Transit is going to make the system more user-friendly. Per ST spokesperson Kimberly Reason, a change to the “tap off” tone, to make it unique from the “tap on” tone, is in the works. However, there is no timeline yet for when the change will happen. The change is in the work queue for ST’s information technology vendor.

It will still be possible to forget to tap at all, and get warned and given a $124 citation even if you have a monthly pass covering the highest possible fare for the ride. State law sets the minimum fine.

Nor is there any plan to deal with the regressiveness of the flat $124 ticket. That fine still seems out of proportion for riders with limited financial means who have already paid $36 for a monthly Regional Reduced Fare Permit ORCA pass or $54 for a youth or LIFT monthly pass. Even high school students with free unlimited monthly passes on a youth ORCA card could be cited. I got to talk briefly with a fare enforcement officer, and he confirmed that even students with passes that are free to the student get warned and could get the $124 citation.

The state sets the minimum fine (which is slightly more than enough to cover court administrative costs when the fine actually gets paid), but Sound Transit could choose to increase the number of warnings for riders in different fare groups, or at least do so for full passholders or some groups of reduced-fare riders, or simply honor full passes.

Continue reading “Tapping ORCA Will Soon Get Less Confusing”