- ST’s executive search starts this afternoon
- Bellevue’s zoning is not ready
- Mary Hopson is Operator of the Year
- Comment on TOD in Lynnwood
- Seattle works through its state lobbying agenda
- Biden shifting grants away from cars
This is an open thread.
121 Replies to “News roundup: this afternoon”
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You forgot…
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The Community Transit Board of Directors’ monthly board meeting will be at 3 p.m., Thursday, December 2.
The board will consider action on:
Adoption of the 2022 budget
Purchase of heavy duty transit buses
Purchase of bipolar ionization units for vehicles
City of Everett/Community Transit Agreement – Joint Study Framework for Consideration of Consolidated Services
The regular meeting will take place as a virtual meeting due to ongoing COVID-19 precautions. Meeting materials, information on how to watch or listen to the meeting, go to bit.ly/CTBdMtgDec2021.
The board holds regular meetings on the first Thursday of each month.
Executive search: Notice how the hired executive search firm is only talking to internal people and is supposed to have “ST values” in the presentation? This is in stark contrast to hiring a firm that routinely searches nationally for the best transit operator CEOs. This does not bode well for future ST operations.
I think the leaders are afraid to bring in someone who change the direction of the agency. They prefer to keep things running as the status quo. They forget that there will be about a tripling of trains and ridership in 3-4 years and that running ST in 2025 is very different than it was in 2015 — and status quo is a terrible approach.
This isn’t true. Hiring from the inside should always be considered as someone internal will offer extensive practical experience. Someone from the outside brings a fresh perspective, but also someone who may be less passionate as their objective may be to jump from ship to ship. It’s also likely to be someone more connected than qualified. I also don’t understand why you would need a change of direction during a process of growth. What do you plan to disrupt? I think the escalator problems are minor. There are lots of successes. Could someone from the outside cut costs without reducing quality? Could they force through a elevated West Seattle Link in less time? I want someone who knows the systems, the operations and the plans.
Hiring from the inside is often necessary if hiring a qualified candidate from the outside is difficult or unlikely. Usually hiring a replacement CEO from the inside is based on a very effective, long term CEO retiring on a set schedule, and his or her protege having been selected some time before to prepare and work under the retiring CEO (who often moves to chairman of the board). The succession at Disney comes to mind. The other example is General Electric.
If an agency or company needs a change in character and direction that usually requires hiring someone from the outside to shake things up. The existing VP’s or deputies are rarely hidden gems waiting for their chance, and they tend to get replaced.
At the same time the Board has to be incredibly careful it can hire someone it can either control, or has some discretion. Rogoff’s public announcements of an $11.5 billion shortfall, followed a few months later by a public announcement of a $6 billion shortfall, when nothing had changed, were not very graceful or coordinated, especially when he had built up such ill will among cities in the subareas.
The Board does not want to hire an outsider who is going to come in and realize he or she needs to make sure the public understands what they inherited, and ST 3 is a house of cards, and an operations levy will be necessary.
But that is exactly what a qualified outside candidate who wanted a future career will do, and will rip the band aid off WSBLE, and usually in those examples the Board gets replaced as well, a la General
Electric. A well-qualified CEO from outside ST won’t serve as the fall guy for the Board like Rogoff did, and will know how to use the press against the Board since he or she can’t replace the Board, and neither unfortunately can the shareholders.
So look for an insider. Probably well unqualified even if the task were not so difficult, but much easier to control by the Board, with the future public blame to fall on Rogoff. In the end, just how qualified a CEO can you get for $300,000 or $400,000/year who has to inherit Rogoff’s mess? Not very.
Daniel, “The Board” does not necessarily agree with you in all things, and so for you to put your words in their mouths, your opinions in their minds, and your hopes in their hearts is a bit presumptuous, bordering on foolish, to be kind.
Whether it makes sense to complete ST3 is an open question. I personally believe that over time lemonade can be made from a very sour [e.g. “wasteful”] plan which uses the wrong technology for its clear, stated purpose. Over the coming decades the existing at-grade sections will be elevated or trenched and the trains automated a la Skytrain in Vancouver. That will brink operating costs down by 30-40%.
Some of the less-used suburban stations will be “skip-stopped” or be widened for a center express by-pass track to speed up the system so that it better serves its Regional Center-to-Regional Center purpose.
Link will come to resemble the BART del Norte regional metro that it is increasingly designed to be.
However, others do not believe that this process can occur. On the right people believe that building ST3 as designed is irretrievably wasteful, while transit “purists” criticize it for further enabling sprawl. That’s a concern I share but see no alternative given the enormous demand for housing that will surely arrive on our doorsteps in the next decade. Those folks will have to live somewhere.
Because Ballard-West Seattle is needed and a fundamentally sound project, it will be “value-engineered” in some non-damaging ways and increasingly be seen as something different from the Link Spine. It will cost more than originally estimated, but significantly less than the pie-in-the-sky wish-lists of the neighborhoods would.
Many of your criticisms are the same things that most of us on the blog have said for many years. “The Board does not listen.” “The CEO has too much power.” “The system is skipping the high-transit areas of the city to its long-term detriment.”
However, our motivation is to improve the system and preserve the decades-long environmental commitment of the Northwest. Yours appears to be little more than to see Link abandoned and the Puget Sound region turned into some sort of mulish, car-dominated offspring of Houston and San Diego where people drive 80 and up, weaving among the slower cars on six- or eight-lane freeways.
Ugh!
TT, I don’t pretend to speak for the Board. My comments were just speculation, as are all the rest. I predicted in January Rogoff would be gone by years end— although it was risky for the Board to fire him after the “restructure” — but it looks like Rogoff is playing ball.
I also stated over a year ago ST 3 would need a new levy or additional revenue, but was shouted down by the ST sycophants on this blog. I guess we could also revisit my claims of wildly inflated ridership on Link.
What do you think the Board will do when it comes to the next CEO?
I agree ST 3 will not cover WSBLE based on what I think the parties — West Seattle, Ballard and downtown Seattle — desire, and I have said that for a long time, but who will break that bad news to the parties? Are you really sure the four other subareas will, or can, pay 1/2 of DSTT2?
Who would accept the next CEO job for such a small salary with so many nightmares?
You see the issue from an engineering point of view, but really it is a revenue issue. If you see a different form of rail for WSBLE to make it affordable you admit the revenue problem, which means a political nightmare for the Board and the next CEO.
Daniel, again, DSTT2 will not suffer the enormous cost overruns that you adamantly predict. The stations may or may not, depending on their number and configuration, and the tunnnel south of New IDS may, depending on the length, alignment and technology chosen. However, the bored tunnel between New IDS and the tunnel portal adjacent to Elliott West will cost within 15% of the current projected costs. Depend upon it.
That’s because it is an engineering exercise, since it will pass through soil and rock of well-known geology. Have you noticed from your perch in Smith Tower the forest of tall buildings along its path, including the tallest building west of the Missippi?
Those buildings didn’t fall down in the Nisqually earthquake because they’re founded on bedrock through which DSTT2 will pass. Because those buildings were built, the geology of lower First Hill is very well known. The TBM’s used to do the work are “off-the-shelf” models proven around the world in such tunneling feats as the Gotthard Base Tunnel and the Hokkaido Rail Tunnel. DSTT2 is child’s play by comparison.
I grant that the geology between Westlake and Denny and the tunnel portal is somewhat less well-known than that to the south, but the alignment will be well-researched before the TBM’s are set to grinding. There will be no Bertha-like surprises.
Since the soil between Massachusetts Street and New IDS is the same chaotic fill that tortured Bertha, there is some risk in that segment of random crap embedded in the path of the TBM’s, but it’s not huge, nor is it likely to require removal of the cutting head of one of the much smaller machines that would be used.
So DSTT2 will not be the catastrophe for which you so clearly hope.
New IDS will be shallow and built as a cut-and-cover excavation. Businesses in the International District will survive and even prosper through impact compensation. New Westlake will be completed in the same way, and if Nordstrom’s chooses to leave its Westlake store, so be it. When the station is completed some combination of high-end retailers will take the space.
I expect that the three underground stations north of New IDS will also be open pits with temporary covers. The only significant arterial to be affected is Westlake, and it can be bypassed southbound using Ninth North. One or the other half of the street can always be kept open.
Ballard to the tunnel portal can be almost entirely at-grade to the north of Elliott and west of 15th West. The project doesn’t need a high bridge over the Ship Canal; a 70-80 foot bascule would open rarely and be much less of an intrusion to the cityscape. Old Ballard will be served by an at-grade station in Market or 56th, about 22nd.
Since these things are true, they will happen; the distance of the trips affected is too short to do otherwise.
West Seattle is harder because of the hills and the much more important waterway. And, so, it will be built last, not first as currently planned. It will include the engineering necessary to provide a connection to a line south along Delridge which will eventually become the “main line”, with the Junction branch a convenient way to turn trains from Everett.
To a different point, your comparison of “The Board” to that of CEO toadies comprising the typical corporate BOD is ludicrous. Firing the CEO will not lead to wholesale replacement of “The Board” because they are ex officio members independently elected by their various independent constituencies. They come and go due to larger currents of politics.
I WISH they were more knowledgable of transit issues, but the current composition is better than having a member from the concrete industry, one from the steel folks and two or three from auto dealerships, which is what would result from direct election, much as the happens to the Ports.
“TT, I don’t pretend to speak for the Board.”
“The Board does not want to hire an outsider…”
Your wording implies you’re speaking for the board. You can add “I think” or something to make it clear it’s your opinion.
“…who is going to come in and realize he or she needs to make sure the public understands what they inherited, and ST 3 is a house of cards, and an operations levy will be necessary.”
This, coming right after the previous clause, implies you have inside knowledge that the board believes ST3 is a house of cards. That’s implausable and out-of-character for the board. You have given no evidence for it like “One boardmember told me” or “My sister lives next door to a boardmember” or “I’m God so I know what the boardmembers are thinking”. So it sounds like you’re putting words in the boardmembers’ mouths. That’s not helpful. You’re really guessing the board’s intentions from outside, so be transparent about that.
I personally believe that over time lemonade can be made from a very sour [e.g. “wasteful”] plan which uses the wrong technology for its clear, stated purpose.
It is nice to be optimistic, but I don’t see it. I don’t think it will never live up to its promise in providing the outer suburbs with good transit mobility, and most of those living in the suburbs will struggle with the same poor transit system they have today. Just look at the transit plans for the East Side after East Link. This is a good project, that clearly has merit, and clearly will save Metro (and ST) a bunch of bus money. And yet when the dust settles, there will still be thousands upon thousands of people who have to deal with buses that run every half hour, even in relatively dense areas, and to relatively popular places. I don’t see Pierce or Snohomish County being much better, even if a relative handful will be able to get to a handful of places in Seattle a tiny bit quicker.
Because Ballard-West Seattle is needed and a fundamentally sound project, it will be “value-engineered” in some non-damaging ways and increasingly be seen as something different from the Link Spine.
Ballard-West Seattle is certainly different, but it is simply a variation on the same basic mistake. It is the wrong project for the area. With Lynnwood Link and Federal Way Link, the northern and southern suburbs need better bus service and in some cases, better bus infrastructure. That’s it. No extension, just an improvement in the mode that will carry the vast majority of people in those counties (whether their trip involves a transfer to Link or not).
Surprisingly enough (given its location) the same is true for Ballard-West Seattle. It is just geography. West Seattle has practically nothing between it and downtown. One (rarely used) station, and that’s it. It already has an expressway connecting it to downtown. The three stops in West Seattle are minor — one of them is merely a bus intercept. Unlike Bellevue (a similar suburb*) there is no “downtown”. While The Junction has its charms, it isn’t the destination that Northgate is, let alone Capitol Hill, let alone UW, downtown Bellevue, or downtown Seattle. It is merely one of the half dozen or so minor destinations (Alki, South Seattle College, etc.) that make up what is largely a moderate to low density sprawling peninsula. This makes it an extremely expensive subway line consisting of bus intercepts. Clearly the investment (if it is really needed) should have been in bus infrastructure.
While the Ballard line has more merit, it too suffers from the same problem, albeit not to the same degree. You do enable faster travel to destinations like Uptown, but only if you get all the details right (as you suggest). Done right, and you’ve added a considerable amount of value without breaking the bank. But it requires doing it just right. Call me cynical, but I don’t think this agency can do that. None of the suggestions you made (all of which I agree with) are obvious to the folks in charge. It’s hard, and they have failed even with the easy stuff. But previous to this, it wasn’t the end of the world. UW to downtown is clearly flawed (not enough stations) but it still works, because you really can’t screw that up, as long as you have at least one station in the U-District, and a station at Capitol Hill (mission accomplished). There is only a remote possibility that Ballard Link will actually serve the main destination in the area (Ballard) which means that lots of people will simply drive, or continue to take the increasingly popular, and increasingly fast and frequent 40. I don’t want to overstate the weakness of the Ballard line, because it is by far the best project in ST3, and if the other projects were better (or even at par with it) I would be a lot more enthusiastic. But it still isn’t that good, and it is pretty easy to imagine a better system, leveraging the buses. Imagine this, along with all of the (much cheaper) infrastructure improvements along the way. That means a bus would travel in its own lane (or in a tunnel) from West Seattle to the Ballard Bridge. Now imagine all of those buses run every ten minutes at worse. Consider that would all be much cheaper, and ask yourself, will whatever ST builds be better, given its history of screwing up even basic things, like a First Hill station? I seriously doubt it.
