Metro unveils new service criteria
After an eventful 2020, Metro has been taking a look at how it prioritizes routes. As first reported by Stephen Fesler, On January 27th it briefed King County’s Mobility and Environment committee on its progress and revealed a bit about the staff’s thinking.
It appears Metro’s top two investment priorities will remain reducing crowding and improving reliability.
The current service guidelines describe how the third priority works: each corridor has a score based on the corridor’s ridership potential (“corridor productivity”, 50%), service to low income and minority neighborhoods (“social equity”, 25%), and connecting key nodes in the county (“geographic value”, 25%). The point total puts the corridor into one of four frequency levels. Metro invests in the list of routes that fall below these target levels, not in order of combined score, but instead first the highest geographic values, followed by the highest corridor productivities, and then the remainder that presumably had high social equity scores.
Finally, routes that carry lots of rides per hour and/or passenger-miles per mile get whatever new money remains.
This system is quite subtle, but broadly speaking routes with high residential and job density but lowish frequency are likely to dominate the list, but of those the ones in sparsely-served areas are likely to be boosted first.
What might change?
Continue reading “Metro unveils new service criteria”Sound Transit wants your feedback on the Stride S3 line
Sound Transit has kicked off a new online open house for its future BRT service along SR 522 and NE 145th street, known as the Stride S3 line. The service, which was funded by the 2016 Sound Transit 3 ballot measure, will run from Bothell to the Seattle-Shoreline border along SR 522 and NE 145th street. From here, riders will be able to transfer to Link Light Rail for fast and frequent service to UW and downtown Seattle, and this service will replace Sound Transit Express route 522 when it opens.
Continue reading “Sound Transit wants your feedback on the Stride S3 line”News roundup: not nearly enough
- Apply for the Seattle Pedestrian Advisory Board
- Seattle’s car population plateaued ($) at about 460,000 2017-2019
- Paid parking rates adjust
- Metro hiring a new finance person, no public agency experience required
- More towers coming to the U-District; as always, it’s not nearly enough
- Republican transportation proposal ($) has new taxes on bikes and transit to fund roads, but at least it focuses on maintenance instead of new highways
- Sound Transit asks the legislature to help out
- Metro’s long range vision slips from 2040 to 2050, includes new service guidelines; more on this later
- SDOT considering loosening West Seattle Bridge restrictions
- Everett Herald ($), like the TNT, is more excited for light rail than the Seattle Times.
- Over 5,000 tickets issued there already
- New research on how market rate construction affects rents; here’s the local version
- VMT Tax comes up again; just raise the gas tax!
- Rizal Bridge gets a PBL
- Spokane’s Downtown Master Plan is ambitious
- Conditions for successful rail
This is an open thread.
Bill would increase housing supply, needs your help
[UPDATE: Sources say HB1157 will be ruled “necessary to implement the budget,” which gives it some more time to live. But it still needs your help!]
Two companion bills, HB 1157 and SB 5390, would create incentives for local government to allow more housing, but at least one of them must emerge from its committee Monday (Finance and Ways and Means, respectively) to succeed in this session.
Both versions of the bill have a bipartisan group of sponsors. In the Senate, it’s Liias (D-Edmonds), Gildon (R-Puyallup), Nguyen (D-West Seattle), and Saldana (D-Rainier Valley). In the House, there are 18 sponsors from urban, suburban, and exurban districts, including Fitzgibbon, Harris-Talley, Hackney, Walen, and Ryu from Seattle and its inner suburbs. Thank your district’s delegation for its sponsorship!
The bill would allow cities or counties to create “real estate excise tax density incentive zones” where they get a portion of the REET proceeds. To qualify, the zone must allow “Single-family detached dwellings at a net density of at least six dwelling units per acre [1], duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhomes, accessory dwelling units, and courtyard apartments.” To qualify, cities and counties cannot allow the units to be short-term rentals for more than 30 days per year.
Continue reading “Bill would increase housing supply, needs your help”Weekend open thread: The best vaccine is the one you can get soonest
MedCram, a series produced by Kyle Allred, has done over 120 updates on COVID-19, featuring Dr. Roger Seheult, including comparing the Pfizer, Moderna, and AstroZeneca-Oxford vaccines, and their outcomes, along with advice on what to do if you test positive for the virus.
Denny Way & 3rd Ave bus improvements…finally
From the SDOT blog:
The 3rd Ave and Denny Way Signal Improvements Project will be modifying signals, updating existing trolley poles, and reconstruct the triangular block of 3rd Ave, Broad St, and Denny Way to improve transit operation and reliability in this part of downtown.
Thus the beginning of the end for one of the longer-running minor subplots here on STB. Thanks to Move Seattle levy funds, Belltown-Queen Anne buses will get their own signal and have a more direct, reliable path across Denny Way.
You can read our exhaustive coverage going back nearly nine years: 2012, 2013, (2013 again), 2014.
New OneBusAway for iOS
There’s nothing that quite matches this community’s interests like open software in the service of transit. In a recent blog post, OneBusAway for Apple iOS maintainer Aaron Brethorst says that a complete rewrite of the software is ready for beta testing.
For most of you, know that beta testing will expose you to some bugs but help make the final product better.
For those of you who spend your lives gluing bits of software together, know that this new version is built on the ‘OBAKit’ library, which makes it much easier to build other real-time transit applications. There are certainly lots of rural transit agencies that don’t have the resources to deploy things of this nature, and this makes it easier for developers to apply their skills to help those in need.
News roundup: bad behavior
- Prepping parking rules for Climate Pledge Arena
- There has not been enough attention to the bad behavior by Renton and others in burden-shifting the homeless
- See also Mercer Island
- Federal Way Link 25% complete
- Train cafe cars are dumb
- Transit managers matter
This is an open thread.
HB 1304: the solution to the next problem
HB1304, which would allow existing monorail taxing authority to be used for light rail, happened to show signs of life at just about the time that ST3 projects sank into serious financial trouble. Inevitably, these two subjects have merged in the discourse. That’s unfortunate, because the bill is best thought of as solving a long-term structural problem rather than a current revenue shortfall. Transit advocates should seize the opportunity to clear this legislative veto point and then argue about how to use it.
The design of Sound Transit is driven by the “spine” between Tacoma and Everett. The basic narrative is that local leaders in Pierce and Snohomish Counties thought, and continue to think, that light rail is important to the economic development of their core cities and convinced the legislature to authorize an agency large enough to take their interests into account. And so supermajorities in Seattle offset skepticism in outlying areas to allow each subarea to fund its stated priorities.
Continue reading “HB 1304: the solution to the next problem”