Month: April 2018

Last year we said goodbye to Zach Shaner, as he moved on from being STB’s paid writer to the next stage of his career. It was painful, but that spot turned into Lizz Giordano, who quickly became our go-to reporter on a variety of subjects. Now Lizz is moving on to a position at the Everett Herald, where she will deliver her brand of well-researched and technically curious writing to that audience. Our sadness at seeing Lizz leave is tempered by our excitement at her opportunity to work on a bigger stage.

If Snohomish County matters to you, subscribe to the Herald and support the creation of more high-quality journalism. But for us, this means we have an opening again.

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We’re looking for a skilled writer with an interest in transit and land use issues and open to a part-time position. He or she would be responsible for a few pieces a week, although hours (and therefore output) are negotiable. Reporting skills are more important than domain expertise. However, knowledge of the local political terrain, transit operations, and land use issues are assets. Outside of the land use and transit beats, you’d be free to use the remainder of your time to pursue other writing opportunities.

Continue reading “We’re Hiring a Reporter”

A 1983 documentary produced by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources and the Seattle Engineering Department about how Seattle got its groove (and groves) back.

This is an open thread.

On Monday, Community Transit announced that it would accept a $43.2 million Small Starts grant from the Federal Transit Administration, completing the last of the $73 million in funding required to complete the Swift Green Line. Portions of the line have actually been under construction for a year, thanks to special authorization from the FTA, and many of the future stations in Everett are paved and ready for new canopy “skeletons” to be installed later this month.

The grant was approved by Congress last year, but was threatened in President Trump’s proposed elimination of the FTA’s Capital Investments Grants program. Sound Transit spokesperson Kimberly Reason told The Times ($) that the program’s grants for Lynnwood Link and Federal Way Link are “still at risk” and that full funding agreements would not be signed until this summer for Lynnwood and next year for Federal Way.

Continue reading “Swift Green Line Moves Along, Now With Federal Funding”

Sound Transit Operations & Administrative Committee meeting April 5, 2018
The escalator presentation runs from 8 minutes into the video until 1:08.

Last Thursday, Sound Transit staff gave a presentation to the Board’s Operations & Administration Committee in response to the March 16 breakdown of two down escalators on the same level at UW Station, resulting in long queues to enter the station during the evening peak period.

On March 16, one escalator was broken down for over two hours before ST personnel became aware it had stopped. Once the other broke down, staff miscommunication delayed calling the contractor that maintains the escalators — KONE — to come out and repair the escalators. Then, KONE took two and a half hours to get a repair crew to the station, despite being under contract to respond within one hour.

Continue reading “ST Exploring New Escalator Strategies”

Are you down for urban density? Speak up for abundant and affordable housing at the District 3+7 (Central Seattle, Pioneer Square to Magnolia) MHA public hearing on April 16!https://t.co/rnS6JE3JdU pic.twitter.com/sAJafzbHvz

— Tech 4 Housing (@tech4housing) April 5, 2018

On Monday, you have a chance to speak to Seattle city council members about one of the greatest challenges facing our society: building more houses for people. In Seattle, our housing shortage does not arise either from a lack of technology nor of capital, but primarily from laws that reserve more than half of the city’s land area for the most spatially-inefficient kind of urban housing ever to achieve mass adoption — the detached single-family house, with mandatory setbacks and car parking — and stringently regulate development on the tiny slice of land where multi-family housing is allowed.

Unlike other challenges we face, many of which require help from reluctant or recalcitrant higher levels of government, we in Seattle control* our own land use laws. We have nobody else to blame for the invisible wall of exclusionary zoning that we allow to stand around our city. The good news is that we have elected City Council members who, mostly, understand our housing problem and care about rectifying it. Last week’s Council vote, to stop forcing many people who live in transit-rich areas to have parking spaces they may not want, suggests our council members are willing to turn concern into legislation, even over the objections of a vocal, litigious, and extraordinarily privileged ($) minority.

The bad news is that privilege dies hard. To listen to much of the testimony at a zoning hearing is to fall into a netherworld where building more homes will not help our housing shortage; where open resentment of immigrants and newcomers is acceptable; where people who live in pre-war bungalows that would never meet today’s codes denounce modern apartments as Dickensian fire traps and health hazards; and imagined slights by the city bureaucracy invalidate years of open public process. To be a person who speaks at these hearings, for the radical proposition that roofs over people’s heads are both a public and private good, is definitely Type II fun.

