- PSRC survey on regional attitudes towards growth and transportation (PDF)
- Could “industrial areas” be put to better use?
- XKCD nails it on driving
- SnoCo pols want faster light rail to Everett (but without mentioning the airport-sized elephant in the room)
- Indoor market could come to King Street Station
- WS Ferries wants a battery-powered fleet ($)
- NYC’s East Side Access now up to $11B
- Kirkland electeds give a thumbs up to new 85th St BRT
- New Amtrak maintenance facility under construction
- In the US, docked bike share is still the ridership king.  Across the pond, signs of trouble in Paris.
- UPS looking at electric delivery trucks in Europe
- Uber is back on their flying taxi jam, while an internal investigation shows its autonomous cars were intentionally ignoring pedestrians
- Speaking of back on their jam…
- Bike lanes across the country stir up outrage
- Details on Sound Transit’s OMF East
- McKinsey & Co says it will take $400M/yr to “solve” homelessness in Seattle
This is an open thread.
“In the US, docked bike share is still the ridership king”
That title is misleading. The reason is *not* docked generates more ridership than dockless. It’s because the dockless companies are currently locked out of the country’s highest-demand markets, including New York City, in order to protect the existing docked bikeshare from competition.
“In Seattle, for example, nearly half of all trips from station-based services are made during rush hours, and three-quarters happened on weekdays. ‘In contrast,’ NACTO researchers wrote, ‘dockless bike share in Seattle has an evening peak but no morning rush hour peak and trips are spread out over the day with highest use seen on weekends, suggesting more recreational use.'”
There are also people who work midday-evening shifts and weekends, and people doing errands all day, and going to activities, and visiting other people, and going the last mile from the bus. Only a small fraction of it is recreational (“Just goin’ for a ride.”).
There’s also another reason why Pronto was mostly peak hours: most of the stations were downtown! Much of downtown is still an office canyon with little to go to after 5pm or on weekends. And I can’t quite see many people biking between Pike Place, Pacific Place, and Pike-Pine after dark.
“Dockless bikes made up 44 percent of all shared bikes on the street last year, but accounted for a mere 4 percent of the trips. In fact, the bikes in station-based systems are used five times as often as those in dockless systems.”
That must to be a skewed statistic based on comparing dissimilar things. Seattle’s experience was decisive: Pronto was limited to the station areas, not very well used, and not considered very useful. Dockless bikeshare has exploded in popularity and usefulness. The difference is as big as Metro’s ridership now vs in the 1980s when it was mostly a coverage network and peak expresses.
There may be too many bikes: I don’t know what the optimal number is, and the article doesn’t seem to have thought much about it either. Recently I’ve seen what seems like an excessive number of bikes lined up, like eight or ten in moderate-volume places, and three in even lesser places. But that’s because three companies are intentionally flooding the market to gain marketshare and drive the others out of business. If that causes underuse of each bike, then that’s not a sign that dockless bikeshare is unpopular or can’t meet its expenses, it’s a sign that companies are dumping the bikes below cost as in a trade war. If it turns out that the companies need to limit the bikes to a smaller, denser service area, then they could certainly take steps to do that, either by prohibiting the bikes from being taken out of that area, charging more per hour to go out of the area and an “exit fee” for leaving the bike out of the area, or redistributing bikes back into the area more often.
Eventually, it will probably come to that. But there’s two things to be careful of. First, is the network effect. In order for a trip to work, it has to serve both ends. A system that allows trips to begin and end only downtown is much less useful than it might seem.
Second, not imposing an arbitrary service area allows for hot spots in demand to crop up that the company may not have anticipated prior to launch. For example, Fremont and the Burke Gilman trail in general.
By area I meant most of Seattle at least, not anything nearly as small as downtown. If the problem is that each bike isn’t being ridden enough times, and the companies aren’t oversupplying bikes to bury the competition, then it must be that the lowest-density areas are the culprit, and so the companies can figure out where the edge of the multiple-use area is.
With respect, Seattle’s Pronto experience proves nothing other than that having insufficient capital and locating your stations to please your sponsors and for political reasons will lead to a failed bike share. I’ve ridden bike share in three Canadian, six American, three European and one American city and none came close to the lack of coverage Pronto provided.
That was “one Australian” city :(
I’m very skeptical that dockless bikeshare will be around in 10 years. Its only working now because of huge venture capital infusions of cash hoping its the next big thing and waiting for the network effects which I doubt materialize. The bikes are highly vulnerable to vandalism and being thrown in the ocean/dumpsters/construction sites, the bikes are everywhere which is a burden to communities and even the companies that own/maintain the bikes who have to go and get them. People/governments will tire of them cluttering every outdoor space and many take it out on the bikes by trashing them or through getting laws passed to cripple them.
I’ll take a well designed docked bikeshare system any day. Just keep SDOT away, they fail at everything they attempt.
Docked bikeshare has several inherent problems. The docks themselves are bulky and expensive, which limits the number of docks – and bikes – the system can have. Since the docks are semi-permanent infrastructure, their locations are limited by jurisdictional issues, which results in needless hill climbs just to get to or from a docking station, where, with a dockless bike, you can just leave it on the side of the Burke-Gilman trail and be done. Then, there’s the added burden on users of having to hunt around for a dock at the end of a trip, and for short trips, having to go even just a block or two out of the way to get to a station often makes it not worth it, compared to just walking.
