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”

• Forget gondolas, turn Silver Line Green.
• ST is hiring a Senior Transportation Planner.
• The mean musical chairs of rising rent and home prices.
• A bold, divisive plan to wean Californians from cars.
• For low-income renters, the affordable housing gap persists.
• Pollution impacts heighten the need for lids or freeway removal.
• Seattle underestimates by millions the cost to run its new streetcar line, Metro says.
• Olympia passes housing bills advancing CLT, homeless funding, and WSCC Lodging Tax.
• Innisfil, Ontario went with Uber instead of public transit‚ and says it saved $8 million per year. Keep in mind that Innisfil is “36,000 people spread over 270 square kilometres,” so this result is what you’d expect.
• Public transit officials are “struggling to understand” Trump’s proposed cuts.
• UW light-rail escalators re-started after 2-hour breakdown ($) Friday.
• Retail turmoil triggers new visions for shopping malls like Northgate ($) in Seattle.
• A closer look at plans to add safety improvements in Green Lake & Wallingford.
• How to survive the Cascadia Earthquake? Tips from seismologist Lucy Jones, “the Beyoncé of earthquakes” ($).
• Can London become a people-centric smart city?
• As city grapples with homelessness, leader tasked with response resigns.
• Here’s how WMATA says it would spend $15.5 billion over a decade.
• Waze launches free carpool app in Washington state matching drivers, riders ($).
• British Columbia goes all in on rapid transit, funds high-speed rail study.
• Modernism in London’s “Metro-Land.”
• Paris rolls out “on demand bus stops” in bid to fight sexual harassment. Note that King County riders already have this.
• Why are the NYC subway’s operating costs so high?
• Light rail frequency: promises and priorities. Another helpful debunking of the the stubborn myth that rails guarantee high-quality service.
• Construction costs and experience.
• How signal timers after a 1995 subway crash led to NYC’s current transit crisis.
• Feds join suit against MTA alleging ADA violations.
• The myth of “forcing people out of their cars.”
• Why outer suburbs in the East and Midwest have stopped booming.
• Portland wants help plotting bus-only lanes, bikeways and safer crossings in central city.
• Falling transit ridership poses an “emergency” for cities, experts fear.
• Don’t delay the downtown bike network.
• City Council briefed on downtown circulator and Seattle streetcar.
• Why Sound Transit doesn’t want you walking down a stalled escalator.

This is an open thread.

Seattle Center and the Seattle Monorail have a survey in the field:

With plans underway for renovating KeyArena and bringing a new NHL hockey franchise to Seattle, Seattle Center and Seattle Monorail Services are planning ahead by exploring how to make it easier to use the monorail to travel to and from Seattle Center and connect to Link Light Rail.

With One Center City (possibly?) on the horizon and an NHL franchise looking likely at a rebuilt Key Arena, many people are looking to Seattle’s oldest grade-separate transit system, the 1962 World’s Fair Monorail, to evolve from a tourist curiosity to a legitimate piece of transit infrastructure.

Key Arena will re-open in the early 2020s, but the arena’s light rail station won’t open until the mid-2030s. That leaves a 10-15 year gap of concerts and sporting events that could benefit from improved mobility.

ORCA support (which we advocated for), the bare minimum for integration into the transit network, is coming in “spring of 2019.”  Improved access to the station and a re-design to allow direct access from the street (as opposed to the Westlake Center Food Court) are also under consideration:

@SeattleMonorail study (1/2):
The medium cost option would allow for 6,000 people an hour. pic.twitter.com/tC56zsRIbV

— Andrew Koved (@Andrew_Koved) March 14, 2018

A Bell St. station and a doubling of frequency (also possible, given enough funding) would be icing on the cake.

Take the survey and let the Seattle Center and Monorail folks know what you think.

Route 7, one of the most popular bus lines in the city, is getting a RapidRide makeover in 2021.  Metro and SDOT are kicking off the public process for the Rainier Valley line with an online open house through April 8.

10,800 weekday riders make the 7 the 5th busiest Metro route, behind RapidRide lines C, D, and E and the RapidRide-in-waiting Route 40.  Rainier Avenue is also a very dangerous street for pedestrians, and bicycle facilities are non-existent.  And while the buses themselves come fairly frequently, the also get stuck in traffic and bunching is common. All of which is to say there’s plenty of room for improvement here.