But speak we must. Housing in the city, both subsidized and market rate, is an ethical and economic imperative, and if we fail to speak for it, we leave our elected leaders out on a limb. On Monday’s agenda is the citywide HALA rezone, a long-discussed, modest rezone of existing urban villages, coupled with a linkage fee. This rezone is worthy in its own right, and you should speak for it, but it must be thought of as a beginning, rather than an end; a down payment on a much more extensive and diverse housing stock that we have yet to legalize. As Minneapolis is considering, we must fundamentally reexamine single-family zoning throughout the whole city.

• What: Public Hearing: Mandatory Housing Affordability in Districts 3 & 7
  
• Where: Seattle Central College, Performance Hall, 1625 Broadway
• When: April 16, 2018 6:00 PM (be early! — speaking is first come, first served)

If you’d like to join up with an awesome, supportive group of people, consider Seattle 4 Everyone or Seattle Tech for Housing.

* Well, mostly. The playing field isn’t really level — upzones go through an exhaustive state environmental process that the status quo mostly never had to.

• What a train trip across the US taught one Australian about Trump’s America. Among other things: Amtrak is slow.
• TNT: Pierce County should borrow trailhead transit idea. I’d argue that having a decent all-day frequent-service network in Tacoma should come first.
• Wave as they pass your car. Fast buses could be coming to a long stretch of Tacoma’s Pacific Avenue.
• First post-rezone U-District highrise proposal gets design review.
• Navigating the strange new world of mobility.
• Morning Crank: A “Reset” for Move Seattle.
• Alon Levy gave a pair of talks in the Bay Area about regional rail.
• With renovation costs up, enhanced station program ends early, amid controversy.
• MTA’s Joe Lhota admits defrauding the public about costs.
• Shoupistas Rejoice: Seattle passes parking reform.
• City Council emails show Rob Johnson’s leadership on safe streets.
• Mayor Durkan: A vision for a more vibrant downtown with fewer cars, more transit, and less pollution.
• Housing cars or housing people? Debate rages ($) as number of cars in Seattle hits new high.
• Hostel takeover: Adjusting to a new Seattle.
• Congestion pricing plan for Manhattan ran Into politics. Politics won ($).
• Is Seattle’s Climate Action plan a plan of inaction?
• You can’t be a “climate mayor” if you’re making more room for cars.
• Century-old hotel in downtown Tacoma could be renovated into micro units for UW students. More like this, please!
• Don’t leave bike shares on ferries. The Coast Guard will think you’ve drowned.
• There are too many cars in Seattle, but there’s no way I’m getting rid of mine.
• Too many cars, too few supermarkets: how Australia’s cities really stack up.
• Montreal métro: Green light for Blue Line extension.
• Under Trump, new transportation grants ditch bikes, walkways ($).
• Developer proposes ($) an 18-story building in Lynnwood. “There’s a lot of land and a lot of parking lots… We’re trying to bring a more urban environment to the area. Everybody has been planning for this for a long time. We’re taking the first step.” Good for them; good for us all.
• All-door boarding is coming for all buses on Third Avenue next year.
• Everett was the first to bury its streetcars.
• Business owners oppose south central light-rail extension; Phoenix moves ahead anyway. “Four lanes or no train” sounds, regrettably, like the Phoenix I remember.
• More poorer residents are driving cars, presenting new issues for transit agencies.
• The Ben & Jerry’s crash course in transportation economics.
• Amsterdam will finally open second Metro Line.
• London’s Congestion Charge needs updating.

This is an open thread.

For months, SDOT watchers have been agonizing over the fate of One Center City’s program of bus and bike lanes, as well as the Center City Connector streetcar and its dedicated lanes. Mayor Durkan’s new proposal to toll the city center makes these petty squabbles by comparison.

Obviously, there’s a lot of process before anyone pays a toll. But if, somehow, the proposal survives and sets tolls as high as necessary to avoid congestion, that implies open streets downtown. That is way better for transit than fighting block-by-block for bus and BAT lanes.

The big exception here is bikes: backpedaling on ambitious bike lane plans plus faster traffic flow actually makes the status quo worse for the two-wheeled. That’s all the more reason to switch the emphasis of One Center City from bus lanes to bike safety.