The network effect with bikeshare is very real – in order for the system to work, it has to serve both ends. If you restrict it to a tight geographical area around downtown, you constrain it to serve only trips that both begin and end downtown. In general, for every n destinations that you can pick up or drop off a bike, you have O(n^2) trip pairs served,
Of course, vandalism is a real issue, but it’s the type of thing that’s easy to sensationalize when it does happen, so you need data to judge it by actual data, not by reading about one or two bad incidents on Twitter.
One interesting question with dockless bikeshare is what the appropriate bounds should be as to how far users are allowed to ride the bikes. Obviously, some limits are necessary, but ideally, you want limits based on actual demand, not arbitrary municipal boundaries where one city ends and the next begins. In general, I think bikeshare systems, in settings their boundaries, have put too much emphasis on population density, rather than bike infrastructure. Even areas with very low density, like Woodinville, can still support bikeshare, as long as it’s confined to flat, car-free trails, like the Sammamish River Trail. I think, if done right, you could design a system that provides 80% of the mobility with 20% of bikes by limiting it only to areas along trails or protected bike lanes.
Of course, any kind of geofencing map that’s optimal from a business perspective is going to be complicated to remember from a user perspective. There are also cases to deal with where your phone’s battery might die in the middle of a trip (so you can’t check the app to see where is ok and not ok to park), or inaccurate GPS readings causing the system to think a bike that’s parked in-bounds is parked out-of-bounds. So far, the companies seem to have decided it’s not worth dealing with.
The companies are also in a growth stage right now, so they’d rather let the users vote with their feet about which suburb the companies should expand to, rather than artificially restricting it. To date, I have already saved about $30 in avoided Lyft/Uber rides by riding Lime Bikes in and around Bellevue at times when the bus schedule was unsuitable for my needs. I’ve also ridden them to/from work in Kirkland several times, and observed the bikes moving around Kirkland on their own, after I drop them off by my office – so people are definitely riding them there. And, they’d ride them more if there were enough makes to make the service dependable.
“… you can just leave it on the side of the Burke-Gilman trail and be done…”
Not a feature. A lot of the most popular parts of the trail are narrow and space-constrained, and the trail follows a critical grade corridor so we (actual riders) can’t just move to parallel routes. At any given moment most of the bikes in motion are not bike-share bikes, and most of the bike-share bikes aren’t in motion. Bike-share is fine, but is it really a gain for mobility on balance when the bikes clutter important paths? It’s not whatsoever clear any of the companies can survive long-term operating the way they do, anyway — they probably need better efficiency (fewer bikes) or higher prices.
Maybe Portland strikes the right balance: lock the bikes to any city rack. For-profit companies would race to monopolize rack space in popular areas (even public-ish Biketown does) but bike parking is a less unique asset than flat trails are in this city.
He didn’t say on the trail, he said on the side of the trail. There are also lots of places where there’s space to put a bike without blocking the trail.
Yeah, and it only takes a few people that don’t get the distinction to make a real mess of the Burke. I’m not talking about some weird theoretical world where people behave perfectly all the time, I’m talking about what I see on my daily commute.
“Actual riders”?
@David: Yes, “actual riders”, as in people riding bikes, shared or not, moving along the trail. As opposed to bikes sitting (or fallen) at the edges, with no people on them, sticking out into the trail.
This ain’t the flat midwest. Grade corridors are valuable for transportation: for moving people. It’s not too much to ask that they be kept clear.
(i.e. this isn’t some sort of roadie snob thing — I rode to work today wearing a shirt and tie, not lycra. When I’m out for exercise I seek out hills and avoid crowded trails.)
The bikes on the sides of the trail do get used, and people, by and large, do a good job of parking them out of the way. If you see one that is sticking out too much into the trail, you can always move it.
“Maybe Portland strikes the right balance: lock the bikes to any city rack.”
The problem with this approach is that there aren’t enough public bike racks, and they aren’t in enough places. In theory, it could work, if we were willing to undergo a massive bike rack building campaign (e.g. racks practically every block, and in all neighborhoods; massive capacity increases to existing bike racks), but that would require a lot of money, which the city doesn’t have. Nor is it feasible to make the companies pay for the it – the racks themselves would cost more than the bikes, and would make the whole business unprofitable.
It would also create a chicken and egg problem. People don’t want the racks installed in their area until there’s proven demand that people will use them. But, if the racks aren’t there, people can’t use them.
Al, you must have caused quite a stir. Unless today was WNBR day.
Jes’ sayin;
Portland does have more public bike racks than Seattle, but not by some enormous margin. And public bike racks are not that expensive or hard to install.
Again, this is not a matter of “if” I see a bike sticking out over the trail. I do see these bikes sticking out into the trail every day, on some of the most congested parts of the trail, in the places where people in motion need that space the most. I move bikes off the trail all the time. That isn’t always going to be a solution. Until recently the companies were intentionally lining up bikes on one of the most congested and confusing parts of the Burke, just east of Stone Way, right up to the intersection. Am I supposed to go move a dozen or more bikes because they’re fouling up traffic? Where would I move them to? Requests to the companies and the city have apparently been effective in this case… but I haven’t seen any clear policy on this.