* While West Seattle residents and fans will no doubt bristle at the description of the area as a suburb, I don’t mean it as a slight. The people of West Seattle (including my relatives) have every right to point out that they do live in “the city”, and are as much of it as everyone else. But from a transportation standpoint, they live in a suburb. Look how many people routinely talk about how you can’t “get out of” (or into) West Seattle, when the only difference is that the buses take the low bridge. For every day travel, transit doesn’t exist. It is only for commuting downtown, and they have complained about experiencing even the tiniest amount of congestion (the type of delay that a C. D. rider would laugh at) for ages. That’s because they are connected to the rest of the city via a freeway, and they want that freeway to run fast and free, as every suburban resident would.
TT, 2022 will be a very interesting year: a new CEO and the DEIS, plus either another year of WFH or finally toward the second half businesses reopening.
Pretty much all anyone can do is speculate, although often the data should tell you whether ridership estimates were inflated (and 2018 ridership figures show they were because there was very little switching from cars to Link), and whether ST would need a restructure and an additional $50 billion.
Thank you for your engineering analysis. It will be interesting to see if any of it is reflected in the DEIS, although I doubt ST will be allowed to use a 15% cost contingency for WSBLE. My guess is 30% will be the contingency bidders will require based on history.
Ross, I don’t think you have enough faith in the voters of Puget Sound. All those bus problems you have itemized can be fixed with money, and in the grand scheme of things, not too much of it.
The legislature which convenes next year will have an absolute majority — not a veto-proof and Constitution-modifying “super-majority” to be sure, a functional economic one — from the three counties comprising the Sound Transit service area. Of course, not all of the areas of those counties will always vote in lock-step, but the people representing the areas served by poor transit will be eager to give their constituents the right to vote more taxes for it if they so desire. Ten more years of Daniel’s freeways-everywhere wet dream will convince them that they need bus lanes too, especially if WSDOT pays for them……
You’re right of course that Link will never carry the majority of transit trips in the three county region. Neither does either BART or Muni Metro in San Francisco, WMATA in DC or even the El in Chicago. The only place where the subway ridership exceeds that of buses is in New York City, because in fact the subway is the local bus for most people.
That doesn’t mean that it can’t or won’t carry MANY more than it currently does or will after Lynnwood, Redmond and Federal Way Link initially opens. It will take some technology changes (higher geared trains probably in addition to what I listed above) but it has the possibility of doing so, especially of DSTT2 is built as planned. By 2040 there will be a second line through it, though it’s not clear at this time what the destinations will be.
One thing sure, though, Issaquah to Redmond Tech is so obvious that everyone will be “on board” [pun] with running overlays.
Daniel, I only put that 15% contingency cap on boring and lining the tunnel from New IDS to the Elliott portal. The stations haven’t even been sited, much less designed, so they are a black box.
You keep saying that “DSTT2” will cost more $8 to $10 billion, but you don’t understand the high level of accuracy that TBM projects turn in tunnel after tunnel.
Maybe there isn’t enough money for Midtown in the currently achievable budget. ST can’t assume enormous population growth in its taxing district, so it doesn’t. But there will be enormous population growth within its taxing district, because so much of California will move here.
No, not anywhere near the majority will move. Anyone within the fog belt will want to stay because it won’t be that bad, but LOTS of people in marginal jobs living in San Bernardino, Colton or eastern Orange County will be glad to get away from the water rationing, the brown lawns and the Santa Ana winds. This doesn’t even consider the non-agricultural folks in the Central Valley where temperatures are going to be in the 110’s regularly soon.
What that means for us is definitely a two-edged sword. The bad edge is that doubling the population will put hideous pressure on the delicate Puget Sound ecosystem. The “good edge” is that they will all pay taxes!!!!! to Sound Transit, the counties and the state.
The money for Midtown will be distilled from the heady brew of runaway growth.
Ross, I don’t think you have enough faith in the voters of Puget Sound. All those bus problems you have itemized can be fixed with money, and in the grand scheme of things, not too much of it.
Yep, I don’t have much faith. King County — by far the most left leaning of the three counties — voted against the last Metro proposal. If I’m not mistaken, Pierce County voted against additional bus funding. I’m not sure about Snohomish County, but I doubt there is huge support for mass transit, given the sprawl that has occurred over the years (Marysville has added a lot more people than Everett). It is only in Seattle where additional transit will pass, and pass easily. As Seattle increasingly decides to “go it alone”, I don’t see them carrying the rest of the region when it comes to bus service.
Our representatives can just do it themselves, but again, I lack faith. To be fair, I don’t blame them. Given all of the needs of a city or county (public safety, public health, housing, etc.) it is hard to say that what we really *need* is buses running every 10 to 15 minutes. Yes, the legislature can allow cities and counties to tax themselves at a much higher rate, but I’m not holding my breath. Nor do I expect the state to grant cities and counties a lot of transit funding. Inslee is by far the “greenest” governor we’ve ever had, and it simply isn’t a priority. That’s because he is also a savvy politician, who doesn’t want to lose the suburbs to the Republicans.
Link spending doesn’t help. It is tough to argue that even after spending a fortune on the new rail line, we need to spend a bunch of money on buses. A lot of people thought we “fixed” the problem with this fancy, expensive light rail (no more traffic, right?). To then come back and say “Oh, we need to invest a bunch in buses, too” sounds like bait and switch. At best it sounds like you are trying to sell the people wheels after selling them the car. At worst it sounds like you are selling them a Civic after you sold them a Hummer. Someone is going to ask “If you are saying bus service is so important, why didn’t we just invest in that instead of the light rail expansion that hardly anyone around here uses?”.
You’re right of course that Link will never carry the majority of transit trips in the three county region. Neither does either BART or Muni Metro in San Francisco, WMATA in DC or even the El in Chicago.
I wrote about the vast majority, not just majority. I was also focusing on the areas outside the city. You are right, more people ride the buses than the trains in places like DC and Chicago — but it is close. In the Bay Area it isn’t, but that’s because BART is clearly flawed (it isn’t built like the DC Metro ).
Which brings us to Link. The ST3 expansions outside the city are a lot like BART. They do a very poor job of serving the communities themselves. In San Fransisco or the East Bay, BART provides a minimal amount of service — hardly the type of rail system you find in DC, Chicago or New York. The New York Subway provides a connection from Manhattan to Brooklyn (several, actually) but it also provides lots of service within Manhattan and Brooklyn. BART just doesn’t do that.
Nor does Link, outside Seattle. For travel within Pierce or Snohomish County, Link provides very little value. Yet these make up the *vast* majority of trips in those counties. There just aren’t that many people going from Pierce County or Snohomish County to the handful of King County locations served by Link. Worse yet, the vast majority of those riders will have to take a bus to get there. This is my “wheels” analogy. If you believe that Link serves as a spine, and provides an essential connection along that corridor, then the only way it can work is with frequent buses on both ends, providing convenient three seat rides. Yes, I’m very skeptical that we can pull that off, since no one has. A lot have tried, mind you. There are a lot of cities that have built what we are building (with lots of stations next to the freeway). The record just isn’t good (https://www.manhattan-institute.org/light-rail-economic-suitability).
I’m not sure about Snohomish County
Snohomish did raise it’s sales tax to support transit. But it seems there’s really only support for commuter buses to Seattle. Everett Transit doesn’t get anything though because it doesn’t apply to them. But it seems to apply to other cities like Lynnwood. Not sure how that works.
@Bernie (and RossB)
See my reply below, which unfortunately didn’t nest correctly.
“If you are saying bus service is so important, why didn’t we just invest in that instead of the light rail expansion that hardly anyone around here uses?”. ”
Because the buses would still have been stuck in traffic, forced to make indirect turns at intersections, and limited to the speed of adjacent cars. And because there’s more political will to build light rail than to significantly expand the bus network.
One of Link’s major features is a dedicated right of way. To replicate that with a bus, you need dedicated lanes and minimizing level crossings. That’s exactly what the governments have repeatedly failed to do. RapidRide has full BAT lanes only on the A, the Shoreline part of the E, and a few scattered blocks here and there in Seattle. Not enough to replicate the speed and reliability of a surface train. The HOT lanes on 405 get so many cars that buses fail to maintain their 45 mph minimum speed. On I-90 this month when 520 was closed, my bus got bogged down significantly from Main Street to I-5 even though the bridge supposedly has HOV lanes. Then there are all the car breakdowns that block highways at least a few times a week. Link just buzzes past them. That’s what a region of 3.4+ million people need, and what other countries have. It’s not just a question of driving when a mudslide closes Sounder; it’s a question of taking Link when driving time or bus time to the U-District reaches 45 minutes, or to Bellevue or Lynnwood reaches an hour, or to bypass the congestion around the stadiums.
There’s also less political will to put into bus frequency. Link runs every 10 minutes minimum until 10pm every day. No bus route does that. The only combination of routes that do you can count on one hand: Third Avenue, Jackson Street, Pacific Street, maybe another one or two. In contrast, Chicago’s buses run every 5-10 minutes all day, 20 minute evenings, and there are 30 minute night owls a mile apart. Most of San Francisco’s buses run at least every 20 minutes (although I’ve heard they’ve been gutted in the covid recession). The transit fan in Canada think it’s substandard for a bus to run less than every 15 minutes outside rural areas, yet most of our routes do that either part or full time. Jarret Walker also said at the beginning of the covid recession that buses should not be cut to less than 15 minutes because that makes them less useful. Link will run every 5-10 minutes to Lynnwood and 10 minutes to Bellevue every day full time. The 550 still has 30-minute Sundays and evenings. The 512 only recently acquired 10-minute Saturdays (!) and 20-minute Sundays. The 535 still doesn’t have any Sunday service (although i guess it’s coming next year or so). The 550, B, and 255 are the only Eastside routes I know of that are frequent beyond weekday daytime, and many routes are 30 minutes all day, sometimes 60 minutes on Sunday.
If you want to get the majority out of their cars, you have to have transit as frequent and comprehensive as the cities that achieve that. Otherwise it’s too inconvenient and doesn’t fit into people’s schedules, and when people are predisposed to driving they won’t put up with this. I always take transit and never had a car. I had roommate who drove everywhere, and he said the reason was so he could fit more activities into the day. He said he couldn’t fulfill all his responsibilities if he had to wait on transit. We lived in the northern U-District so there was frequent transit there, but not in most of the places he was going to.
“BART provides a minimal amount of service — hardly the type of rail system you find in DC, Chicago or New York.”
San Francisco also has MUNU Metro and buses. If the transit agencies were structured differently, they might all be under one brand, and BART might have those missing lines to the north shore and Marin County, and Geary Street.
“King County — by far the most left leaning of the three counties — voted against the last Metro proposal. If I’m not mistaken, Pierce County voted against additional bus funding. I’m not sure about Snohomish County,”
My recollection is the last two countywide Metro measures failed. Somebody else said the second-last one succeded so the second-last failure must have been earlier. The last failure was the one that led to the 2014 recession cuts and the creation of Seattle’s Transit Benefit District. In 2016 Metro published a long-range vision with a significant increase in bus service to complement ST2 and 3 Link expansion, but it depends on additional funding. The county was going to put a levy on the ballot in 2020, but covid diverted its attention, and it wanted the Harborview levy alone on the ballot, so it deferred the Metro levy. It made noises about maybe putting it on the ballot by 2024, but there’s no guarantee it will pass, since the last one failed. South King County, which after Seattle is most in need of increased bus service, says it’s too poor to pay additional transit taxes. So you get opposition from both the car-bound rich and also from much of the car-bound poor.)
Pierce County has the most adversion to transit taxes, the worst transit (besides little Everett Transit), and the worst prospects. Tacoma and Lakewood are pro-transit but they’re outvoted by the rest of Pierce. The PT district had to shrink just to pass one levy, and PT is still gunshy about proposing more than small increases. Nevertheless PT has a pretty good long-range plan, so if it can get it funded and get the frequency up it would be in reasonable shape. But I’m not holding my breath.
Snohomish County is in between. It likes some transit measures. In the 2008 recession CT asked its constituents whether to prioritize Seattle expresses or local service in cuts. The overwhelming majority of feedback was to prioritize the Seattle expresses. But this has to be understood in Snohomish’s context. It has few north-south highways and they’re the most congested. Some 70% of Snohomans work in King County. It gets the most storm and snow events because of the convergence zone. It’s 12-30 miles from both Seattle and Bellevue. Many constituents are predisposed to take only express-level transit, so that’s the only kind they see as worth their tax money. So express buses play a larger role in the Snohomish mind than they do in the Eastside and South King. Still, CT has a robust long-range plan to convert the Link-truncated routes to crosstown local service that will narrow the gap between King County’s and Snohomish County’s frequency, two Swift lines under construction, two more after that, and plans to extend the Green line to UW Bothell at some point. It plans to do this in stages over the next few years, and a supplemental levy has at least a 50% chance of passage.
“Everett Transit doesn’t get anything though because it doesn’t apply to them. But it seems to apply to other cities like Lynnwood. Not sure how that works.”
Everett Transit doesn’t get what? What applies to cities like Lynnwood?
ET’s tax is lower than CT’s so it doesn’t go as far. Everett doesn’t pay CT taxes so it doesn’t get CT service, except the Everett part of Swift Blue which ET funds, and a couple express stops on the 201/202 for the benefit of Smokey Point, Marysville, and Lynnwood passengers.
And Everett has long said it’s too poor for additional transit taxes, similar to South King County cities. That has only recently changed, as Everett is now considering a possible merger into CT.
Mike, you are probably correct. Since Everett has it’s own transit tax it wouldn’t pay into the County tax that funds CT. The rest of the county whether incorporated or not gets at least some marginal CT coverage so they all pay the tax. Everett’s sales tax rates seem to vary by zip code so I wonder if that is tied to transit coverage? In most cases though Everett has lower sales tax than the other cities in Snohomish County which is surprising and perhaps why their transit system is on the ropes.
@Bernie
“Since Everett has it’s own transit tax it wouldn’t pay into the County tax that funds CT. The rest of the county whether incorporated or not gets at least some marginal CT coverage so they all pay the tax.”