However, in a bad sign for anything happening at all, on Sunday Danny Westneat started off the equity backlash, though he at least proposed constructive alternatives like allowing specific cars only on certain days. Ultimately, there’s a finite amount of road space and we will ration it somehow. Today, it’s by willingness to put up with traffic delays, and tough luck if you need to get there fast. Congestion charges sort by a combination of wealth and the value of someones’s time, and tough luck if you put a very low value on your time. A rotation scheme is equitable except for those with access to multiple cars, a perverse incentive if ever there was one. But the main cost is that there are days where you can’t drive downtown at all at any price in time and money.

Personally, I’m simply not moved by the equity argument. The downtown core is well-served by transit from nearly everywhere. Driving there is already expensive and difficult, so the extremely price-sensitive take the bus or train. The great mass of working class people that drive to do their jobs are getting paid (or forgoing paid work) to sit in traffic. It is worth it for them — or the people that pay them — to give them clear streets to be more productive. And finally, congestion pricing is revenue-positive, providing space to compensate the handful of disadvantaged people hurt by such a system (also, congestion may cost Metro $100m annually, even more money that could be plowed into increased service).

Technical merit is never a guarantee that a project will deploy, but if it does Mayor Durkan will have a transformative transportation legacy in downtown.

Learn about how Vancouver’s TransLink operates internally and how new SkyTrain corridors are decided.

This is an open thread.

Nestled by the confluence of Wenatchee and Columbia Rivers, the City of Wenatchee is framed by some of the most dramatic scenery in the state. A small urban core of about fifty thousand people, squeezed into a bench around the confluence, serves as the primary urban center for a huge rural hinterland that extends roughly from Leavenworth at the southwest, Ephrata at the southeast, and 145 miles east of north up US 97 to the Canadian border. I think of Wenatchee as the gateway to Washington’s Big Sky Country, and it seems many other visitors are similarly taken, as the area is struggling with a housing affordability crisis ($).

Wenatchee is a railroad town, and it owes its location primarily to the choices of the Great Northern. Headed west from Saint Paul to Puget Sound, the GN crossed one of its major obstacles, the mighty and wild Columbia, at its narrowest point in Washington, before threading its way up the Cashmere Valley towards Stevens Pass. That westerly alignment, which made Wenatchee well-connected in the era of the railroad, has made the city an island in the age of the macadam road: there are exactly two road bridges carrying one paved road, WA 285, through the urban core, which can suffer startlingly bad car congestion given the small population.

The political and business leaders of Wenatchee have exhibited more progressive thought around transportation policy than one might expect. While the north end of Wenatchee Ave is a hellscape of roaring engines, drive-thrus and giant parking lots, the downtown business association formed a LID in 1989 [PDF page 40] to convert the historic central section into a calm, pedestrian-oriented street. WSDOT-owned land riverfront land on the east bank of the Columbia, once slated for a freeway, has become part of a non-motorized trail system, which notably includes a historic bridge over the Columbia initially designed for wagons and irrigation pipe. The city recently engaged the marginalized South Wenatchee neighborhood in a subarea planning process that yielded safe walking facilities as the top priority.

In a similarly forwarding-thinking vein, Link Transit was founded in 1989 to provide transit service to Chelan and Douglas counties. Today, the agency provides all-day bus and paratransit service throughout the urban core, with a more skeletal service radiating out to smaller towns along the US 2, US 97 and WA 28 corridors. In 2009, Link pioneered battery buses on a set of short, high-frequency urban routes — a bold move for a small agency. This November, car-free mobility in north-central Washington will take another big step forward if voters approve a 0.2% sales tax increase for Link. This ballot measure arises from a planning process which found that residents both wanted more transit options, and were willing to pay for it.