It’s unlikely the bike-share businesses are operationally profitable as they are. Just like the app-taxi companies, they’re probably still setting investor money on fire in the hope that they can eventually build something profitable. Just like the app-taxi companies, we shouldn’t acquiesce to every request they make of the public realm just because it helps them be profitable. Of course the app-taxis are a hundred times worse; cities showed no backbone and got rolled over by them. I think we should have a backbone on our most important bike paths.
Most sections of the Burke Gilman trail have a dirt shoulder that you can park bikes on, without them getting in the way. I suppose one could argue that it creates a pinch point when joggers go around them, while, at the same time, getting passed by bikes traveling both directions, but so far, I haven’t really found it a problem.
I have seen the big pile of bikes on The Burke-Gilman near Stone Way and agree that that should not be there – looks like the companies have taken care of it, though.
This does lead to a broader issue with stationless bikeshare, as currently implemented, in that, in a hypothetical rule where the parking rules could be strictly enforced, a large majority of the city of Seattle street frontage would have no legal place to park. Essentially, the problem is that the wide, paved furniture zones, by and large, don’t exist outside of commercial business districts. For example, this street has excellent places to park a bikeshare bike, while this street has none because the area between the sidewalk and the street is entirely grass. If a map existed that actually enumerated all the areas in the city where bikeshare bikes can be parked in compliance with the letter of the law, we would find it shockingly small.
One way or another, this needs to be reconciled. We can’t pretend to have a system that covers the entire city, while at the same time, having parking rules that effectively exclude most of the city. The way it currently works, people park in the paved furniture zones when it’s convenient, but when it isn’t convenient, they’ll park as close to the spirit of the rule as they can, without going blocks out of the way to search for a parking spot. In the second example I gave, this usually means parking the bike on the grass. On other streets like this one, the furniture zone is too narrow to park anywhere without either obstructing the sidewalk or the street, or parking on grass which is technically private property. On this street, not surprisingly, it is common to see bikes obstructing the sidewalk.
Ultimately, the way to get people to park properly requires a combination of carrots and sticks. The carrot would be designated places to park within a short walk of where people want to go, which don’t already have furniture zones. The easiest way to find space for bikes is on-street, particularly near intersections, so one parking zone can effectively serve multiple blocks (and, use the zone within 30 feet of a stop sign, so as not to impact car parking). Staircases are also great places to host bikeshare parking zones. For example, over here, they could use the diagonally shaped area to the right of the parked gray car, where no car could otherwise fit. The cost of the paint jobs can be charged to the bikeshare companies as a condition for their operating permit, and can happen wherever illegal parking happens often enough to become a problem.
Sticks are also possible, but might require some technology improvements beyond what’s easy and cheap to implement with today’s technology. For example, in principle, the bikes could be equipped with embedded cameras which snap an automated picture each time you attempt to end a trip, and use automated, cloud-based software to process the picture in real time and decide if you’ve parked correctly. If the parking is incorrect, the app, or the bike speakers, could give you a notification that you need to come back and re-park the bike, backed by fines charged to your credit card if you don’t do it within a certain amount of time.
In addition, if rules are to be actually enforced, the definition of “legal place to park”, needs to expand to include the sides of trails, when room exists for it. For example, people should be able to park here without penalty, but definitely not here.
Finally, one easy (albeit incomplete) fix that the companies could implement today (and the city could require of them), would be to say that any trip under 30 seconds is free. This serves two purposes. One, it allows anybody with the companies’ app to move improperly parked bikes without needing to lift them (the e-assist bikes, in particular, are very difficult to lift). Two, it allows people who unlock a broken bike to immediately relock it and try a different bike, without needing to pay twice. 30 seconds allows enough time to move a bike a few feet that somebody parked in the middle of a sidewalk, or hop on, notice an obvious defect with the bike (seat adjustment mechanism broken, gear shifter broken, brakes stuck, etc.), and hop off.
Thinking about the problem some more, I think it would be very difficult (technology issues aside) to start actually enforcing parking policies without causing ridership to plummet. Any situation which requires the city and/or company to enumerate every possible case where a bike is reasonably accessible to users and not getting in the way is going to miss stuff, and whatever cases the rules miss, people will be out of luck. Furthermore, any attempt to create suitable bikeshare parking areas on blocks which lack them will inevitably fall victim to NIMBY opposition and people who can’t stand the idea of one single car parking space getting sacrificed to make room. And, the only way to get the data to justify such installation in the first place is by observing where people leave the bikes with the relatively uncontrolled system we have today.
There is the possibility for UW’s grad students to strike next Tuesday, May 15th, with a longer strike planned for June. I wasn’t here for it, but I was told that when the last time a strike occurred in 2001, unionized bus drivers held their own partial sympathy strike – most routes ran as normal except no routes crossed the picket line to enter UW campus.
Can somebody confirm if this happened in 2001, and if that might again be the case next week for Metro / CT / ST / Link?