The transit tax that funds CT is not a county-wide tax; rather, it is exclusive to the taxing district, i.e., the Snohomish County PTBA. The following links should help clear up any misunderstandings you or any other reader might have in this regard.
Map of SnoCo PTBA (direct .pdf link):
https://www.communitytransit.org/docs/default-source/about-documents/2015julyptba-map.pdf
WA DOR notice of sales tax increase subsequent to passage of Prop 1 in Nov 2015 (direct .pdf link):
https://dor.wa.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/Docs/Pubs/SpecialNotices/2016/sn_April_16_SnoCountyTBD.pdf
As you can see from this table, the SnoCo PTBA tax increase only impacted the locations highlighted on this particular DOR bulletin. For example, I reside in location code number 3131, which is Unincorporated Snohomish County/PTBA/RTA. As of this bulletin’s effective date, purchases in my surrounding area or online were subject to a sales tax rate of 9.8%. That increased to 10.3% with the passage of ST3 and its sales tax increase of .5%. Then subsequent to that, Snohomish County passed a ballot measure to increase the county rate by an additional .1% to fund a replacement of its aging 911 system (that they failed to budget for in advance), thereby making my local sales tax rate 10.4% where it stands today.
Fwiw, I don’t believe there is any appetite in this area of Snohomish County to increase our sales taxes in support of an additional transit measure in the foreseeable future.
Thanks Tlsgwm. Even with your links I won’t pretend to understand all of the complexity. Plus, I’m really only familiar at all with the area of SnoCo north of Bothell to the 405-5 interchange. It seems strange that there are huge areas included that have no transit but I think they also have largely no nothing (like east of Darrington. But what do the people from Arlington to Darrington actually benefit from this tax? What really seems odd is the exclusion (if I’m reading this right) of the big area just north of the county line and east of Bothell. I’ll call it Raintree for lack of a better understanding. It looks like this may include Maltby and areas like Turners/Thrashers Corner where there has been a lot of development along Hwy 9.
I’m sure you’re right there is little interest in yet more taxes in SnoCo for transit. You are paying a high rate and IMHO not getting a lot for it. I’m curious on where you stand on the Everett/CT merger. Do you think the rest of the county will just be bailing out Everett?
Arlington is an industrial growth center. Swift Red to Smokey Point is planned for 2027, and that’s close to Arlington. It just needs a frequent feeder to Arlington and Quil Ceda, which CT seems ready to provide.
I know nothing about Darrington or the area northeast of Arlington, only the farmland I can see from I-5, so I can’t say whether Darrington gets appropriate service or its tax level is reasonable. But I did find it odd that Index and its surrounding area is paying CT taxes when its bus service was deleted decades ago and service east of Monroe has been on-again, off-again. But that’s something for the Index residents to raise if they’re concerned about it.
CT has been thinking about an all-day route on Highway 9, both for current inhabitants and future growth. It’s just lower priority than the other things and CT has limited money.
It’s not “bailing out” a city to give it the relative level of transit its size deserves. Everett is the largest city in the county, has a lot of jobs, and plans for growth. Its routes may be more closely spaced than CT’s, but their frequency and span are lower, and it is the largest city. If we want people to live in Everett rather than sprawling to outer Arlington and Darrington, it needs an appropriate level of transit.
I’ve driven through Darrington several times on the way to/from hikes in the North Cascades. It’s a town of around 5,000 people, separated from Arlington by a stretch of 30 miles of rural highway. Except for occasional country homes dotting the road, there’s really nothing.
Until the Great Recession, CT used to run an hourly bus route from Arlington to Darrington down SR-520. I don’t remember if this bus continued to Smokey Point, or if you had to transfer at Arlington to get there. Once at Smokey Point, you could then catch the 201/202 to Everett or Lynnwood, followed by the 510/511/512 to Seattle.
Fifteen years ago, this bus actually used to run 7 days/week, and I would often see it out the car window along SR-530, driving the other direction while off to a hike. At some point in the early 2010’s it was cut back to peak-only, I think, just two round trips per day. Between the small population of Darrington and 30 miles of nothing between Arlington and Darrington, the operational cost per passenger was, needless to say, extremely high. Although, peeking in windows, ridership out there wasn’t zero. (Most of the people who did ride it, at least on weekends, looked like teenagers).
Politically, everything in Snohomish County from Arlington on east is Trump country (although, not as lopsided as you’d find in eastern Washington). I highly doubt the locals there were enthusiastic about paying more in transit taxes; I’m sure the area was solid “no” votes, although its population is small, and it’s the Everett/Lynnwood/Edmonds area that really determines how Snohomish county elections go.
General Reply,
All five of you are making the same mistake of assuming that the future will be like the present, but amped up.
It won’t.
The rest of the world , drowning and starving from climate change will not allow the US to continue generating 20-25% of its GHG emissions for its hideously inefficient transportation and distribution systems. They will kill us all, and they have the means and just cause to do so.
Yeah, it will be dirty beyond belief, and they’ll suffer mightily, but there won’t be anyone who’ll shed a tear for The Ugly American’s passing, save some RWNJ’s in Australia and Canada.
There simply isn’t enough economically recoverable Cobalt, Lithium and the other non-ferrous Magic Metals for everyone in the world who wants an EV — even in America, really — to have one.
So our choice will soon be “build (and use) transit or die”. The voters might come with pitchforks and torches, but they won’t be demonstrating in Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow or Brussels where it will matter.
“Oh, there he goes again.” you say. Don’t be too smug about American Power. We’re six percent of global population and our military is no longer hegemonic. China, Russia and India can beat us, both strategically and tactically, even if the EU “sits this one out”. They’re all part of The Dictators’Club so they see eye-to-eye about America, even if they’d slit one another’s throat in a heartbeat if they were reasonably sure they could pull it off.
So, yeah, the three county region better figure out how to explain this simple conundrum to their distracted, self-absorbed, myopic constituents. Each and every American needs to reduce his, her or their GHG footprint, and the only direct way they can do so is to reform their transportation habits, and the “inconvenience” Devil take the hindmost.
What does removing 99 and 509 in South Park mean? Would the freeways just end and dump cars into local streets? Would they be downgraded to boulevards? Would elevated segments be lowered to the surface? We’d need specifics on how the roads would go, not just abstract “remove freeways” hand-waving.
In any case, removing 509 is a non-starter because the state is in the process of extending it to I-5, and it won’t remove a freeway it considers essential.
https://cultivatesouthpark.org/reconnect
This is one local group’s vision.
Personally, I think a boulevard is a more realistic option for 99. And you are right, 509 isn’t going anywhere.
Thanks for the hyperlink!
The big issue I see is with port trucks. 99 is currently not easy for a semi driver as there are signals and turns involved. What’s needed is a non-signal or least-signal path for trucks.
If the port would study and fund a better connection that bypasses South Park, I’m cool with fully removing the segment. However, I don’t think it should be a unilateral decision.
The West Seattle Bridge closure creates more traffic in this area so how circulation works will change when it reopens.
Thanks for the link. I was skeptical at first, but they make an excellent case. The key is that not that many drivers use that section, and it isn’t that hard to find alternatives. I support the proposal, and hope that it happens.
One of the slides has a map of alternative routes. It looks like that may be doable. Nearby 509 and East Marginal Way/16th are available as alternative routes, and the 99 freeway ends anyway a couple miles further south.
I’d be for converting more freeway segments to boulevards. That’s what cities without freeways have. The freeway goes to the edge of a city and turns into a boulevard, or it goes around the city and connects to a boulevard. Some of these boulevards are eight lanes so they’re not small. But they’re less disruptive than freeways.
How about using the 99 corridor partially (one direction) as a potential corridor for the “airport express” light rail alignment?!? It would lead into the Tukwila line to the South, not quite sure about the Northern part though, I guess there would be several options. In any case, such new line might be more important/beneficial than a Boeing Access Road station.
So, Bellevue will create some affordable housing by increasing housing. Where? Why around the station at east main, in downtown Bellevue, in huge, tall, new skyscrapers. And who sponsored this article? MN Custom Homes. https://www.mncustom.com/
And what is the basis for all this needed housing in Bellevue according to the article linked in this article. The demise of Seattle, from head taxes to homeless to public safety to public schools:
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/bellevues-boom-citys-tech-industry-poised-eat-seattles-lunch/
Will development in The Spring District, Wilburton, downtown Bellevue and adding thousands of brand-new “multi-family” housing create affordable housing. Let’s look at how S. Lake Union turned out, since that is the closest template:
“Broadly, he said, the philosophy at the time was that South Lake Union would end up growing with a ratio of 60% residential and 40% commercial space. But that didn’t happen. Not even close. Just like in the Denny Park plan, the region became largely office space — an estimated 75% of new development — exacerbating the need for the 18,000 housing units that never saw the light of day. It is now home to Amazon’s sprawling headquarters and large offices for Google, Facebook, Apple, and other tech companies.
“The effect? All of that building and Seattle’s median housing price climbed 157% in the nine years between 2012 and now.”
And now all those employees are moving to the eastside, and want SFH, but Bellevue is cautioned to avoid Seattle’s mistakes in S. Lake Union.
And who is the biggest proponent of “increased” or affordable housing? Microsoft, where all the execs live in Medina, and why every state housing target bill applies to cities with populations greater than Medina’s so Medina is exempt. Despite its huge wealth Medina contributes almost nothing to ARCH, the eastside affordable housing inter-local agency. Will Medina be part of her vision:
“She said eventually the changes to the city must march up to the door of what longtime Bellevue residents prize: the vast swath of single-family neighborhoods. Statistics show that 70% of the city’s single-family homes have one or two occupants.”
No, Medina won’t be part of that upzoning, and neither will Seattle after the election of Harrell.
The demise of Seattle, from head taxes to homeless to public safety to public schools
Alright, lets take this bit by bit:
1) Head taxes — No one cares. OK, some do, but my guess is less than 1% of the population cares about head taxes. 99% of the population isn’t concerned in the least. Hmmm, the term “99%” sounds familiar for some reason. Anyway …
2) Public Safety — Crime has risen across the country. There is nothing special about the rise in Seattle (or Bellevue).
3) Public Schools — Seattle has outstanding public schools, and has, for quite some time. Test scores merely reflect the wealth of the residents. I doubt very many people move from Seattle because they are concerned about the quality of the schools. I guess is it possible, but most of those people are ignorant. For reference, my mom was on the school board; my brother-in-law was a teacher, then a principal, then a superintendent; my nephew and niece are teachers. All my kids went to Seattle public schools, all my grand kids this side of the Cascade Mountains attend Seattle public schools. I have connections to just about every public school in the city, and I wouldn’t hesitate to send any of my loved ones to any of them. But yeah, some parents are stupid — they think their kid can’t handle a regular school, and their precious snowflake needs to be pampered, in the same way they shouldn’t get vaccinated for measles. (People forget that the anti-vax movement was popular amongst hippies and right wing extremists before Covid/Trump — idiocy knows no bounds.)
4) Homelessness — Now we are getting somewhere. This is a national problem, but Seattle has seen a huge increase in homelessness, as expected. In short, we added a lot of high paying jobs, but not enough housing. Poor people were essentially pushed out because of rising rents. Supply and demand, and all that. It makes sense that Bellevue, fearing the exact same situation, would want to add to their public housing supply to mitigate a problem that will surely occur as they try and mimic Seattle.
I believe your overall argument (if there is one) is that the homeless problem is more wide spread, and should be dealt with in that manner. I agree, which is why the county has been trying to address the problem for quite some time. Whether they are doing a good job or not is another story, but it is definitely not a city-specific problem. It is (or will soon be) a big problem in Bellevue, unless action is taken to address it. Maybe not in every neighborhood, but in many, and pretending that short term solutions (like sweeps) will solve it is naive. Seattle’s failure to address the homeless problem stems from the fact that we did what most cities would do under the circumstances (too little) not that we did something unusual.
1) Head taxes
Maybe it’s the 1% that’s driving virtually all of Amazon’s new leased space to Bellevue. More people are going to care when they can’t lease office space they’ve just built and not enough people are around to keep other business that depend on these workers afloat.
2) Public Safety
There’s plenty special about Seattle. Rapes went from below the US average to well above. Higher crime rate than 91% of US cities. numbers for Belleuve show higher crime rate than 63% of US cities. Rape remains well below the national average.
3) Public Schools
Nothing wrong with Seattle public schools. And there are many standout programs (Garfield Jazz to name just one). Test scores take a hit on two fronts. Seattle has more poverty than surrounding districts and conversely Seattle has a lot of really wealthy parents that results in the City having one of the highest rates of private school enrollment. Thing is, Bainbridge, Mercer Island, Northshore, Lake Washington and Bellevue are consistently ranked near the top for the State.
4) Homelessness
Seattle spent way more money on homelessness than Bellevue and got worse results. You’re just ignoring reality if you think this all came from people pushed out because housing costs went up. Prices have gone up faster in Bellevue. Seattle created a crises when it promoted the Free-attle meme and failed to enforce laws like not camping out and doing drugs on school district property, allowing encampments in public parks and legally challenging the enforcement of existing laws regarding parking RV’s on public streets. The “usual” things that have had the same result in LA, SF and Portland.
“4) Homelessness
Seattle spent way more money on homelessness than Bellevue and got worse results. You’re just ignoring reality if you think this all came from people pushed out because housing costs went up. Prices have gone up faster in Bellevue. Seattle created a crises when it promoted the Free-attle meme and failed to enforce laws like not camping out and doing drugs on school district property, allowing encampments in public parks and legally challenging the enforcement of existing laws regarding parking RV’s on public streets. The “usual” things that have had the same result in LA, SF and Portland.”
