Month: May 2018

• Some suburban cities looking to slow growth
• Growth in single-family home rents also slowing
• Diminished budgets for Seattle’s transit corridors
• Mariners-Link promotion extended to July 8
• Mixed-use TOD near Mountlake Terrace station
• Local mayors learning about bikes in Copenhagen (Pipeline trail in Pierce Co. looks ?)
• High gas prices straining some transit agency budgets
• Mobility workshops at UW
• That’s a big boat
• San Francisco transit agencies improbably losing ridership (no exclusive lanes > slower buses > more driving)
• Hello Kitty Shinkansen. Just gonna leave that here.
• Dan Bertolet on the backyard cottage DEIS is always worth reading
• Seattle shows how cities can win outside the sunbelt
• Remembering bike advocate SJ Brooks
• Renderings of the new Paine Field passenger terminal
• Plans for increasing monorail capacity to serve Key Arena

This is an open thread.

Photo by Joe Kunzler in the STB Flickr pool

It appears we’re not going to get a formal study of building the Midtown Station on 8th Avenue, much less further up First Hill. However, a little searching can give us an idea of costs and benefits. Call it the discount version of the study Sound Transit will refuse to give us.

Costs

Back in 2010, Sound Transit spent $27m to tunnel under I-5. Two undercrossings thus price out to $62m in 2018 dollars.

Oran’s mapping software estimates an 8th & Madison alignment as adding roughly 0.09 miles, or 475 feet, to the length of the tunnel. Taking the experience of the Beacon Hill Project, a TBM can cover 50 feet per day, so that’s 10 more days of boring operations. This source suggests TBMs cost about 5m Euro per month, so that comes out to roughly $2m in additional expenditure.

Lastly, an 8th Avenue station would be deeper than at 5th, and therefore more expensive. Back in 2005, the entire Beacon Hill project (both station and tunnel) cost $305m, which is $413m today. Roosevelt Station cost $151m in 2018 dollars, and can be considered a floor for what the 5th Avenue choice would cost. Thus we can place a ceiling on the station cost differential of $252m, and estimate the total cost of moving the station from 5th to 8th at no more than $316m.

Benefits

Ridership predictions are difficult, even with a professional model. They become harder when it’s not clear what to measure: is it enough to compare boardings at each location? What if those riders are cannibalized from the existing Link stations? If they’re taken from the bus network, how do we measure the improvement in quality of life for those riders even if they don’t take a car off the road?

Rather than try to answer any of these questions, I’ll use two considerations. First, walkshed:

Continue reading “A Cheap ST3 First Hill Study”

The nice thing about BRT is that it doesn’t take forever to open. After we approved BRT on SR522 in 2016, it will open in 2024.

ST is holding two community meetings this week to start public planning for the project:

Bothell Public Meeting
Wednesday, May 30, 6-8 p.m. (presentation at 6:30 p.m.)
Northshore Senior Center // 10201 E. Riverside Dr.

Lake Forest Park Public Meeting
Thursday, May 31, 6-8 p.m. (presentation at 6:30 p.m.)
Brookside Elementary School // 17447 37th Ave. N.E.

You can also participate online.

BART extended further east this weekend using DMUs.

• Estonia on the free transit tip
• Bellevue’s Spring District getting more offices
• NTSB holding a hearing on last winter’s Amtrak Cascades derailment
• Even when you think you’re done paying for parking garages, you still gotta maintain ’em
• Deep dive from the Times on bike lane costs [$].  Spoiler: most of the money wasn’t for the bike lane.
• Bike lanes are for cars. Amen.
• Search for new SDOT director underway. Take the survey.  Read Tom’s take on what the new director needs to do.
• Seattle drivers enjoying laying on the horn more these days (blame the transplants, I guess)
• TRU argues for higher transit pass subsidies for UW employees
• Biking may expose you to air pollution.
• After an auspicious start, NYC’s new transit chief seems to have gotten caught in the DeBlasio-Cuomo petty crossfire. NY’s transit riders be the worse for it.
• Golden Gate Transit routes entering a low ridership death spiral. Marin County is the worst.
• 175 units in Othello Square
• What will happen to Seattle’s sidewalks with the recalculated Move Seattle levy?
• Boulevards of Death: unsafe arterials in America. Rainier Ave gets a shout-out.
• Bay Area taking baby steps towards less balkanized infrastructure investment
• Madrid declares victory in the war on cars
• Seattle population still growing like crazy

This is an open thread

Route 401 at Westlake Park by SounderBruce, STB Flickr Pool

I have long been skeptical that Sound Transit would build a First Hill light rail station. When the staff doesn’t want to do something, it takes a combination of grassroots pressure and an aggressive leader to make them do it. For over a year, there was no organized campaign and no elected champion for the neighborhood. Threats to project revenue and a desire to quickly eliminate alternatives worked against introducing new ideas. Although we always knew the ST sausage making process was subject to the whims of coalition-building, we at least believed we understood it.  The First Hill saga reveals that there’s no real process at all.

Frank has already covered most of the hypocrisy: a legal standard for deviating from the representative alignment never used in previous Sound Transit measures, missing from assurances in 2016 when they needed your vote, and indeed ignored in this very same meeting; summary rejection due to increased costs, as other alignments passed with vague hopes they could find the money; and concern-trolling about the cost and effort of studying a single First Hill alternative, immediately followed by waving through six ways to get into Ballard. I am not a lawyer, but applying spurious and inconsistent standards is probably better grounds for a lawsuit then any invented constraints from the ballot measure.

But perhaps the most astounding result is that First Hill did organize, no institutional opposition emerged, Joe McDermott and Sally Bagshaw recognized the enormous potential of the station, and still the Sound Transit staff and its elected allies found reasons to dismiss this alternative that apparently didn’t apply to any other part of town. Both ordinary residents and big institutional employers on First Hill showed up to testify, and what they said was well-informed and accurate. Most of Sound Transit’s foul-weather friends explicitly urged a close look at First Hill’s potential. Even the DSA — arguably the injured party if the station moved outside the downtown core — supported the effort. And yet, that coalition got much less out of Sound Transit than a bunch of angry Kirkland residents that flouted their City Council to keep transit as far from their homes as possible.

The Sound Transit Board will be briefed on the recommendations this afternoon, and gets the final say next month. Though the chances First Hill gets to Level 2 analysis are slim, a Sound Transit analysis would not be likely to favor the station anyway. A line that poaches many of its riders from the existing train can look good in a superficial study, one that doesn’t place adequate weight on riders added to the system from an extraordinarily dense housing and jobs center. Few who witnessed last Thursday’s motivated reasoning would expect the planners to make this subtle distinction and choose correctly.

First Hill’s organizing efforts are likely to result in some sort of concession to the neighborhood, as the Streetcar as currently implemented is largely a failure. This might involve Madison BRT, already planned to be less reliable or frequent than Link, and with another round of Durkan value engineering likely ahead. Even in the best case, First Hill will be an additional transfer from most regional destinations. To take a simple example, hospital workers taking Sounder up from South King County will have to choose between a two-seat ride from King Street and a circuitous, congested route on the streetcar. Those people weren’t represented Thursday, save by Dow Constantine, and they’re among those who will pay the highest price.