Month: December 2019

Geekwire reports that the carshare company will shut down across North America in February. Cars will start disappearing well before then.

This step is not surprising. Lime recently shut down their similar Limepod service. ShareNow itself is a merger from weakness of two previous competitors. Recent tinkering with the fee structure was a likely signal of operational problems. Only Zipcar, with a membership fee and slightly longer rental periods, remains.

Meanwhile, Limebike is using the December expiry of its permit to punt on the unprofitable winter season, coming back in the Spring when Seattle starts allowing electric scooters. If other cities’ experience is an indication, the scooters will dominate and the bikes will wind down. Only Jump remains as a bikeshare option this winter.

This is an open thread.

Since it dropped right before Thanksgiving, I worry not everyone saw Alon Levy’s excellent piece in Streetsblog on fares and fare enforcement. The proximate reason for the piece is New York’s plan to spend a bunch of money on fare enforcement that’s disproportionate to the actual loss of revenue involved. As per usual, the piece has lots of international comparisons and some good lessons for Seattle.

First, from time to time some Seattle observers have suggested that Sound Transit ditch the current proof-of-payment system and install fare gates at Link stations. This would be expensive, impractical for open-air stations, and wouldn’t work at all for RapidRide. Also, New York has fare gates and, well… see the previous paragraph. Levy writes:

New York itself may have an excuse to keep the faregates: its trains are very crowded, so peak-hour inspections may not be feasible. The question boils down to how New York crowding levels compare with those on the busiest urban proof-of-payment line, the Munich S-Bahn trunk. But no other American city has that excuse. Tear down these faregates.

What’s more, the fare inspection should be a low-key affair. The fine in Berlin is €60. Inspectors who can’t make a citation without using physical violence should not work as inspectors.

Indeed.

• Peter Rogoff gets an “excellent” (not “outstanding”) job evaluation ($).
• ECB checks in on Alex Pedersen’s first few weeks in office. Not great!
• Republicans want to gut the general fund to subsidize highways deferred by I-976.
• University Place Mayor Kent Keel is the new ST Board Chair. Dow Constantine vice-chair.
• Sound Transit open to cutting car tabs ($), but they want to make up the revenue hole.
• Northgate Pedestrian Bridge construction begins Jan. 13th.
• Bellevue reaches the limits of car capacity ($).
• Landslide south of Tacoma cancels Amtrak runs ($); Pt. Defiance Bypass would have avoided it. It’s incredible that there is still no firm plan to start using the new track.
• Limebike taking a strategic pause for the winter.
• There’s a $40 bus to Crystal Mountain.
• Gov. Inslee releases his 2020 transportation budget proposal.
• How ride-hail companies could be helpful to cities.

This is an open thread.

SDOT’s spot improvements program strikes again. This time, it’s a re-channelization of one block of 3rd Avenue at the downtown-Belltown border to allow southbound buses to more easily enter the 3rd Avenue transitway. SDOT says the change “will benefit approximately 168,000 daily bus riders on 36 key routes.”

The current configuration has two southbound GP lanes and a right turn lane, which seems excessive considering cars can’t go straight 13 hours a day.

I can give you about 168,000 reasons why Third Avenue ought to be transit-only all the way to Denny, but I guess we’ll take it one block at a time if we must.

While we’re on the subject of spot improvements: now that construction is wrapping up on Yet Another Amazon Tower, it looks like the Blanchard St bus-only lane is nearing completion. The full bus lane from 3rd to Westlake should provide to 4 minutes of time savings for riders of the 40 and C buses, per SDOT.

• A crowd in Renton gets to question some transit leaders. I wish we had a better canned answer for what cities can do to get better transit service given the service guidelines.
• More details on reduced Link service this winter.
• Someone had to say it: the deep-bore tunnel tolls aren’t high enough.
• Sounder vs. car in Edmonds.
• Now Kenmore and Kirkland get a rideshare pilot, but with volunteer drivers.
• I-976 precinct results ($) show it failed inside the Sound Transit district that was the core of the argument. But both Eyman and Pierce County will join the court case.
• More bike lockers for Link.
• ShareNow shutting down in February. More on this later.
• Official questions about ST fare enforcement disparities.
• WSDOT wins this round of the SR99 tunnel lawsuit.
• Two robberies at Renton Transit Center.
• Planning for a Vehicle-Miles Traveled (VMT) tax grinds on. Just raise the gas tax!
• Less federal bureaucracy when painting bus lanes red.
• But USDOT will audit some local projects more carefully ($).

This is an open thread.

If you’re reading this, there’s some year in which you became very interested in Puget Sound area transit services. For me, that year was 2006, and I found Jim Kershner’s Transit: The Story of Public Transportation in the Puget Sound Region to be a concise, readable, and richly illustrated overview of all that has gone before.

Unlike other books ($) in this genre, this work starts all the way at the beginning, with horse-drawn streetcars, and takes us to the ST3 vote and beyond.

Seattle’s streetcar system began as an amenity common to all modern cities, and entered a period of public ownership in 1919. The system ultimately collapsed due to poor fiscal judgment among city leaders, the apparent superiority of auto ownership at Seattle’s mid-century wealth and population level, and even competition from “jitneys” — the Uber and Lyft of their day. For a work targeted at transit fans, Kershner is admirably clear-eyed about the system’s weaknesses. Partially legitimate critiques of modern streetcars were doubly so for their poorly maintained, always-stuck-in-traffic forebears.

Greta’s speech was part of an hour of speeches all worth listening to, if not as incisive as Greta’s timeline explainer.

This is an open thread.

• Supremes uphold the stay on I-976; tax cut is off indefinitely. Cuts coming anyway.
• A report from the Delridge Station open house.
• Bus lane enforcement cameras are getting it done in NYC.
• Seattle rolls out rules for the e-scooter pilot.
• Metro has a survey on more water taxi routes.
• Roosevelt over 95% complete.
• Lynnwood approves large development near future station.
• A deadline for ST fare enforcement recommendations.
• Pierce County attempts to defend I-976 in court ($).
• Seattle lowering speed limits ($) after a bad year for traffic deaths.
• Portland adopts minimum parking requirements — for bikes.
• On the other hand, ODOT wants to reduce carbon emissions by speeding up cars.
• Sorry to see her step away from the Herald, but congrats Lizz ($)!

This is an open thread.