I can’t confirm that with any confidence, but might be able to help…I do remember the strike, as I was an undergrad (who walked between campus and Terry Hall) and saw some of my TAs picketing. Some supportive evidence that the buses perhaps would not have gone on campus in 2001 is: for multiple days, grad students picketed the campus entrance at 40th and Stevens Way, and blocked the crosswalk at the entrance when the walk sign was on in that direction, and blocked the crosswalks that cross 15th when those walk signs were on. That meant that no vehicles could turn right or left onto Stevens Way to enter campus…there was a cop pulling over cars and writing tickets if they tried to force their way through the crosswalk full of picketers. So any bus routes that turned from 15th onto Stevens (or vis versa) would not have been able to do that.
I don’t recall that. I was living in the northern U-District and taking the 44 to Ballard for work, so I think I would have seen something as major as a UW campus reroute. However, only a small fraction of the U-District routes go into campus, and in 2001 there were fewer of them, and those that did were mostly suburban expresses.
IIRC, the busses didn’t drive on to campus, but they were rerouted right around main campus so you might get off on the Ave instead of Stevens Way. As long as you were willing to cross the picket line, you could ride the bus to the U.
The herald is explicitly asking that subarea equity be put aside in order to
“Prioritize Link Light Rail spine connecting Seattle, Tacoma, Everett and Bellevue”
instead of
“prioritizing ridership and socioeconomic equity.”
This is an ask to delay Link to Ballard and West Seattle, and run Link to the Everett Airport and Tacoma Dome first.
They didn’t mention Ballard and West Seattle in the article, possibly for several reasons such as not wanting to look like sour grapes in print, but they’ve said it on other occasions, that they think Seattle doesn’t have a right to more lines until Everett and Tacoma are done (or at least under construction). Subarea equity was originally to prevent Seattle from having more lines at the beginning, but now the shoe is on the other foot. So I guess we’ll see which is stronger, subarea equity or the spine plan. However, if Eyman’s initiative passes and voids ST’s MVET, then everything will have to take a haircut. (And then I’m sure Roberts et all would try to take it all out of Seattle.) But they need the second tunnel for their Everett and Tacoma trains, because not all of them can fit in the first tunnel without capital improvements. So would ST keep the second tunnel but defer the Ballard and West Seattle extensions? But the tunnel is the most expensive part, and wouldn’t it have to go all the way through to Interbay anyway because it would be stupid to terminate it at Westlake and then extend it underground later, plus there are now Tacomaites and Everettites going to SLU.
Without Ballard and West Seattle there is plenty of capacity in the existing DT tunnel.
The issue is the space the trains take, not the space the passengers take. ST2’s demand is estimated without Ballard and West Seattle because they won’t exist yet. ST2 has 20 trains each direction peak for the Red and Blue lines, and that’s the tunnel’s capacity. While Everett riders will mostly be on Lynnwood Link in ST2, Tacoma and Federal Way riders won’t be on 240th Link in ST2 because that’s too much out of the way and too slow. So you’ll need at least 4-6 trains per hour for that.
Also, Everett — or even Lynnwood — to Tacoma is a long way to operate a light rail train between breaks.
The merits and deficiencies of Sound Transit’s adopted subarea equity policy have probably been debated ad nauseam on this blog, so my intention here is not to rehash those arguments regarding the principle itself but rather to illustrate what has happened in actual practice. The following data is pulled directly from the agency’s 2009-2016 annual subarea reports (cumulative YOE$ for this eight-year period) and shows the accounting charade that ST employs to satisfy this adopted policy.
There are obviously five subareas accounted for (plus a sixth for system-wide activities) but I’ll try to keep this simple by limiting it to just three of the subareas.
2009-2016 cumulative sources and uses by subarea (millions YOE$):
Snohomish –
Sources:
Tax revenues $624.1
All sources $856.4
Uses:
Capital $147.3
O&M $191.2
Debt servicing and add/sub from reserves $182.3 (A)
Inc/dec to general reserve fund $335.7 (B)
Total changes in debt servicing/reserves $518 (A+B)
All uses $856.4
North King –
Sources:
Tax revenues $1,553
All sources $3,568
Uses:
Capital $2,452
O&M $313.5
Debt servicing and add/sub from reserves $891.9 (A)
Inc/dec to general reserve fund $(89.3) (B)
Total changes in debt servicing/reserves $802.6 (A+B)
All uses $3,568
East King –
Sources:
Tax revenues $1,315
All sources $1,593
Uses:
Capital $937.1
O&M $394.9
Debt servicing and add/sub from reserves $67.8 (A)
Inc/dec to general reserve fund $193.1 (B)
Total changes in debt servicing/reserves $260.9 (A+B)
All uses $1,593
The detail inside the reports is quite illuminating and I’d recommend further reading on the matter. (For example, it really jumps out that North King doesn’t get charged a dime for ST Express and Sounder services despite Seattle being the terminus for the end of these “suburban routes”. Additionally, Snohomish has seen $141.7 million in bond proceeds (draws) and paid $101.7 million in debt servicing costs whereas North King has received over $1.1 billion in bond proceeds and paid $681 million in debt servicing.) Of course, the numbers by subarea are all supposed to even out by the end of the ST2 cycle in 2023, now 2024. We shall see. For this eight-year period, for example, Snohomish subarea has been a donor region, contributing over $335 million to the general reserve, whereas North King subarea has been a recipient region as their total uses exceeded their total sources by $89 million during this same period.
“North King doesn’t get charged a dime for ST Express and Sounder services despite Seattle being the terminus for the end of these “suburban routes”.”