Well, I just looked for any sign of a Freeattle meme, and while I found some t-shirts and a pithy response to a Seattle Times tweet, there’s no meme. And Seattle hands out much fewer things than many cities, including cities where homelessness is better taken care of like SLC and New York (where housing is considered a human right). So I’ll respond to you with a meme, just so you know what one is.
“Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong.”
For any city in isolation, the cheapest and most “effective” way to deal with the homeless is to send them elsewhere so they become somebody else’s problem. This is essentially what’s done by Bellevue, Kirkland, and all of the other eastside cities. Anybody that’s camping on the streets, round them up, send to Seattle, and make them Seattle’s problem.
Unfortunately, Seattle itself, doesn’t have the luxury of sending its homeless over to Bellevue because Bellevue (by design) has almost no services to take care of them. Seattle is stuck actually dealing with its homeless population itself, which is far more expensive.
The fair solution is to spread the burden of actually housing the homeless around throughout the entire region, rather than making Seattle do the heavy lifting for everyone else. But, of course, its in every other city’s parochial interest to refuse to do so, so it will never happen.
“For any city in isolation, the cheapest and most “effective” way to deal with the homeless is to send them elsewhere so they become somebody else’s problem.”
My dad would tell stories about when he was a cop in a suburban NY town how they would intercept one of the “Bowery Bums” walking along a thoroughfare and transport him to the town line to the north. Said “Bowery Bum” was hoping to be picked up, and get a hot meal, and a flop to sleep in for the night. Nope. Sorry pal, you’ll have just keep walking.
They usually found themselves somewhere upstate.
My brother worked for Social Services in Westchester County. He’d talk to clients that were obviously from the south. “So, how did you come to be in the NY area?” : “I took the bus.” : “Really? Where did you get the ticket?” : “My caseworker gave it to me.”.
Trust me, that crap still goes on.
@Bernie
1) Amazon is not abandoning Seattle for Bellevue. In fact, they are increasing employment in Seattle. They are also increasing employment in Bellevue and other cities across the country. Very little of this has anything to do with the head tax.
2) By the very website you stated, Seattle crime is going down. This was the general trend (nationwide) until Covid hit. But there is nothing special about the increase in crime for Seattle, Bellevue or any other city. It is a national trend.
4) Homelessness. There is a well proven relationship between increase in housing costs and homelessness. Bellevue has seen a substantial increase in homelessness (https://bellevuewa.gov/discover-bellevue/about-us/hot-topics-initiatives/homelessness-in-bellevue). This will likely increase as time goes on. I don’t expect it to reach the levels of Seattle because it is a much smaller city, and a suburb at that. A typical Seattle homeless person lives in an apartment, but lost her job. She can’t afford the (really high) rent, so she moves out (perhaps living with a friend or maybe in a car). There just aren’t that many apartments in Bellevue compared to Seattle, so the increase in housing costs effects fewer people.
Seattle is also the center of the region. For example, the major trauma center for the state is in Seattle. So let’s say you are living paycheck to paycheck, and get in a really bad accident on I-5. They send you to Harborview. Your car is totaled, you lose your job while being laid up. You are broke, with no place to go. Even if you were living in say, Kent, you are in Seattle now. Unless you have friends or relatives to stay with, you are essentially another Seattle homeless person.
Enforcing laws against camping doesn’t reduce homelessness. It just means the folks move around. Come on man, think about it. If you have no money and can’t afford rent, how the hell does it help to have your car towed, or be kicked out of a park. Do you think we should just put all the poor people in jail? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just give them all a place to live? I’m sure you are no doubt aware (since you seem to know a lot about the subject) that in many countries, those in jail are considered homeless. So according to your brilliant plan (that you no doubt pulled out of a Dickens novel) we would still have as many homeless as before, but they would just be a lot less visible. Brilliant.
Oh, and what the hell is the “Free-attle meme”? Please provide evidence that such a meme has played any part in the homelessness problem in the city. In the meantime, here is a link to the relationship between homelessness and the cost of housing: https://dupagehomeless.org/research-demonstrates-connection-between-housing-affordability-homelessness/
Then there is this excerpt from a CBS news story:
Dennis Culhane, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has been researching homelessness for 35 years. He doesn’t believe drug addiction and mental illness explain why there’s been a recent rise in the number of unsheltered people.
Anderson Cooper: Why is this happening?
Dennis Culhane: The best evidence we have is that it’s the real estate market. You have a lot of wealthier individuals, especially in places like Seattle, who are driving up the price of housing and there’s just not enough housing to filter down to the lower income people.
It is true many cities, either directly or indirectly, route the homeless to other, larger cities, either with a bus ticket or lack of services. That is the point of the ninth circuit’s decision in Martin v. Boise that held a city cannot criminalize sleeping on public property if it does not provide overnight shelter (but of course cities can still use civil forfeiture to accomplish this goal). But Boise did not mandate every homeless person get their own hotel room. This region, based on the amount the region spends, is probably the opposite end of the Boise equation, which in some ways is why Seattle has the third highest number of homeless in the U.S. but the 18th highest population.
Rising property values are some of the problem, especially when it increases the cost for publicly subsidized housing. But there are many very wealthy areas with few homeless camping on the streets or in public. Seattle like San Francisco (which is getting much tougher on homelessness because it is hurting the tourism cash cow) has a reputation for generous benefits and very lax criminal enforcement, and the availability of drugs. Seattle is not blameless in the extent of its homeless problem.
It is easy to say the problem is more housing, and every homeless person should get a free place to live, all alone, usually at the expense of the working poor who don’t get such subsidies, and usually paid for by someone else. King Co. is trying this experiment with its 1/10th of one percent sales tax increase to buy hotels throughout the region for the homeless (in large part to spread the homeless around), but at $65,000/year per room it simply is not affordable (unless we take some of the $148 billion from ST), and there are real issues with filling a hotel with untreated and unrehabilitated homeless, both for the neighborhood and the other tenants in the hotel. If the remedy for homelessness is a free hotel room, Seattle and King Co. will become quite the draw for homeless, even more than today.
The other problem with King Co.’s approach is the rehabilitation that advocates of the program promised by providing housing before treatment has not materialized. Many of the issues plaguing the homeless have no solution. This idea the homeless camping on the streets simply need a shower and hot meal, and first/last month’s rent plus damage deposit, and off they go to self-sufficiency is unrealistic.
Emergency housing is supposed to move into subsidized affordable housing, a “migration” as it is described, but the reality is many of the homeless — for many, many reasons, which is part of the reason they are homeless — have zero residual wage-earning capacity, even in entry level wage jobs, and always will. This makes housing them incredibly expensive, and that housing comes at the expense of the working poor and subsidized affordable housing for them.
The big difference — in part caused by the pandemic — between east and west King Co. is west King Co. has gone away from congregate housing, such as shelters, which is much more affordable, and removes the homeless from the streets. In the past, the long and often painful journey began with a cot or mat in a congregate shelter, and sobriety or mental health medication, and if progress was made to an enhanced shelter room that allowed storage of personal belongings and privacy, and ideally some return to work.
It also hasn’t helped that the shelter system and emergency housing has moved from religious based folks to the most progressive folks who want to make homelessness a political issue, and a generous salary of course.
My guess is this is what Harrell will return to, unless he wants to devote 10% of the city’s budget to housing, forever, like Charter Amendment 29.
Many homeless advocates argue camping in public should be a right during Covid because of the risk and reduced shelter space, but now those advocates are changing course and abandoning congregate housing, even when Covid ends. It doesn’t help that the homeless funding supports a homeless industrial complex that many see as wasteful and profligate, and politically motivated (with their tax money).
Now the goal is to provide every homeless person from wherever a free hotel room forever (ideally outside Seattle because its cash cow is tourism), plus food, clothing, health care, etc., without any requirement for sobriety, or more importantly work. But the cost is astronomical.
I am not sure you can create affordable housing — or enough of it — in very expensive cities. (Ross is right about the cost of housing in expensive cities being a cause, but mistaken that upzoning and new construction will create affordable housing). Tom Terrific raised this truth in a post, and predictably many got many all up in arms, although it is true. NYC does provide hotel rooms for its homeless, but at great cost and great taxes, and it has a very lucrative financial industry to tax, although many are moving to lower tax states and cities.
This region as a whole, including federal, state, county and city taxes, pours nearly a billion dollars/year into the homeless and affordable housing, and the reality is treating folks who can work but need assistance to become housed — like not letting them become unhoused in the first place, or first/last rent and damage deposit, or some public subsidy — is not undoable. But permanent emergency housing for those with zero residual wage-earning capacity forever in a very expensive city is unaffordable, unless the region wants to fundamentally change its spending priorities.
There is a lot of virtue signaling around this issue to go with the desire to move the homeless someplace else, and a lot of money is spent on homeless advocates rather than the homeless. My own opinion, and the approach ARCH and east King Co. take, is the only affordable approach, and the best approach to determine those who can recover and return to some kind of work, begins with the congregate shelter system, except Seattle doesn’t feel it has time for that, with tourism down, business down, tax revenue down, street retail down, and the voters’ desire in the election.
Harrell doesn’t have much time. Certainly not enough to buy a few hotels, or build billions of dollars in public housing that unfortunately costs 1/3 more than private development.
ARCH’s approach is shelter mat or cot, enhanced shelter room (that costs around $17,000/year per person rather than $65,000/year per person for a hotel room), followed by subsidized affordable housing, which means you begin with the cheapest land you can find nearest the best transit.
You can blame eastside cities for the disparity in the homeless, but eastside cities pay a fortune towards homelessness in taxes and donations to ARCH, but see very little improvement, and think Seattle is its own worst enemy on this issue. Property values are higher on the eastside and still the homeless camping in public or parking broken buses on the street are in Seattle, and there are a lot of needles outside those buses, along with excrement.
I don’t think the Seattle City Council will ever take the steps to really address the issue and remove the homeless from camping in parks and streets, and the city has created such an entrenched sense of a right to camp in public that Harrell won’t be able to do much, which is why eastside cities really don’t feel any angst at the disparity of the homeless, and often feel aggrieved Seattle has caused this regional problem. They may be wrong, but don’t expect eastside cities to change their opinion on this.
“This region, based on the amount the region spends, is probably the opposite end of the Boise equation, which in some ways is why Seattle has the third highest number of homeless in the U.S. but the 18th highest population.”
“Seattle like San Francisco (which is getting much tougher on homelessness because it is hurting the tourism cash cow) has a reputation for generous benefits and very lax criminal enforcement, and the availability of drugs.”
“It is easy to say the problem is more housing, and every homeless person should get a free place to live, all alone, usually at the expense of the working poor who don’t get such subsidies, and usually paid for by someone else. King Co. is trying this experiment with its 1/10th of one percent sales tax increase to buy hotels throughout the region for the homeless (in large part to spread the homeless around), but at $65,000/year per room it simply is not affordable (unless we take some of the $148 billion from ST), and there are real issues with filling a hotel with untreated and unrehabilitated homeless, both for the neighborhood and the other tenants in the hotel.”
Holy run on sentence, Batman!
“Now the goal is to provide every homeless person from wherever a free hotel room forever (ideally outside Seattle because its cash cow is tourism), plus food, clothing, health care, etc., without any requirement for sobriety, or more importantly work. But the cost is astronomical.
I am not sure you can create affordable housing — or enough of it — in very expensive cities. (Ross is right about the cost of housing in expensive cities being a cause, but mistaken that upzoning and new construction will create affordable housing). Tom Terrific raised this truth in a post, and predictably many got many all up in arms, although it is true. NYC does provide hotel rooms for its homeless, but at great cost and great taxes, and it has a very lucrative financial industry to tax, although many are moving to lower tax states and cities.”
There’s the truth, although you buried the lede. The most successful homelessness programs in the US give the homeless housing. For free. Seattle does not have generous benefits. In fact, its benefits to the homeless are below average for a state. Almost everything you said above is factually incorrect. Which is slightly surprising, since while your conclusions are often off base, your facts tend to be better, just skewed in their interpretation.
“The other problem with King Co.’s approach is the rehabilitation that advocates of the program promised by providing housing before treatment has not materialized.”
” In the past, the long and often painful journey began with a cot or mat in a congregate shelter, and sobriety or mental health medication, and if progress was made to an enhanced shelter room that allowed storage of personal belongings and privacy, and ideally some return to work.”
“Property values are higher on the eastside and still the homeless camping in public or parking broken buses on the street are in Seattle, and there are a lot of needles outside those buses, along with excrement.”
And here is the old, tired canard again. The majority of the homeless in Seattle are not drug users or mentally ill. As such, viewing them as in need of mental health/addiction services does more harm than good. There is more mental illness and drug use among the homeless than in the population of the region in general, yes. But it is still well below the levels that alarmists like yourselves try to say it is.
We know from other cities namely NYC and SLC, that providing free housing works. And that it isn’t a homelessness magnet. SLC literally provides free houses, not just apartments or hotel rooms. Yet they haven’t seen a boom in the homeless migrating to the city. The facts at hand show that your assumptions, observations, and conclusions are all wrong. As well as showing what you purport to be facts to be incorrect by their very nature. Seattle under Harrell is only going to see the problem getting worse, as his ideas and tactics as they have been professed so far by and large are just a repeat of what Durkan has been doing. Sweep baby sweep.
A Joy, in many ways you and your philosophy are the problem. More money, except other people’s money, without results or any accountability. You create a characterization of the homeless that is just not realistic and makes it impossible to resolve the problem. You want it to be about the rich, and their unwillingness to pay more, and your self-righteousness, but in this region that dog just does not hunt. That approach also really turns off taxpayers, who have become fatigued by the self-virtue over this issue.
The fallacy in your constant argument that the homeless camping in parks and on streets are simply down on their luck is they wouldn’t need PERMANENT free housing, would they. They would need a shower, some clothes, first and last rent, and a damage deposit, and that would be the end of the obligation. Anyone can deal with that problem, and those folks don’t often end up on the streets.