The open house materials break the 7-mile route into four segments:

• Chinatown to Mount Baker, which includes Jackson Street along with the widest, straightest, northernmost section of Rainier Ave. Improvements here could include a Business Access and Transit (BAT) lane for bus priority or a bike lane, but not both.
• Mt. Baker to Columbia City on Rainier Ave., which would continue to be a 4- or 5- lane general purpose traffic street
• Columbia City to Rainier Beach on Rainier Ave., where a BAT lane is already planned
• Downtown Rainier Beach to its light rail station on S. Henderson St., which could see protective buffer added to the bike lanes at a cost of some parking spots

Pedestrian/greenway crossings would be added throughout the route.  A few stops would be consolidated and the remaining ones would be upgraded to RapidRide standards.

Bike access would be via a “parallel” neighborhood greenway, which is unfortunate — there really is no true parallel street to Rainier Ave.  The materials include a lengthy note explaining why bikes and transit are not both feasible in the narrow section of Rainier between I-90 and Mt. Baker.  It stinks, as ever, that bikes and transit have to be pitted against one another, but as you can see on the right an unbuffered bike lane hugging a bus lane would not be a pleasant experience.

Finally, Metro is undecided about the tail end of the route at Prentice St.  Read our previous takes from 2011 and 2014 if you want to go deep on some ideas for what to do there.

The survey ends April 8.

Update: clarified SDOT’s involvement in the project

Be sure to thank your bus driver today and every day.

This is an open thread.

Kenmore wants to bring a new mix-used development to the shores of Lake Washington and eventually replace the cement and asphalt plants.
Credit: Lizz Giordano

Home to one of the last remaining industrial ports on Lake Washington, the city of Kenmore longs to shed its manufacturing past and cultivate a new identity. Nestled at the top of the lake, the bedroom community wants to give passers-by a reason to stop.

“Rather than just fixing potholes and writing traffic tickets, we wanted to be about building community and getting people connected to each other,” said Rob Karlinsey, Kenmore’s city manager.

To do that, the city became a developer. Several years after incorporating, Kenmore bought a dilapidated 10-acre lot and resold the land after placing certain conditions on the parcels. A couple of economic cycles later, Kenmore’s new town square is taking shape — a year-round community space, 300 units of multi-family housing, and a medical clinic replaced an abandoned park-and-ride lot and a run-down grocery store.

“The new town square area is giving Kenmore something residents never had before, which is a place for people to gather,” said Mark Abersold, a current resident who moved to the city six years ago.

“We are hoping for a ripple effect that will be a catalyst for more redevelopment,” Karlinsey said, proudly showing off the new town square to the STB.

Continue reading “Kenmore: Casting off an Industrial Past”

• Rainier Valley through the years.
• In Kenmore, urbanism takes root in suburbia.
• Could Pittsburgh public transit handle Amazon HQ2?
• LA taps the brakes on freeway expansion.
• How a new transit system could hobble Montreal.
• Missed connections, a treatise.
• The MTA genius challenge is as bad as expected.
• Excellent principles for shared mobility.
• Dublin, California city council rejects 220-unit TOD project. “Too massive… wrong colors.”
• Portland uses bikes to rethink 70 years of strip malls.
• State legislature passes big supplemental transpo bill.
• In Munich, putting people before cars makes transit work so much better.
• Morning Crank: Adapting parking policies for the next 50 years.
• More housing, less bureaucracy: That’ll solve the housing crisis.
• Asian flavored H Mart in talks to fill key retail space at Capitol Hill Station.
• Northgate Mall plans huge overhaul ($) with housing, offices as North Seattle transforms.
• Former SDOT Director Scott Kubly takes a job ($) with bike-share company LimeBike.
• Steilacoom’s mayor, foe of Sound Transit’s $54B plan, now on agency’s board ($).
• Here’s Sound Transit’s plan to make the display signs at Capitol Hill Station work.
• Minneapolis leaders consider allowing fourplexes citywide to relieve housing shortage. Yes!

This is an open thread.