That was intentional. They are suburban routes. They go to Seattle more than Seattlites go to them. If North King had the money it would do something else with it.
I know it was intentional and that’s what makes it even more ridiculous. North King does have the money and has been and is doing something else with it since they don’t pay any portion of these services. You’re welcome.
Tlsgwm,
Nobody in North King cares one whit about Sounder North. If it disappeared tomorrow nobody would notice (in fact, almost nobody in Snohomish County would notice either, but that’s another issue). Very few people who live in King County ride it, ever, because it only runs in the “peak direction” at the peak hours and there’s no place for North King riders to board or deboard except at King Street Station. Do you object to folks from Marysville or Stanwood from riding CT buses to Everett Station and then riding Sounder North? If you object to the few King County “free-riders” who take it to Edmonds or Mukilteo for a ferry ride, then you should. In short, charging Snohomish County for Sounder North’s full cost is only reasonable.
When we consider the expenditures on Link you have a point. Rather than building up reserves your elected officials could certainly have insisted that Sound Transit build the portion of Link between Lynnwood and the King County line as revenues were accumulated. That would have been entirely within both the letter and the “spirit” of the Subarea Equity regimen.
But what would it have accomplished? Yes, perhaps a year could have been trimmed from the arrival of Link in Lynnwood, since only the portion within King County would remain to be completed after North Link is completed to Northgate. But no matter what you might have done that project could not have been accelerated because it was tunneled and includes two underground stations.
And, not to put too fine a point on it, Snohomish County vehemently objected to putting the Maintenance Facility for the additional cars required for East and Lynnwood Link there in Snohomish County, so even if you have wanted to run trains the three miles from Lynnwood to Mountlake Terrace you could not have done so.
So your argument, while certainly factual, is a bit of a Red Herring. Building a high-capacity transit system from the ends toward the middle is not the way it’s done, for any number of good reasons.
True, it would be doing things in the reverse order of the norm. That said ST has a less than stellar record for planning, staging and scheduling. For example, they routinely overbuy rolling stock that sits unused or gets leased out; both money losing propositions. I argued at early East Link scoping meetings for building Redmond to Bellevue 1st. One reason they said “couldn’t be done” was there would be no MF on the eastside; a small white lie. DT Bellevue and Redmond have grown exponentially and Microsoft is in the middle. A bonus would have been the ERC could have been used during construction and delivery. It may have even magnified the importance of this corridor to the point ST money wasn’t used trying to kill it. Of course that wouldn’t have meet the political objectives of the appointed board (hint hint).
Should San Francisco pay part of Golden Gate Transit routes because one end of them is in downtown SF?
The herald is explicitly asking that subarea equity be put aside in order to “Prioritize Link Light Rail spine connecting Seattle, Tacoma, Everett and Bellevue” instead of “prioritizing ridership and socioeconomic equity.”
Exactly. The authors whine about subarea equity, and imply that if there were a just funding mechanism, we would build the spine first.
That is nonsense. From a cost/ benefit standpoint, extending the spine form Everett to Tacoma is terrible (https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2016/04/06/youve-got-50-billion-for-transit-now-how-should-you-spend-it/). Even with the ridiculously inflated numbers for Everett (and the pessimistic numbers for the urban projects), the rail line to Everett comes out well behind every project in Seattle. Even the chairman-pleasing, we-only-built-it-because-it-we-like-the-symmetry West Seattle rail line is a better value.
And that’s just if you look at the cost per ridership. If you look at the cost per rider time saved (something discussed in the followup — https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2016/04/22/which-riders-matter/) — this project comes out worse. On a metric that used to be required for federal funding, but has now been rejected because it tends to favor suburban projects, this suburban project performs horribly.
That is because Lynnwood to Everett rail just a really bad value. It doesn’t add much. When this isn’t running alongside a freeway, it is detouring to relatively sparsely populated (and sparsely employed) areas. Just imagine someone from north Everett, headed to Seattle, when this is all done. They take a bus that starts in their neighborhood, gets on the freeway, stops once at the South Everett Park and Ride, and then ends at Lynnwood. Will they want to get off the bus, to get on the train sooner? How much time will they actually save if they do that? During much of the day, they would actually lose time! At noon you would get to Seattle much faster.
That leaves trips within Everett, that simply aren’t common enough to justify a major light rail project. The whole is a terrible value, and the authors are basically arguing that it should be the priority because traffic is bad. This shows a complete disregard of transit fundamentals, which I’m afraid is all too common amongst the board members of Sound Transit.
We have so much room to build housing in Seattle without forcing out our industry, so why mess with it? Why is it considered better or easier to change industrial zoning than to upzone the massive swaths of SFH zoning?
Our industrial zoning is already slowly being turned into commercial through various loopholes (see the Ballard PCC). Once our industrial land is gone, it’s not coming back.
To get more housing, it might not have to be either/or for industrial and SF. Maybe it could be both. Do you think either of the following is a valid question to ask?:
1) “Do we need and want 100% as much industrial zoning going forward as we have now?”
2) “Do we want to modify the codes around industrial zoning to match modern industrial uses?”
Note that I’m not proposing an answer to either question, but if you think the questions themselves are valid, then it means it’s worth a discussion.