That migration could begin with a congregate shelter, and once they were screened be resolved pretty easily. Instead, you argue for permanent free rent, forever. Why would someone need permanent free housing forever if they are simply down on their luck, and just need a job and entree into housing? Adopting such a financially unrealistic approach is a way to deflect the poor results in this region despite the billions spent on the issue.
For you the issue is class warfare and virtue signaling, which doesn’t solve much, especially if you have no money to contribute to the problem. The issue — for whatever reason — is the homeless who have zero wage earning capacity, which apparently you don’t think exist, but who need a free place to live, forever.
What you conflate are the homeless and permanent emergency housing forever, and the working poor who need subsidized affordable housing. Your solution works for the latter, but not the former because it is not affordable, unless the former become the latter.
The problem is not the taxpayers, although you want it to be. The problem is the homeless with no residual wage-earning capacity, and the homeless industrial complex and their self-virtue without results who have resisted the steps necessary to solve the problem, and unfortunately destroyed any kind of sympathy for the homeless among the rest of the citizens.
Look, I don’t think Harrell will solve the problem because I don’t think it is solvable anymore in Seattle, and quite frankly I am out of sympathy for the homeless and the self-interested homeless complex. I think that is a common sentiment in the region outside Seattle, which is why those areas are aggrieved at King Co. moving Seattle’s homeless to their neighborhoods, and so don’t expect a lot of handwringing over Seattle’s homeless.
Your solutions almost always depend on someone else doing the work, and paying for it. That is just cheerleading and doesn’t score a lot of points. If you need others to pay for the solutions you need to give them a reason to pay more, and right now I don’t see a reason because I don’t think the problem is the amount spent, especially if their tax dollars are just for others to self-virtue. It gets kind of old.
A Joy is right.
Look, I get it. If you just look at what is going on in it is easy to make the wrong assumption. Look at all the winos, the junkies, the bums. Look at how the big cities have more in the way of liberal services. This is what is attracting them all. Giving them a place to live is completely the wrong message — it will only encourage them.
Except, of course, every shred of evidence suggests you have it all wrong. Again, all of the evidence suggests that the biggest cause of homelessness — by far — is increased housing costs. Nothing else comes close. Your suggestion that San Fransisco (a place well known for high housing costs) has a lot of homeless because it is liberal is laughable. Denmark didn’t largely eliminate homelessness by “being tough”. Quite the opposite.
Yes, of course there are outliers. Cities that somehow have relatively few homeless despite relatively high housing costs. Houston is one of those cities. What did they do? The same thing as Finland. They focused on housing first.
You are simply wrong when it comes to the sources of homelessness, and wrong when it comes to the solution. You are also wrong in suggesting that zoning doesn’t effect housing costs. Again, there is evidence to the contrary: https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/hier1948.pdf. You will notice that this is the only reference I make in this comment. I’m getting a little bit tired of always being the one to actually have evidence to support my case. It is taxing. If this was a real debate (one with judges) you would have destroyed you by now. With only minimal effort I can find ample evidence to support all of my arguments (and have in the past). You can’t even come up with one single shred of evidence to support your case. By no means can I compete with a top notch debater, but in this instance, you have nothing. You are like a guy playing a pick up game, and you can’t dribble, or shoot, or box out. I keep stealing the ball and getting layups, and it is getting a bit boring. The only fun part is that you continue to think that are actually good at this, when it turns out, you are incompetent.
My suggestion to you is to read more and write less. You obviously don’t know anything about the subject, yet you go on and on as if you do. I understand this is common in this age, but I think a lot of us would appreciate it if you did a little bit of research before spouting out about a subject. You bring an interesting perspective to the blog (kind of a modern day Richard Nixon) but unlike old tricky-Dick, you seem incapable of looking at the evidence. Please do.
Ross, you repeat the same two mistakes over and over in your zeal to upzone the residential neighborhoods:
1. you confuse affordable housing for those earning below AMI and paying more than 30% of their income in rent with emergency housing for the homeless. Like A Joy, you believe if you just take the chronically homeless and give them a free apartment they will start contributing to their rent; and
2. you actually think upzoning and new construction in expensive residential neighborhoods will create AFFORDABLE housing, like builders and developers like building affordable housing, which makes me wonder why Seattle and King Co. are spending a fortune on affordable housing if you are correct and builders will build it for free.
There is a big distinction between affordable housing for the working poor and emergency housing for those living on the streets who probably have zero residual wage-earning capacity. Here is a very progressive article that explains this for you. https://crosscut.com/opinion/2021/07/homeless-solutions-seattle-can-look-new-york-and-vancouver
Yes, rent vouchers are probably the best method since they use existing housing, are immediate, and use existing housing which is usually the most affordable, not your vision of brand-new Brownstones in an expensive residential neighborhood for every poor or homeless person. Plus vouchers use the market, and remove so much of the waste in the homeless industrial complex, or the very expensive cost of publicly built housing.
Or you can go whole hog and adopt basic income grants ( in addition to SSI), but I don’t see that passing under Harrell, and certainly not in King Co. And even in NY an applicant must contribute 30% towards their rent to receive vouchers, although A Joy’s vision is free housing.
Even this article, in a very progressive blog, states:
“Of course, we need places for everyone. But Seattle has more than enough space. While we know that many landlords discriminate against tenants who rely on government subsidies, this is outlawed in Seattle, just as it is in New York City. And compared with the chronically homeless, and the stereotypes based on them, voucher holders are much less likely to have behavioral issues.”
So once again, segregate out those who need some kind of public subsidy for affordable housing but can pay up to 30% of their income towards the housing like just about everyone else, use vouchers for existing housing that already exists rather than fantastical and ideological desires to upzone the residential neighborhoods that won’t occur under Harrell, and won’t create one unit of affordable housing, and then figure out what to do with the intractable problem of chronically homeless persons who come with a lot of issues and likely zero residual wage earning capacity that is very expensive.
This article although very progressive, actually makes economic sense if the money is there, and the homeless complex signs on. I would rather give the working poor housing vouchers than give the money to the homeless complex.
Now do I think these ideas will come to fruition. No. As the article states:
“Absent a reliable funding stream, major obstacles remain. The most formidable are political. The region’s centrist crowd tends to be too incrementalist to handle the scale of problems that come from being the fastest-growing city in the country. Going big on vouchers seems unlikely for people steeped in the Seattle process. Meanwhile, our progressives aren’t much more promising. The Seattle City Council has held a veto-proof majority and could have raised tons of money for housing with taxes that redistribute from the rich to the poor. But they haven’t and our streets are still swamped with suffering citizens. Something as practical as a voucher seems unlikely to rise to the top for this group.”
I think a voucher system that required, like NY, work and 30% of income toward rent would be attractive to the centrists, but not so much the progressives who want to use this issue for their pet political issues. But if you want to start with upzoning the residential neighborhoods under Harrell in order to create affordable housing in 20 years good luck.
Ross:
Some time back I decided it wasn’t worth having a meaningful conversation with Daniel. They basically just cuts and pasted the same comments over and over again, without apparently paying too much attention to what anyone else says. They also apparently have an endless supply of spare time.
There’s simply not enough time in the world to try to convince someone whose mind is already made up.
We have to counter the falsehoods for those that happen across these comments, but anything beyond that is a waste of time better suited to discussing transit issues, which is the reason most of us are here.
“The fallacy in your constant argument that the homeless camping in parks and on streets are simply down on their luck is they wouldn’t need PERMANENT free housing, would they. They would need a shower, some clothes, first and last rent, and a damage deposit, and that would be the end of the obligation. Anyone can deal with that problem, and those folks don’t often end up on the streets.”
Except that this isn’t a fallacy. This is the reality for over 50% of the people living on the streets today. This is exactly what SLC and NYC have discovered. Most homeless people don’t stay in their free housing. They get some stability and balance in their lives, decide they want to live someplace better, and do so. What you claim to be fantasy is statistical reality.
“That migration could begin with a congregate shelter, and once they were screened be resolved pretty easily. Instead, you argue for permanent free rent, forever. Why would someone need permanent free housing forever if they are simply down on their luck, and just need a job and entree into housing?”
Congregate shelter is awful, and a patent failure. In most versions, you cannot choose the people you sleep near, and must leave the shelter with all of your possessions daily for the rooms to be cleaned. They leave the homeless in a permanently unstable state, and that screening doesn’t make anything any better. Because while they are overblown, drug use and mental health issues do exist among the homeless, yet individuals with those issues are housed right next to those without them. So now you are being placed in a shelter system where you never sleep next to the same person twice, have no idea what their history is, and no hope of applying to a job or social services system over the course of a day. The congregate shelter system is honestly one of the biggest parts of the problem, and where the money sink you wish to complain about really exists. Because it is designed to keep people in the congregate shelter system, never giving them the time or support they need to get off the streets.
“For you the issue is class warfare and virtue signaling, which doesn’t solve much, especially if you have no money to contribute to the problem. The issue — for whatever reason — is the homeless who have zero wage earning capacity, which apparently you don’t think exist, but who need a free place to live, forever.”
This isn’t the first time you’ve accused me of virtue signaling and class warfare when I simply state the facts of the problem at hand. As well as cast aspersions on me and my point of view for personal circumstances in my life. Know that I consider the latter to be a form of harassment, against this site’s TOS, and will report it when/if I see you using it in the future.
I acknowledge that some of Seattle’s homeless will never become “productive members of society”, to paraphrase you. That is 100% true. But that group comprises less than 20% of the adults homeless on the streets today. To use a bit of napkin math, you’re talking about 1,400 of the roughly 11,000 people on the streets of Seattle. A problem, to be sure. And yes, an expensive one. But still a vast minority of the people you are trying to say are mostly hopeless loafers.
“What you conflate are the homeless and permanent emergency housing forever, and the working poor who need subsidized affordable housing. Your solution works for the latter, but not the former because it is not affordable, unless the former become the latter.”
The former rarely become the latter, most often getting employment that puts them above the “working poor” level you cite. I am arguing for giving both the latter and those who can rise above the latter’s status an opportunity to do so, an opportunity you actively wish to deny them.
“The problem is not the taxpayers, although you want it to be. The problem is the homeless with no residual wage-earning capacity, and the homeless industrial complex and their self-virtue without results who have resisted the steps necessary to solve the problem, and unfortunately destroyed any kind of sympathy for the homeless among the rest of the citizens.”
You are so close to having a right idea here. The homeless industrial complex is indeed part of the problem, as are their acts that have destroyed any kind of sympathy for the homeless among the rest of the citizens. But the homeless industrial complex is busy, even in Seattle, primarily supporting congregate shelters (the hotels you despise are but a drop in the funding bucket). This, combined with Seattle’s spending of tens of millions of dollars a year on homeless sweeps, is what is starving the system of funds to make real changes in the issue.
“Look, I don’t think Harrell will solve the problem because I don’t think it is solvable anymore in Seattle, and quite frankly I am out of sympathy for the homeless and the self-interested homeless complex. I think that is a common sentiment in the region outside Seattle, which is why those areas are aggrieved at King Co. moving Seattle’s homeless to their neighborhoods, and so don’t expect a lot of handwringing over Seattle’s homeless.”
Sadly, I agree with some of this. The dogged stubbornness of Seattle’s government to not take the steps proven to solve the problem, handing out excessive amounts of money to congregate shelters, and the resulting taxpayer burnout does mean that Seattle will likely never solve this problem. That said, Seattle is not moving their homeless to Kind County. In the end, it is hard to separate the homeless populations of the city and county in such a simple way. For decades the county has decided that the best way to deal with their homeless was to ship them to Seattle, where homelessness dollars and services were focused for ease of distribution. We are moving to a more disbursed distribution model. That said, over 50% of Seattle’s homeless still came from Seattle, so the homeless magnet theory is false, and to the degree it is true, it was created at the county government level, and not by some Freeattle hype.
“Your solutions almost always depend on someone else doing the work, and paying for it.”
That is because I am disabled, yet you continue to paint this as some personal failing on my part. Again, casting aspersions in a way that is both unbecoming of you and against the TOS.
“That is just cheerleading and doesn’t score a lot of points. If you need others to pay for the solutions you need to give them a reason to pay more, and right now I don’t see a reason because I don’t think the problem is the amount spent, especially if their tax dollars are just for others to self-virtue. It gets kind of old.”
I’m not here to score points. I don’t believe in popularity contests directing my actions or theories. I’m also not here to get others to pay more. I’m honestly arguing for spending smarter, not harder. For cutting the excesses of SHARE/WHEEL, the UGM, and Salvation Army, that same homeless industrial complex that has no financial incentive to get the homless off the streets, off at the knees. And for using that money, the money already in the system, to support systems that are more proven and tested with regards to actually getting people off the street.
“Like A Joy, you believe if you just take the chronically homeless and give them a free apartment they will start contributing to their rent;”
Yes! This is what all the data supports! This is the reality of the situation. Is it a 100% correlation? No. Is it enough of a correlation that it both costs less and is more effective at solving the problem? Absolutely. It isn’t even up for debate.
“There is a big distinction between affordable housing for the working poor and emergency housing for those living on the streets who probably have zero residual wage-earning capacity.”
Absolutely. But that letter group is so exceedingly small that it is sophistry to even bring them up, much less claim that they are a significant part of the problem. Your continuing use of them as a scapegoat is internally and in my opinion intentionally disingenuous.
“Even this article, in a very progressive blog, states:
“Of course, we need places for everyone. But Seattle has more than enough space. While we know that many landlords discriminate against tenants who rely on government subsidies, this is outlawed in Seattle, just as it is in New York City. And compared with the chronically homeless, and the stereotypes based on them, voucher holders are much less likely to have behavioral issues.””