To find out more about Link’s plans, I exchanged emails with planner Lauren Loebsack.  Continue reading “Wenatchee’s Link Transit Goes to the Ballot”

• Who decides if robots can drive? It shouldn’t be the companies racing to build them.
• The real driver of regional inequality in America.
• Here’s the real nightmare scenario for self-driving cars.
• Not a done deal: Convention center expansion could face fight in city hall.
• Tampa Bay’s new transit goal: Dedicated BRT lanes from St. Pete to USF Tampa.
• Feds to dig in on high costs of NYC transit construction.
• New interview of Jarrett Walker: On transit, home, NIMBYism, pipe cleaners. Everyone should listen to the Overhead Wire, but this episode even more so.
• Only a few American cities are growing transit ridership — here’s what they’re doing right.
• Legislature puts lid on tolls ($) as part of Tacoma Narrows Bridge loan.
• Kitsap Transit executive director talks route changes, fast ferries during community meeting.
• Debate continues in Kent over light rail station details.
• Pierce Transit weighs bus lane options for Pacific Avenue BRT.
• America begins capping the scars of freeways past.
• Albany punts ($) on clearing Manhattan’s clogged streets.
• Downtown Vancouver to Seattle flights imminent.
• Plight of Spring: Insane crowding on the Brooklyn Bridge.
• Washington’s loneliest road — from Dusty to Dodge — was one of the state’s first highways.
• New arboretum trail daylights creek, gives greater access to wetlands. The west side is a great bike thoroughfare, too, although the arboretum folks seem to be at pains not to point that out.
• Rainier Avenue’s second phase of improvements lacks vision.
• De Blasio administration may ditch planned streetcar along Brooklyn-Queens waterfront.
• With L Train shutdown a year off, Lower Manhattan braces for upheaval ($).
• As shared scooters invade, cities must decide whose vehicles belong.
• Don’t just rebuild the collapsed pedestrian bridge in Miami. This proposal doesn’t stand a chance in hell, but the authors are absolutely right: pedestrian bridges are usually a capstone of failed street design.

This is an open thread.

This spring, construction will finally begin on four seven-story mixed-use buildings above the Capitol Hill light rail station. Though an ideal place to build transit-oriented development (TOD), the land has sat empty since the station opened in March 2016. When the buildings are completed, probably sometime in 2020 according to Capitol Hill Seattle, 428 new housing units will be added to the light rail station walkshed. Of those new units, 41% — 176 of them — will be considered affordable housing.

Sound Transit is in the final stage of updating its TOD guidelines that the agency says will make TOD an integral component of transit project planning and delivery, and could support bringing new development online when transit stations open, rather than years later.

The ST3 plan requires the agency develop and implement “a regional equitable TOD strategy” and offer at least 80% of surplus property first to projects for families making 80% or less of area median income (AMI). The agency, which has until May to update its TOD policy, released a draft at the March 22 board meeting.

The draft policy declares goals such as “encourage [the] creation of housing options near transit with priority given to affordability” and “increase the value and effectiveness of transit by increasing transit ridership.” To reach those goals, the proposal lays out a specific set of strategies.

However, affordable housing advocates, who called the draft policy a step in the right direction while addressing the board Thursday, urged the agency to include specific housing goals in the TOD policy.

“While the statute sets a target over the entirety of the ST surplus properties, it would be beneficial to outline how these targets will be met,” said Angela Compton, an outreach coordinator with Futurewise. “Being transparent about this approach would provide a clear understanding of what ST is trying to achieve through this process.”

Compton suggested housing goals could be set by each site, corridor or year. Continue reading “ST Draft TOD Policy Lacks Specifics, critics say”

As the colorful dockless bike-shares, which began operating last summer in Seattle, stray past city boundaries, some suburban cities want to come along for the ride.

Bothell was the first suburb to issue permits for bike-share companies after bikes began popping up around town, most likely propelled north by the Burke-Gilman Trail. And now Bellevue is set to launch its own dockless bike-share pilot this May.

The city is starting small, permitting only 400 bikes at the pilot’s launch (roughly one for every 350 residents), and is only allowing e-bikes, which Bellevue says will “make the service accessible to a wider variety of potential users.”

Taking lessons from Seattle, where some dockless bikes are being improperly parked and blocking sidewalks, Bellevue’s pilot establishes bike hubs, using paint and racks, to identify preferred parking areas. Operators will be required to offer incentives, to encourage riders to use the hubs, and disincentives, to keep people from parking the bikes improperly. Geofencing will be used to keep bikes from being left in the middle of parks.

The city is laying out strict guidelines for rebalancing bikes nightly which the city says will “facilitate the convenient provision of bicycles where people want them while maintaining orderly and accessible public space and minimizing impacts to private property.”  

Continue reading “Bellevue Eases into Bike-sharing”

New York’s transit woes of the recent past, summarized by The New York Times.

This is an open thread.