We should use our existing residential areas for additional residential usage before unnecessarily foisting residential usage on our well used industrial areas.
As the article briefly touches on, once you mix housing with industrial, you’ve pretty much signed a death warrant for the industrial area. Look at how much grief Sea-Tac Airport has to put up with as residential areas began to encroach. Small, industrial businesses don’t have the resources to fight the onslaught of complaints that will inevitably happen when you mix residential and industrial.
What grief is Sea-Tac airport putting up with? The biggest problem in SeaTac is that the owner of the parcel next to the station won’t allow the hotel to be converted to a civic center and housing. And I don’t see much other housing in SeaTac along 99, just hotels and parking lots and fast-food chains.
To emphasize, we need to start with an official review of our long-term industrial needs. This is important because we the public need to make sure it’s accurate and doesn’t leave anything out. It’s too easy to assume the current media darlings are the future, that everything will be online ordering and cloud computing. But as a critic of the 1990s futurists said, “You can’t eat floppy disks.” Meaning that no matter how much dotcoms and software seemed to be the future, they can’t meet all our survival needs. There’s a risk of that now if we define 21st-century industry too narrowly or inflexibly. As Jane Jacobs said, innovations often come from the edges, and are unnoticeable and nondescript at first. She was talking about the outskirts of Toronto, where little-noticed light industry startups in boring suburban industrial parks were producing new kinds of manufacturing (or at least new to the region), and she predicted that they would be the drivers of the next economic wave and jobs.
That’s was a followup to my comment below.
I don’t think industry belongs in or near a city center to begin with. When land is valuable, there are usually better things to do with it.
Respectfully, if it was that easy to upzone SFH zoning areas then it would have happened a long time ago. Even the most modest proposals in HALA were met with fierce resistance. As long as we’re living in a democracy where the Mayor and City Council is elected via popular vote, I just can’t imagine it happening even though I wish it would.
We need housing now and we need to be okay with imperfect solutions. I’m all about saving industrial blue collar jobs but not over housing. We can’t have it both ways–preserve lower paying jobs and then not have any place for those workers to live. There’s a huge value in preserving some industrial land (SoDo for sure) but I can’t say the same thing about Interbay. I live along the border of that Industrial area and so much of that land is empty. The massive parking lot the Port owns down by the cruise terminal is completely vacant 90% of the year or used to store their trash–I think we can all agree that our entire city would benefit more if that land was used towards housing.
We need to accurately predict what the optimal citywide/regionwide balance of industrial+housing is. I’ve been reluctant to rezone industrial land because the industries are active, it keeps a diversity of jobs and career paths, it’s local-manufacturing capacity that we may need in the future if overseas shipping gets cut off due to wars/protectionism/climate change, and the companies would otherwise have to relocate to the outer suburbs (hard to get to without a car and exacerbating sprawl) or out of the region or close. Other cities like Vancouver have completely converted industrial districts to housing, but that’s putting all their economic eggs into one basket and depending on a narrower job market and abstract jobs (paper pushing, cloud computing) — more prone to boom-and-bust affecting the entire economy. On the other hand, some industrial districts are completely obsolete: nobody will ever want those 1920s or 1940s factory equipment again because manufacturing has changed. But that’s not Seattle’s situation because our industrial districts are active.
The last several city administrations have felt the same way, which is why nothing has changed. The problem is not just that companies like Amazon would outbid the industrial companies for office space, but that condo and apartment developers would outbid them too: there’s no way industrial companies can compete or pay those prices so they’d inevitably be displaced.
Yet I’ve been dismayed that the industrial districts have partly become the dumping ground for big-box stores (Home Depot in SODO) and suburban-style detached, surface-parking chain stores (Big 5 in Ballard) and strip malls (in Ballard). If it’s going to that kind of hell, we might as well convert it to mixed-use apartments. But I like the multistory car dealerships in SODO. That was a success story, moving them out of downtown and making them denser. I hope those second floors aren’t too inconvenient for customers and staff, are they?
Yes, we should define what our 21st-century industrial needs are, and figure out what kind of housing can coexist with it without displacing it. Since we also need affordable housing, we could start by requiring all housing to have the same income mix as the SHA redevelopments. That would help to bend the curve on the average income threshold for living in Seattle. And since zero market-rate housing is allowed now, it would not be taking anything away from it.
I do think a mixture of industry and housing makes sense, so that hopefully some people can live near where they work. We just have to make sure that luxury buildings and luxury offices don’t displace it all and leave us with no place for manufacturing/industrial startups.
Office buildings hold much more jobs per square foot than industrial buildings. So, better to put the office buildings in the dense, transit accessible places, and let people drive to factories out in the fringes.
It doesn’t make sense to adopt policies of reserving scarce inner city land for spread out activity, just because that’s how the land happened to be used back when the city was smaller.
Additionally, industrial uses tend to go along with large, dangerous, polluting trucks. We should not encourage articulating trailers in dense areas, especially ones with pedestrian and cyclist traffic. Large trucks in urban areas are incredibly dangerous.