Crosscut is not a progressive blog. In fact, they are a right wing blog. They’d score over a 3 on right wing issues under The Political Compass Test. It is only the heavily skewed Overton Window in the US that makes many “progressive” outlets look left of center, or even center for that matter.
I agree with you that what Seattle is doing is not working and will not work. Where we diverge starts with what Seattle is and isn’t doing today. Which is weird, because it is a simple matter of fact. As is what other cities in the US and other countries have done to mostly fix the issue, and that those fixes are cheaper than the constant Band-Aid on arterial bleeding approach Seattle seems to be stuck advocating, and that Harrell will simply double down on. This has been the same thing tried in the area for literally 30 years now. What is it colloquially called again when you repeat the same action but believe it will result in a different solution? Sadly, it is also called The Seattle Process.
@RossB
Thanks for the link to the Harvard study. It’s interesting even if it is 20 years old. It’s conclusion is the primary thing to look at with creating affordable housing is construction cost. They do dip into zoning and conclude that it’s an issue only in the very limited areas where there are extremely high land values. I encourage others to plow through it and draw their own conclusions.
There are some head scratchers in the study:
OK, I get the newer, higher quality bit but “suburban land is more expensive”? Huh, since when? I thought that was why we had sprawl in the first place. More expensive than what?
The response was getting so long I’ve decided to turn it into a multi part Page Two article. As a teaser I’ll end with this quote from your article:
“They do dip into zoning and conclude that it’s an issue only in the very limited areas where there are extremely high land values.”
That’s what we have in Seattle and the Eastside. Broken-down fixer houses in West Seattle are going for $600K+. Construction was decades ago so there’s no remaining construction costs. It’s not as bad as San Francisco or Silicon Valley but it could get there if we don’t increase housing construction.
When did prices and rents start rising? Rents started rising to 5-10% per year from 2003 to 2008. Then there was a lull for three years during the crash when people moved away. Then in 2012 they went into unprecedented overdrive. People who depended on $600K mid-century apartments found the price suddenly doubled. This coincided with the vacancy rate going down-up-down. When the vacancy rate goes below 5%, prices rise steeply. It got down 2-3% for several years.
San Francisco had it even worse, with vaacancy rates down to 1%. That’s because San Francisco allows even less housing expansion than Seattle, and nimbys have more power to veto everything. So as a result high-end Seattle rents are around $2000 and high-end San Francisco rents are around $4000.
I went to the Bay Area in 1998 to consider getting a tech job down there. Seattle rents for an average 1 BR were maybe $500. My friend in ST was paying $800 just for a sofa in somebody else’s apartment, or $24000 total for the unit. I ended up coming back to Seattle because with the cost of living I’d have to run three times faster to have the same quality of life, and I decided I didn’t want a Bay Area job even if they offered it.
Owned houses are on a somewhat different trajectory but the same principle applies. The equivalent of vacancy rate is inventory or time-on-market; i.e., how long it takes for a house to sell. Before 2008 it was six months. Between 2008 and 2012 construction halted nd people didn’t move. Then people started buying again but there were very few sellers. The inventory was four weeks instead of six months, and sometimes down to one week. Inventory never got back to its pre-2008 norm. That coincided with prices escalating at an unprecedented rate..
What else happened starting in 2012? Amazon started leasing computer time on its spare capacity. Cloud computing became the thing. Amazon created the cloud computing market, and Microsoft also had a large infrastructure role Out-of-town companies like Google and Facebook began setting up Seattle offices and also hiring a lot of people. (Google soon focused on Kirkland, of course.)
During 2012-2018, Seattle was creating 9 housing units for every 12 new jobs. The vacancy rate plunged, and few houses were for sale. So there’s the reason for the rapid price increases. It’s mostly because of land, not construction. More people are willing to pay high prices for inner-city locations, so they displace lower-income people. Even decades-old construction had huge price increases. Average rents went up 40% in five years. Meanwhile inflation was 2% a year or less for 2000-2020.
The demand spreads out from highly-desirable areas like central Seattle, the Eastside, and near north Seattle to the rest of the region. South Seattle has been going up at unprecedented rates, South King County has been going up, Snohomish and Pierce Counties have been going up. Because when there’s no place left in the desirable areas or people can’t afford it but the population is still expanding, people fall back to the undesirable areas push up costs there.
@RossB
I see a fundamental difference in philosophy here. What I take from this is you support selective law enforcement. Something Pete Holmes was a big fan of. I believe that’s a slippery slope especially when city council members start telling police to do things that are in violation of a federal consent decree. Seattle lost (in my opinion) a really great Chief of Police over that. If a park closes at 11:30 it means everybody out. It’s a slippery slope because it cuts both ways. A redneck city then has precedent to selectively enforce the laws that fit their value system.
All I hear from the Seattle Progressive side is the Sargent Schultz argument. Fortunately (IMHO) Seattle voters have in a convincing majority realized that #1 Seattle needs to be safer and that means supporting the police and #2 the current approach to the homeless crises not only isn’t working but making things worse.
Free-attle isn’t really hard to find if you do a google search and don’t have the Stgt Schultz blinders on. Of course you know that but think endless words and counter posts make this an echo chamber and therefore true. Again, if anyone actually wants to make a decision , look at the links provided.
An interesting turn of phrase and choice of websites to support your assertions there, Bernie. After all, Sgt. Schultz served a militant right wing ideology and the Independent Sentinel “provides news, opinion and commentary, analysis, factual and original content, mostly political, usually right-of-center, for a Conservative, Libertarian, Republican audience.” And while yes, references to Freeattle are relatively easy to find, there is no sign of a Freeattle meme.
The Free-attle meme seems to have gotten it’s start with a parody song written by a KIRO radio listener. I thought it was a Dave Ross original and seem to remember him singing it on air. It really took off again after the KOMO series Seattle is Dying. Put this in a google search:
“free-attle” -royale -battle
It should bring up pages of links from homeless advocates to conservative talk show hosts from Louisville to NYC. One interesting read is Seattle and it’s Discontents. Skip down to “Seattle is Not Dying, It is Splitting” for a history of Shackville and Hooverville in Seattle.
@Bernie — Thanks, that’s what I thought. The Free-attle meme is just BS, spread by right wingers who are too lazy to do any research about the causes or solutions to homelessness.
Kind of like the right wingers in the 1970s writing about how Scandinavia would eventually become a hellhole with all the free stuff they are giving away. History showed, of course, that it was the opposite. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/study-shows-scandinavia-is-still-the-happiest-place-in-the-world/, https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-index-by-country, etc., etc.
KOMO, the station owned by Sinclair, a right-wing media corporation that forces local stations to air right-wing editorials even when KOMO pushed back and said these aren’t appropriate for its market and would alienate viewers. This may be related to why KOMO was willing to produce this “Seattle is Dying” sop. (Which I haven’t seen.)
Downtown Seattle went through a big decaying period in the 1970s like most large American cities did. The current wave is the worst since then. Whether it’s as bad as the 70s and as hard to fix is a debatable question. But Seattle is not “dying”. 99% of Seattlites are doing fine and can go about their business without seeing more than a couple tents here and there. Many Seattlites haven’t gone downtown regularly for decades. The only reason to go there is if you work downtown, you live in the adjacent neighborhoods and it’s your closest shopping center, you’re going to a unique destination like the Central Library or SAM, or you’re transfering buses that have only downtown transfers.
Link functions like an extended DSTT so you can transfer outside downtown more easily. More people will increasingly do that, and that’s the city’s and Metro’s intention so it can decrease the number of buses downtown.
I love this quote in the article, not:
“It is about the damage [the homeless] inflict, on themselves to be sure, but also on the fabric of this place where we live”
The homeless are there because American society inflicts so much damage on homeless people and doesn’t give them better housing alternatives. And on lower-income people in general, who are often one paycheck or rent raise or medical bill away from homelessness. If we treated housing as a human right and made it available on a sliding scale to everybody who needed it, there would be no homeless and our sidewalks and parks would be clear. Or at least, for the 2% who refuse housing, it would be a much smaller problem and we could address it in a targeted way. King County has been buying and leasing hotels for the homeless and building tiny houses, but it’s only enough to sweep one encampment here and there, not enough to house everyone who needs it now. Seattle/King County doesn’t even have a plan to house everybody in ten or twenty years, even though it declared an emergency several years ago. And people complain about raising a sales/B&O/wealth tax and Amazon expands in Bellevue to escape it, even though that’s the money that’s needed to build the housing and fix the problem.
BTW, I don’t believe Amazon’s expansion in Bellevue is really about the “Amazon tax” impacting the bottom line. It’s really a symbolic move by a CEO/company that has long been anti-tax, the way the sham search for an HQ2 was.
@RossB,
I’m glad we can at least agree that Free-attle is a meme. A meme in general is something I find to usually be an over simplification if not a total misrepresentation. I’ve never considered Dave Ross who, like it or not originated the meme, as a right winger. Likewise, I never considered Dave Reichert a right winger. The great thing about the congressional race between those two was respect for the the other candidates difference of opinion.
@Bernie:
I can’t believe I have to say this, but a parody song does not a meme make. If it did, Bob Rivers and Dr. Demento would have been creating memes for decades. One of the hallmarks of a meme is the conveying of a cultural idea. As the Freeattle concept is completely divorced from any form of statistical reality, it really doesn’t convey any cultural idea. It is a pearl clutched by a lunatic fringe, not an actual example of a belief seriously held by any rational human beings.
It’s not unknown for a slogan to be created for one purpose or cultural/political context, and then reused or recreated years later for another.
“Bellevue will create some affordable housing by increasing housing.”
Bellevue never said it would be affordable (in the sense of less than 100% AMI). This housing is for the workers in the future tech expansions. Most of them probably make more than $90K so they can afford market rate. The people making less than $90K is a different issue, and doesn’t negate the need for this market-rate housing. One, it’s needed for the current tech workforce. Two, it’s needed for the major tech job expansion in the future.
“the philosophy at the time was that South Lake Union would end up growing with a ratio of 60% residential and 40% commercial space. But that didn’t happen.”
So Seattle didn’t adequately monitor the ratio of housing to jobs or the amount of housing when those buildings were built. That’s just one of several things Seattle got wrong with SLU. It could have zoned for growth in the 1950s or 1980s or 1990s rather than waiting until the construction boom was already well underway. SLU was in uncertain limbo for decades because the city never specified exactly what it wanted.
I don’t know how Seattle could have improved the housing:jobs ratio if the zoning allowed both: how could it ban one building’s offices and make the developer build housing instead? But that’s one issue the city should have addressed, rather than just hoping all the individual buildings would add up to 60% housing.
I don’t know if 60% housing is even ideal for SLU; we’re all used to lots of jobs concentrated there, and that seems fine. The housing for those jobs doesn’t all have to be right in SLU, it just needs to be somewhere in Seattle with good transit access to SLU.
What happened is the city got heady about all the jobs and tax revenue that were coming in the 2012-2018 boom, and assumed everything would work out.
“All of that building and Seattle’s median housing price climbed 157% in the nine years between 2012 and now.”
What do you expect? If housing growth doesn’t keep up with job growth and population growth, it’s like musical chairs but unequal. The wealthiest workers buy/rent what they want, displacing less-wealthy workers. And since many people are competing for a few units, the owners can jack up the rents/prices, or people even outbid each other over the asking price. Again, overall prices go up.
Bellevue is poised to make the same mistake Seattle did over the past decade: not enough housing increase for the jobs increase. The result will be the same: faster price/rent increases than there would be otherwise. It happened in San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and it’s been happening in Bellevue, but it may go into overdrive if Bellevue doesn’t build enough housing.
“And who is the biggest proponent of “increased” or affordable housing? Microsoft, where all the execs live in Medina, and why every state housing target bill applies to cities with populations greater than Medina’s so Medina is exempt. Despite its huge wealth Medina contributes almost nothing to ARCH, the eastside affordable housing inter-local agency. Will Medina be part of her vision:”
Do you know that 99.9% of Microsoft’s employees and contractors are not executives? They need something smaller than a Medina mansion. And ideally it would be in the city they work in, rather than in Issaquah or Sammamish or Woodinville or Renton.
I wish Medina were upzoned but there are two things against it. It’s an incorporated city so Bellevue has no say in its zoning, only the county does. It was probably incorporated precisely to avoid multifamily growth. And Medina is so far away from any major activity center that it’s low priority for growth. The highest-priority areas are those adjacent to major activity centers, like Surrey Downs.
Ideally there would be no tiny incorporated cities/towns like Medina, Beaux Arts, etc. Instead Seattle and Bellevue would annex their surrounding areas as they urbanized, and would focus on sufficient and compact-dominant housing appropriate to the entire metro area’s size, and not play favorites with existing single-family homeowners (who are wealthier than the average resident or would-be resident, so it’s like reverse robin hood).
Wow, really long winded response with yet again not a single reference. I’ve wasted too much time refuting your rose colored glasses perceptions and won’t do it again. You live in a different time and and your own alternate reality. But claiming something true, no matter how much you do it doesn’t hold a candle to the facts you choose to ignore…. tilting at windmills
Have you ever produced a citation to support a single claim you make?
Bernie, the only uncited claim that Mike makes here (that I can see maybe wanting citation) is that when new housing isn’t allowed or constructed near new workplaces, the existing housing gets more expensive as folks compete for homes near jobs and cultural centers. The obvious result is that lower-income folks are eventually pushed out to wherever housing is still affordable to them, which is usually further from workplaces and cultural centers. It’s a simple effect called supply and demand.
If developers were allowed to build housing units at the same densities as they build commercial footage (like they could before restrictive zoning), family-scale housing would still be affordable to blue-collar incomes in major cities. It wouldn’t be SFH, but the choice would be there.
when new housing isn’t allowed or constructed near new workplaces, the “existing housing gets more expensive as folks compete for homes near jobs and cultural centers.”
The existing housing across the entire city or metropolitan area.
Nine paragraphs by a quick count on the last post. Zero references and this is a continuous pattern. Redmond Town Center is not over by Marymoor as Mike claimed in a previous post. It goes on and on. I appreciate that Mike has a long time experience with the eastside. He brings up things I didn’t know from the way back machine even though we grew up around the same time. I hope we can have a beer together at Bellevue Brewing when East Link opens, I’ll buy! But google isn’t that hard and if you don’t reference anything then it’s just all made up.
“Redmond Town Center is not over by Marymoor as Mike claimed in a previous post.”
I’ve never been in Redmond much so I have less familiarity with where things are. My time in the Eastside was mostly between NE 26th Street and SE 6th Street, and mid Somerset Hill.
Early rumblings of the MOTU Magi.
But of course, Bellevue is not like that now. Well-dressed, clean African-Americans who work for tech companies — in the call centers of course; the development jobs are reserved for Asians and geeky Euro-American guys — are perfectly welcome in several areaas of Bellevue!
[I really hope the formatting works for this post]
Re: ST CEO search
To me, this raisies the opportunity for a discussion of what type of person a reigonal transit executive should be. I can see viable cases being made for any of the following to be THE key selling point of any potential hire:
-They should be the World’s Biggest Transit Fan
-They should have operations experience
-They should have planning experience
-They should have background with customer service
-They should be a funding grant application wizard
-They should be a region’s #1 all-round booster
-They should know the region inside-and-out
-They shouldn’t know a lot about the region (outsider’s perspective)
-They should have public sector/private sector experience
-They should be able to build relationships between governments
-They should be able to publicly go to bat for their agency when needed (and also know when to just shut up)
These traits, and many more not listed, are all ones that are probably worth considering when hiring someone who will be the face of any regional-scale transit agency.
Here are my scores on importance on a scale of 1 to 3 with 3 the most important
– They should be the World’s Biggest Transit Fan (1 – fans can be blinded by bias)
-They should have operations experience (3 – ST will ba running lots more trains soon with Line 2 starting and Line 1 extending)
-They should have planning experience (2 – this a a broad term and needs specificity)
-They should have background with customer service (3 – tact is important although a deputy soils be handling this)
-They should be a funding grant application wizard (1 – this is a job for a deputy)
-They should be a region’s #1 all-round booster (1 – nice but not essential)
-They should know the region inside-and-out (1 – with service and expansion direction already in motion, this is not important these days)
-They shouldn’t know a lot about the region (outsider’s perspective) (1 – with service and expansion direction already in motion, this is not important these days)
-They should have public sector/private sector experience (1 – most experience involves both so it’s not a differentiator)
-They should be able to build relationships between governments (2 – this is a personality thing)
-They should be able to publicly go to bat for their agency when needed (and also know when to just shut up) (2 – this is a personality thing)
I would add that the next one needs to understand the systems for each mode that ST operates in vehicles as well as the physical needs of stations and OMFs. Running a light rail system with owned stations is much different than having only stops for express buses or using another agency’s commuter rail platform. This is a 3 for me.
I generally agree with Al’s grading system. Unfortunately the way the system is set up, hiring an “operations manger” is doomed to failure. The ST/Board system needs to change. ST “tries” to off load operations as much as it can. Maybe ST needs to be split. It would be easy to just say push operations to Metro except Link is moving beyond King County. Maybe there should be an agency/department like WSF that takes over operations? Building is hard especially when it’s combined with “selling” transit measures. Bottom line, ST (i.e. Link) needs a new system. Dividing the bus service works to an extent but doesn’t with multi county rail.
My general criterion is somebody who has engineering and/or operations experience on a more successful system. Rogoff was chosen because he was last at the FTA and it was thought his knowledge would get us the most federal grants. This was when the ST2 and ST3 grants were going through and ST3 wasn’t approved yet, so it may have had some benefit then. But now Link has tons of construction ahead and the last two phases had had some problems, so we really need somebody who has a lot of engineering and operations experience in a better, more urban network. If ST is really hiring only from within, I’m going to write the board and tell them this, because internal people don’t have that level of experience.
I can’t parse your point, Dan. The “lesson” of SLU is that Seattle didn’t allow enough dense housing near its dense offices, and now the rest of the renters and new homeowners are literally paying for it. Bellevue’s going to repeat Seattle’s mistakes with housing. Anyone who’s managed to buy before today will see great profits tomorrow, everyone else tomorrow be damned. I guess entry-level office workers and janitors will have to commute from Bothell or Issaquah. If you think I-405 can’t get worse, you haven’t driven in LA.
I wonder, if Issaquah builds out all their planned low-density homes and there’s a significant commuter population from Issaquah to Bellevue or Kirkland, what’s an efficient way for them to commute from their new foothill townhomes to the Spring District? Man, if only there were some high-capacity transit project in the works…
IF Issaquah-Bellevue is built it will make enormous sense to run “overlay” trains during the rush-hours between Issaquah and Redmond Tech Center. It will happen.
Nathan D., although not discussed in the article, the reason housing percentages were relaxed in SLU was because in 2009 the housing market fell apart. There is still quite a bit of land in SLU and Belltown to build very tall residential towers, but I don’t think the market is there (and many are moving to the eastside), and it certainly would not be affordable.
“Anyone who’s managed to buy before today will see great profits tomorrow, everyone else tomorrow be damned. I guess entry-level office workers and janitors will have to commute from Bothell or Issaquah. If you think I-405 can’t get worse, you haven’t driven in LA.
You have accidently stumbled onto something here. Currently, between 1/5 and 1/7 houses are being purchased by large investment REIT’s, for the favorable taxes, low interest rates, and belief the market can’t go down. Unfortunately, when the market does go down it tends to really go down. Even online brokers like Zillow tried to get into the investment game. But most eastsiders own their home, so not a lot of tears over the increase in property values and lower interest rates, thank you Seattle.
I hate to break it to you, but Bothell and Issaquah are not where eastside janitors live, let alone own. Issaquah residents in SFH’s who work in Bellevue will probably WFH, or take the 554 to work, or drive. Still better than commuting to Seattle like in the past, especially if it is only a few days/week.
The thing to remember is over 70% of eastsiders live in SFH zones because they WANT to live in SFH zones. You could build a 100,000 condos in downtown Bellevue and that percentage won’t change.
The agreements between Bellevue’s surrounding SFH zones that allowed the Bellevue council to speak for them also preserved their zoning, which is why Bellevue’s downtown zoning has such dramatic demarcations between zones. It would be political suicide for the Bellevue Council to try and amend zoning in west Bellevue, although there are multi-family zones in east Bellevue and the Crossroads area. I am sure they read Trumm’s analysis in The Urbanist of SFH voting in the elections in Seattle.
If I could offer the author of the article any advice it would be never give Bellevue advice what to do based on anything Seattle has done, because Bellevue will do the opposite, except The Spring District and Wilburton will look just like SLU except much taller and with way more parking and way more expensive, and the eastside SFH zones will end up with about as much “middle missing housing” as Seattle, which is essentially none.
How do you take a red-hot market like Bellevue with a $127,000 AMI for all of Bellevue, (downtown and West Bellevue are much, much higher) and create non-publicly subsidized housing? ARCH will tell you just like Seattle you don’t, and upzoning residential lots that sell for $3 million won’t create affordable housing either. So take the $4.5 billion line from Issaquah to Bellevue no one will ride — and that just duplicates the 554 — and reallocate that to subsidized housing, following ARCH’s number one rule: affordable housing begins with the most affordable land, which is usually south of I-90 and maybe Crossroads, and maybe around the Judkins Park station, which I assume is the purpose of the station.
There is still quite a bit of land in SLU and Belltown to build very tall residential towers, but I don’t think the market is there
Wait, what??? Come on man, the area is booming. The places that allow residential density are becoming dense at a crazy-fast rate*. The problem is, much of the land is now office buildings. The same thing would happen in the UW, if they allowed it.
* https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/central-seattle-absorbed-more-than-half-the-citys-housing-growth-in-the-last-decade/
https://www.seattleinprogress.com/ — This link is more interactive. The little tear drops represent buildings. Some of those are offices, some are apartments. These three, for example, are all within spitting distance of each other:
https://www.seattleinprogress.com/project/3018968/page/1
https://www.seattleinprogress.com/project/3028930/page/1
https://www.seattleinprogress.com/project/3031600/page/1
There are plenty more where that came from (Belltown). SLU is the same way (https://www.seattleinprogress.com/project/3033344/page/1). Or how about this one, which involves preserving the existing structure: https://www.seattleinprogress.com/project/3016723/page/1. That isn’t cheap. Any time you bother with the regulations and complexity of building around an existing historic structure it means demand for housing (in that area) is sky high.
Sorry, but you are being ridiculous. Twenty years ago, thirty years ago, forty, fifty, sixty years ago — this demand simply didn’t exist. Even the post-war Boeing boom pales in comparison. You have to go back to the Gold Rush era to find anything similar. From 1897 to 1910 we added about 150,000 people. In the last ten years, we added around 130,000. Nothing in between comes close — and we clearly aren’t done yet. To put things in perspective, that is damn near one Bellevue in a decade. One entire city (the city you so laud for being so big) in just ten years. It shows no sign of stopping either. The red symbols are those built in the last year. The orange approved and the white applied. The map is dominated by those in the pipeline, even though those that were built represent one of the biggest growth spurts in our city’s history, and the biggest in North America.
The market is definitely there.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/time-lapse-video-shot-over-three-years-atop-the-space-needle-reveals-seattles-astounding-growth/
I’m curious what you all think of the extension of the federal mask mandate on transit. It seems to me to be counterproductive, as most states and locales have no mask mandate and thus the only place you’re expected to wear a mask is on a bus, train or plane, sending a message that transit is more dangerous for covid spread vs other places, when the evidence is to the contrary.
I think N95 masks should be permanently required on all transit. Great way to reduce the spread of all germs! I don’t think I will ever ride another bus or train, mask free. Airplanes , I can see going nameless, due to executive business travel.
Do you think the same about all public spaces (restaurants, bars, grocery stores)? I can see why you would wear a mask for every indoor public place (for the rest of your life) but I see no reason to single out a bus. Unlike airports, they are local, and far less likely to be a major disease spreader (as the data shows).
At this point, I don’t think it makes much difference in terms of demand. A lot of people (myself included) avoided transit, as we did various forms of “normal” social interaction. I bought just about everything online, including my shoes. But now I put on the mask, go into Big 5, and buy whatever I consider a good value ($40 for a pair of New Balance seems a bit steep, but they do fit really well, and look nice, and I’ve heard about the supply chain problem, so what the hell).
The people who are concerned about Covid are already vaccinated, and while they don’t want to get it, aren’t freaking out. Those that are in denial don’t care. It seems rather arbitrary, but any thinking person realizes that is the way much of this works. Hygiene theater has already entered the American vocabulary just like security theater. Folks are sanitizing the hell out of their hands, even though we’ve known for more than a year that the disease is not spread that way. Just the other day I used a public bathroom with signs about washing your hands for two minutes. I think a lot of people are like me, and just shrug, with a “yeah, whatever”. It is a good idea to where a mask on a bus, just like every place inside. But we don’t assume that it is riskier than any other place. Most of us don’t even think about, or if we do, know the opposite, but know the limits of government power, and politics.
“as most states and locales have no mask mandate and thus the only place you’re expected to wear a mask is on a bus, train or plane…”
For airports, extending the mask mandate should really be a no-brainer, both due to the shear number of people gathering in one place for an extended period of time, and the potential unknown variants that could be coming in from literally anywhere in the world.
For local transit, I suspect the real reason is to support blue cities in red states that want to have indoor mask mandates, but are pre-empted from doing so by their governor or legislature. The feds cannot impose a mask mandate in all indoor buildings, but they can on transit, so it’s simply a matter of them doing what they can.
I was just thinking about the future Boeing Access Road station and struggling to figure out what the point is. Rainier Beach to Tukwila is a ridiculously long stretch with no station, but there is really nothing around the proposed station location at all.
The only use case would be a transfer between Link and Sounder for people commuting from South King County to Rainier Valley, but that will always be an extremely small number of people, especially since Sounder will never be frequent outside weekday peak hours. There appears to be no chance at all for TOD around that station ever, given the runway to the north and what Google labels as a Seattle police facility to the south.
I feel like if they really want to have an intermediate station between Rainier Beach and Tukwila, something south of where Link crosses the Duwamish would at least have SOME value, with the Metro base and other industrial employers around there, some residential, and some potential for future development. Boeing Access Road just seems like a waste of money and an annoyance for everyone riding Link in the future who has to sit through a stop that almost no one will ever get on or off at.
I think south King wants it as a bus-Link transfer point for all the industrial jobs in the Dwamish. There are a ton of jobs around Boeing field, and more to come if UPS builds a major distribution facility there as proposed. I view the potential Link-Sounder transfer as secondary; there’s no funding for the corresponding Sounder infill station.
AJ, if the point is bus-to-link then the proposal to put the station at the rail crossing is not well-placed. It would be better to put it along East Marginal about 110th and add a bus-only access to SR599 at East Marginal or directly to the HOV lanes using a structure alongside the roadway for northbound and a slip ramp to the HOV southbound. This would keep the buses out of the traffic on BAR and avoid the left turn into or out of the parking lot.
The elevated structure does curve along Marginal, so a station there would be expensive to engineer, but the curvature is slight.
I imagine that when ST does the EIS, there will be alternatives showing both a N/S station along Marginal and an W/E station along BAR. It will be interesting to see which is preferred.
As noted there are a lot of jobs at and around BFI. Whether those works will take transit I don’t know. There are a surprisingly large number of flights out of BFI but a large number of them are freight. I don’t see the station being very well used unless a couple of major airlines start flying out for there. But for the foreseeable future it looks like most “overflow” from SEA will move to Paine Field.