Another thing that gets tied up in this is planning. There are lots of non-industrial land-uses in SODO and Interbay today in the form of big-box retail, even more when you consider end customer-focused parts of light-industrial businesses (like breweries’ “tasting rooms”) and commercial offices (like the Starbucks headquarters). Though major transit runs nearby, the street networks in these parts of town are built around freight movements first, and walking from transit to destinations can be, in various measures, unsafe, unpleasant, or inconvenient. Meanwhile any proposals to improve things are met with overwhelming resistance from freight interests.
Barring real planning backed by a serious vision to transform particular parts of industrial areas, it’s hard to see how simply allowing more non-industrial uses there will do anything but reinforce auto-dependence. We’ll just get random projects in random places where buildings happen to be decrepit.
I really dont understand how “freight” (trucks) is an excuse to have sub standard sidewalks, no crosswalks and no bike lanes. Pedestrians and cyclists must be sacrificed to cater to trucks for some reason. Why cant trucks exist with safe streets?
If we need industrial area for housing, lets redevelop Boeing Field. And Interbay since we made the terrible decision to route Link through it (versus Upper QA & Fremont subway).
The notion of mixed use industrial area is an interesting one to talk about. In terms of getting housing now its the only quick way to do it. The NIMBYs are so hell bent on turning Seattle into San Francisco with perpetual lack of housing due to most of the land being zoned for single family homes instead of higher density apartment/condos. That is seems unlikely that we will ever see enough conversion of low destiny residential into higher destiny.
But at the same time industrial use is vital as most of those businesses are not giant Boeing sized companies, nor do most of them own their own buildings. Small single building businesses can not afford to compete price wise with strictly commercial office space businesses.
So great care would be needed to make sure any zoning changes doesn’t result in a massive land grab that drives all our small industrial/warehouse businesses out of the area. They employee a lot of people and they’re also the primary source of relatively low skill (or low schooling at least) jobs that operate year round.
At a bare minimum the city should be encouraging/requiring that any new buildings in the industrial zones at least have a higher floor space ratio. No more single story warehouses. Good example is the new 3 story warehouse across from the 1st ave bridge. If you haven’t seen it yet it’s very impressive and will be the largest multistory warehouse in N.America once completed, 590K sq ft.
As an example, there is no reason to avoid putting housing above the Port of Seattle school bus storage area in Interbay.
Love the idea of the battery-powered ferries and plugging in when docked! Solar panels at the terminals could also be incorporated (albeit less useful during the 6+ months of rain :) ) Hope it moves along swiftly.
Plugging in when docked makes a lot of sense, but I’m not sure how hybrid ferries which don’t plug in are better than all diesel. Conservation of energy says you would have to burn just as much diesel to charge the batteries as what it would take to just power the ship. Is the idea to avoid idling the engines while the ship is docked at Port?
Bingo. Hybrid electric drive systems are becoming more common for boats. I believe nearly all cruise ships have these types of drive systems. No idling while docked, and the engines can be sized down as they are just needed to charge the battery and can do so at a constant, efficient rate. Think freeway driving vs. stop and go surface street driving.
Diesel Electric has been the predominant technology in locomotives since they replaced steam. That’s because the electric motors are capable of full torque at zero RPM. Imagine trying to slip the clutch on a freight train! I’m not sure how that transfers to marine. When the propeller starts to turn slowly there’s very little load. Seems that if it were substantially more efficient the container ship and tanker industry would have switched over long ago. OTOH, they tend to run very low grade fuel (think tar) so the economics may be different for WSF. Without knowing a great deal about the details I wonder why the thought to convert to LNG hasn’t been pursued more vigorously? Of course, to date our record of embracing new technology with the ferry system has been less than stellar.
I wouldn’t count on it. Locomotives leave the engines idling for hours when they are sitting unattended on sidings. Diesels are under full fuel when they start and produce a load of emissions. Cranking them over at the dock every run might not fly (er, float).
Upzone Aurora from the George Washington bridge all the way to Shoreline. Make it residential zoning at 8 to 10stories. There is absolutely no reason for this city to go after SFZ’s when they continue to neglect doing anything to improve the underutil eyesore that is Aurora
Create a program to put housing on top of big box stores and their massive parking lots. It angers me no end that the city council didn’t support 4 story (or more) housing on the Fred Meyer site in greenwood, then respond by trying to tax Amazon.
This city council actually needs to do something about the housing crisis instead of pretending it is someone else’s problem.
And fix the condo laws on the state level too.
>> Upzone Aurora from the George Washington bridge all the way to Shoreline.
Aurora is already zoned for apartments. Most of Greenwood around Fred Meyer is already zoned for apartments. It isn’t enough. That’s the problem — it just doesn’t work if you carve out tiny areas (a small fraction of the city) and say “build there and only there”. For a host of reasons, housing prices end up being very high for everyone.
>> There is absolutely no reason for this city to go after SFZ’s
Huh? That makes no sense. If you “upzone” on Aurora, or Greenwood, or anywhere else, it means “going after the SFZs”. It means changing the zoning from single family to multi-family.
What is the logic behind having OMF East coming online in 2020?
It’s my understanding that it will not be connected to the spine until sometime in 2022 or 2023
LRV delivery starts in mid-2019 and continues through 2024. They have to put the trains somewhere. I imagine there’s also prep work to do before they can go into service/testing, which starts in 2022.
If East Link testing starts in 2022, then can we expect start of service to be in March of 2023 rather than September like they plan for most openings (including U-Link, which only opened in March because it was ahead of schedule)?
And if East Link is ahead of schedule like U-Link was, could it open in September 2022?
“And if East Link is ahead of schedule like U-Link was, could it open in September 2022?”
East Link is already behind its original planned opening (2020 and 2021).
The limiting factors for East Link opening are the construction on the bridge and the HOV roadway into Union Station and the completion of the downtown Bellevue stations. They can and should build the trackway through Bel-Red quickly, before it fills up with new buildings and residents. Trains can be tested on that stretch without being able to run into Seattle.
The biggest difficulty will be the actual delivery of the vehicles. They’re longer than any truck and when placed even on a low-boy flatbed cannot pass under some freeway bridges. They’re usually delivered by rail, but the ERC is out of business in both directions from the Eastside MF. It will be interesting.
The physical guideway to the OMF-E will be done in 2020 or 2021. Not ready for passenger service, but good enough to move LRVs to storage.
Dan, Across the bridge? And through the Bellevue tunnel? Really? That seems, frankly, impossible. Where are the cars to be transferred from the flat cars to the Link trackage?
Three years of LRT vehicle delivery and testing to ensure East Link is ready to run at expected capacity on day one.
Compare that to the Brightline in Miami, the station is still under construction and they are opening for service to the public later this month.
1. ‘Nother idea for re-peopling industrial areas: Include non-pollutionary industries where their neighbors can work. Basically, modernizing the Ballard I moved into to start my driving days at Metro. My own favorite way to keep housing and likewise “affordable”: nearby work paying wages that will let people afford things.
2. Electric trucks?:
Been there: https://www.flickr.com/photos/43315334@N07/37186675530/in/dateposted-public/
Done that: https://www.flickr.com/photos/43315334@N07/36734317614/in/dateposted-public/
Rumor that Swedes are submitting a bid for joint-ops Ballard to West Seattle. Great news, William, because if we can get only two lanes through new CPS underground parking from Terry, DSTT still available.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/43315334@N07/39331515420/in/dateposted-public/
Hate-to-break-it, but since automatic transmissions let your shift gears without the clutch (usually took thirty years to estimate rpm’s) the unintimidated can still “Take a Knee” for the Over-The-Road International Anthem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrJczjf_tk4
Put it on the automatic PA, ST.
3. Well, well, well. Targeted “ignores.” Maybe we can do an ancient Roman (well, Cecil B. Demille version) Majority “#Thumbs Down”s on Twitter.
Though really do think that given 100% freeway history, danger period will be pretty short. “Kill” really hard over fifty miles of half-mile an hour traffic.
Great posting, Frank. And incidentally, photographic proof on why $124 threats for bad tapping are already necessary. Hundreds to thousands of Deputy Fare Inspectors. Looks like a warning to me. Actual citation will be an earsplitting howl that’ll shatter every tile in Westlake!
Mark
Guess that should’ve been “unnecessary.” Good thing I’ve still got one extra ear-drum.
MD
Get ready for transit across the country to start getting much worse:
The security people are pushing security scanners at subway stations. Their best stuff can only handle 600 people per hour, which means each person gets a 6 minute scan. Imagine replacing turnstyles with an entrance gate that each requires a 6 minute process.
There’s an article in Progressive Railroading about a test at thePort Authority Trans-Hudson subway station at the World Trade Center, but security equipment makers have been pushing for installation of their stuff in a bunch of different places.
Each person would get a 6 second scan
10 people per minute or 1 person in every 6 second
The same amount of time you actual spend in the airport TSA Scanner
It’s 6 seconds in the scanner. But will subway passengers have to empty their pockets? Take off their shoes and belts? All the other security theater stuff?
If they tried to do that here, it would be a wonderful gift to Uber. Nobody is going to put up with airport security lines just to ride municipal transit.
You can bet the auto manufacturers and TNC’s are pushing this “scan everyone” insanity. Will we have “TSAPre” lines at Husky Stadium Station?
The thing is, such insanity is only really good for the TNC’s in the short term. Long term, people will just switch to driving and parking. Still a huge windfall for the parking garage owners downtown, though.
Right — because terrorists would never think of using the automobile as a weapon.
This country is so paranoid and stupid. Just the other day i was reading an article that explained how we’ve never been safer. Makes sense when you think about it. Crime is down, accidents (of various types) are down, etc. But it is human nature to be afraid (we evolved to be worried about what is in the bushes) and there is a lot to be gained by scaring people. We spend so much time worried about “an attack” while ignoring much more likely threats to our health (such as our poor diet, lack of exercise, disease, etc.). We cut the CDC budget, but spend trillions on “national security”. Just ridiculous.
Meanwhile, we aren’t doing anything about the biggest threat to America: Bears (http://www.cc.com/video-clips/f0uh68/the-colbert-report-threatdown—all-bear-edition).
Hey ya’ll where can an unskilled Yimby have high margnl benefit? Tac native gonna move from Spain to US this fall and remain for a year. Thinking MIA to campaign for D FL gov (big purple state without medicaid expansion). Bigger MIA might fake FL bluer, no? How would HALA-style reforms in MIA, ATL, Philly, Houston/Dallas change odds of John Bolton White House job?
Any idea what September 2018 service changes for metro will be like?