A few years ago Kenmore Air had flights from BFI to Nanaimo, BC. Obviously not seaplanes!
I was amazed that there was no metro bus that went to the passenger terminal.
I don’t see it as being a very productive station unless they invest in other infrastructure. Walk-up ridership would be minimal. That leaves Link-Sounder transfers and Link-bus transfer. There could be two types of Link-bus transfers: BAR and freeway based. The latter would require a new freeway station.
Thus without a freeway or Sounder station, almost all of the riders would come from buses going along Boeing access road. There are three ways those buses could be routed:
1) A bus (like the 124) makes a detour to serve it. This is less than ideal, for a couple reasons. First, it takes longer for the route to operate, reducing frequency. You might make up for it with added ridership, but I have my doubts. Second, it delays through-riders.
2) A bus terminates there. I don’t see this making sense from a network standpoint.
3) A bus keeps going (east-west). This could provide for a better network. I could see an ‘X’ pattern of buses going diagonally. The northern part of the 124 could be merged with part of the 107. The southern part of the 124 could go across, then end at Rainier Beach (the neighborhood). Of course the second route wouldn’t need the new station, since it would connect with the Rainier Beach station. Metro hasn’t done this, presumably because it just isn’t worth it. It would cost money, and not provide that much value. It is worth noting that a lot of the area is just scraping by with minimal service (coverage routes that don’t cover everything).
Just about all of the restructures save money, typically by truncation. The 130th station will enable a more efficient routing (as buses currently take a lengthy and redundant detour to Northgate). I don’t see this station offering any of those advantages. It would result in a nicer network in the area, but it would probably require a substantial amount of extra service money (or a reduction in frequency).
In contrast, a freeway station would be extremely cheap free from a service standpoint. Buses like the 101 and 150 could stop there on the way to downtown, providing a connection between Rainier Valley and parts of Renton and Tukwila. A Sounder to Link connection has obvious advantages as well. Both would require more capital investment though.
An X pattern would be the most elegant solution; hopefully they are able to do that.
But does the 124 really need to divert that much? Seems like station access fund could put in a signal (perhaps bus only?) at 112th and Marginal Way to allow the bus to get quickly back over to TIB. Doesn’t seem super disruptive. But your general point in true – this station requires more investment in a better bus network to unlock the value, whereas most Link station displace bus hours and allow for bus service to be deployed elsewhere.
It will be interesting to see how the station is oriented. If it is east-west, it should be straightforward to add a Sounder station and/or a freeway station in the future, with only a modest walk from a freeway station to the east entrance of the station, while also positioning the west entrance of the station to be a short walk from bus running on Marginal Way. If, however, it is north/south of Marginal Way, there is perhaps better opportunity for TOD but likely scuttles the opportunity for a future freeway station.
An X pattern would be the most elegant solution … But does the 124 really need to divert that much?
No, and that is the first suggestion. A bus detours to the station, and then gets back on track. But at best that takes about five minutes, and yet it hasn’t fundamentally changed the network. It clearly adds value, but not that much. Everything south of Rainier Beach and east of I-5 is the same. A lot of people who ride the 124 downtown will continue to do so, and find the detour annoying. You’ve connected parts of Rainier Valley with Tukwila Boulevard and East Marginal Way. This is good, without a doubt, but the same thing could be achieved by simply spending more money on the buses.
That is the issue as I see it. To take full advantage of this station requires either more capital spending (in the form of Sounder or bus freeway stations) or more Metro service (e. g. run the 107 more often). The latter might just be a better value without a new station. If extra bus service was happening anyway, then I would be more excited about the station (my guess is we will continue to underfund our bus network).
This makes this station different than most. Just about all of the stations either have money saving bus restructures associated with them, or the buses just happen to serve the station anyway (e. g. the 8). This is the opposite — at a minimum it requires a detour, which will cost money. Not a lot, necessarily, but it also doesn’t seem to add a lot either. Infill stations are relatively cheap, so I can’t say if this is a bad value. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it is, and we would be better off just running the buses more often. Or, rather, it may be one of those “go big or go home” situations, where the only way you get value out of this is if you add a Sounder or freeway station (or both).
I think the potential for a BAR station is that it makes sense for bus transfers and a bus restructure. I can say from my commute, the 107 is just excruciatingly slow headed north to my transfer in Rainier Beach (to the 9 or 7). If it took a left to BAR and transferred to link there, I could probably shave 5 minutes off my commute.
One of the crappy things about Rainier Vista and South Seattle in general is that east-west transit sucks. for example, if I wanted to go from Rainier Vista to White Center (to get a nice steak), I could drive 18 minutes, or take a transit trip that is 1 hour and 18 minutes. At some times, it’s not inconceivable that the fastest trip would take you through downtown. That’s ridiculous.
As RossB notes, a BAR station opens the possibility for a east-west bus that connects with Link, forming a grid. Boeing Access Road is probably the only place until tukwila international boulevard (itself not a great station area) for that to work. Although, I could see his point that it would probably require more service hours to truly be effective.
The reason for the Boeing Access Road station is South King made it a high priority. Tukwila cited transfers to an extended RapidRide A that would serve a planned urban village at 144th. It also citied easier access to the Museum of Flight and Aviation High School. (You’d still transfer to the 124 to get to the Museum of Flight but it would be a shorter bus ride. I don’t know where the high school is.)
ST3 had a list of candidate projects to choose from, and one of them was a BAR Sounder station to transfer to Link. The Sounder station wasn’t included in ST3. People said that would make it easier to get from Sounder to the airport. I guess that means people from Kent and further south and avoiding a three-seat ride. I think they’re thinking of taking Sounder to Tukwila, the A to TIB, and Link to the airport, so a 3-seat ride.
Of course, Kent has a 20-minute one-seat ride to the airport. The rest can take the 578 to Federal Way and transfer to the A. In Metro’s 2040 plan (now offline and uncertain), a truncated 578 to Federal Way would still exist, a new RapidRide line would go from GRCC to Kent and KDM, and a second RapidRide line would go from GRCC to Auburn and Federal Way. So that would give more people faster access to the airport than they have now. But people who talk about transferring from Sounder to Link often don’t think of that, or consider it unacceptable.
Didn’t realize BFI and most of the land there on E Marginal is not City of Seattle. Explains why Aviation HS is in the Highline School District. My bet is Boeing made sure they were not in Seattle to pay minimal taxes. BAR just doesn’t have a good location. If it’s to intercept freeway buses (why, they should have been intercepted farther south?) then closer to the freeway is better. If it’s to align with bus connections that don’t yet exist maybe it doesn’t matter. No matter where they put it it’s not walkable to anywhere and never will be. The expense and increased run times don’t seem worth the sparse at best ridership. Highline I assume has a perfectly good yellow bus system to get kids to school. If you’re out of district then that’s on you. Either way much better ST bus service could be added for the money dumped into this station. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it :-P
The Boeing land was part of Seattle but Boeing convinced the city to redraw the boundaries for tax avoidance.
I went to a special-purpose junior high, and I and other students rode Metro buses from all over Bellevue and some from Kirkland. It was located at Bellevue High School, so I chose to go to high school there too. I don’t know anything about Aviation or Maritime high schools, but from their name the probably draw from a large area too.
Oh, they came from Newport Hills and Renton too. Routes 226, 235, 240, and 252.
@MikeO
Sounds like you may have attended what is now the International School over by Wilburton. My wife would know what is was called in the 70’s but I don’t. I know there was Interlake (relatively new) and Sammamish and Bellevue. The International School campus I suspect was created from what was originally a junior high. Bellevue did something smart. When the student population dropped (even though population was rising) they kept all school district property. That’s been gold going forward.
Bellevue has long, apparently really long, contracted with Metro to provide school bus service to HS. It’s a great system and my only gripe is nobody but “kids” can board those buses. That seems like a wasted opportunity on a number of levels.
My school was Olympus Northwest, an “alternative” junior high, meaning it was based on 1970s experimental ideas. I don’t know if it still exists, and it wasn’t international. It had no school buses; special Metro routes, or subsidized fares. That was fine because the fare was 40c for one zone (everywhere outside Seattle).
My local schools would have been Odle and Interlake had I not chosen Olympus and Bellevue.
During high school and college my parents, separately at different times, moved to various apartments along Bellevue Way or near Old Bellevue, so I could walk to school.
I thought the International School building was administrative offices. I never saw it until much later. It might have been another junior high at one point. My junior high was located in part of Bellevue High School.
P.S. Sam, how do you know Olga Mikhailovna Penrose, the Russian teacher at Bellevue High in the 80s?
During the Northgate Link opening ceremony at North Seattle College, one of the speakers talked about how Link connects Roosevelt High School to the college, and that a fair number of Roosevelt students take classes at the college. There are probably other things like that: students not on school bus or special-bus routes, students who go to another school for a certain program of for personal reasons, and students splitting their day between high school and college classes.
It sounds like Aviation High School is a special-purpose school, to prepare people for aviation or similar careers. If so it may get one person from here, one from there, one from somewhere else, too sparsely for school-bus routes, or at least routes for all the students. That may be the target Tukwila is thinking of.
Bellevue for as long as I can remember contracted with Metro to provide bus service for all of the High Schools. They had standard Metro bus stop signs with 8xx series numbers. The 889 that went past our house was to Sammamish and then continued to the International School. This all seems to have changed post Covid and now for the first time I’m aware of BSD is giving out student ORCA cards and running supplemental yellow bus routes. Northshore has relied on regular Metro service for some time now. The old 236 (or was it 238?) would make a couple of packed runs everyday with HS students which the driver told me was the vast majority of the routes ridership.
Do school buses go to every scattered student’s house or only where large numbers of students are? I’ve never used school buses but at the stops I see several people gathered, not just one.
In my time school buses were provided to your closest or regularly-assigned school, but if you chose to go to another school you were on your own. You couldn’t expect a school bus to come to your neighborhood if you were the only one in it going to that school. Has this changed? Also, even if there are two-way school buses, that still doesn’t address students splitting the day between high school and college, students going from school to work, teachers, staff, parents, etc.
In Bellevue every student is provided the option of bus service unless they live within a mile I believe it is walking distance to school. They do group the stops based on walking criteria. Older kids are expected to walk farther, nobody is made to walk dangerous traffic routes, etc. It’s not all that scattered since everyone is starting at each school at a set time. After school activity buses cover a lot more ground because they don’t have the same density. As for density stops in Crossroads and other apartment areas can load an entire bus in a couple of stops. For Special Ed buses are run to every individual house.
If you choose to go to a different school than assigned you may be on your own for transportation. For the special schools though like Big Picture, International, Puesta del Sol (previously Sunrise), and Jing Mei transportation is provided. I’m not aware of buses that take running start students to Bellevue College but now that they are getting student ORCA cards they can use Metro. I don’t get why so many parents waste 15+ minutes waiting in line dropping of their kid(s). I can see that there might be a child care issue if the parent needs to be at work before the scheduled bus time but then they’d be dropping off well before the starting bell.
This gets into a larger issue that we need solutions that work for everybody, not just for those who fit the stereotypical categories. School buses may work for the majority of students but not for the exceptions I mentioned above. The point is that exceptions are larger and more diverse than most people think. The school districts and city councilmembers know about it because it’s their responsibility, but much of the public does not realize it. And some of those insist on inadequate solutions and deny the rest of the problem exists. That causes people to fall through the cracks.
This happens in many areas, not just school buses. Those pushing voter ID laws say everyone can get an ID and you need one to board a plane, but planes aren’t a fundamental right/responsibility of citizens like voting is, and they ignore people who live sixty miles from a licensing office, can’t get time off work to go, are elderly and homebound, have a lot of family responsibilities, etc. Those saying 30-minute off-peak bus service is enough ignore people who work off-peak, have 1-2 hour rides, and the fact that our hospitals and grocery stores and shipping centers depend on people being able to get to work easily 24 hours.
China, Japan, Northern Europe, Central Europe, Southern Europe, and Eastern Europe have more or less comprehensive transit that lets you go anywhere in the country and do practically anything, so it works for both typical and exceptional situations, for both students, teachers, factory workers, office workers, shopping, recreation, medical trips, and other things. The UK, Toronto, Vancouver, and New York have a lesser version of this. Some of these countries also have robust social safety nets so people don’t fall into extreme poverty or homelessness or have unaffordable medical conditions like they do here. This is what we need more of, things that work for everyone, or at least that everyone can fall back on.
I’m not saying Tukwila is necessarily right that Aviation High School needs more than TIB and the 124, but it’s probably in agreement with the school district on this, and it may have more knowledge of the size and diversity of student situations at the school than we do. Or it may want to move to relying less on school buses and special routes in general. And a school has more than just students, it also has teachers and staff and parents and itinerent experts that school buses were not designed for.
I had forgotten about the tile mural at the south end of Pioneer Square Station. I don’t remember what it represents. I always liked the open air arch entrance. I think it fits the neighborhood well. I believe the wheel and cable are there as well. I always liked the cable car history turned to art. Was that dug up building the tunnel? I don’t remember.
Like Pierce Transit, TriMet is having to slash bus schedules due to a driver shortage:
https://katu.com/news/local/trimet-to-reduce-service-starting-next-year-due-to-driver-shortage
Does anyone know how likely it is that Metro will have to do something similar?
Rogoff reconsiders ST’s response to the outage this weekend. ($) Previously ST said, “an unsafe incident developed when passengers decided to use emergency exits to leave the train.” Now Rogoff is saying, “It is our fault our passengers were in that position. Some passengers were quite understandably frightened by the incident,”
Some other things from Mike Lindblom’s article:
“The operator had no idea the cable was severed as she tried to restart the train.” So that’s why the operator didn’t walk to the other cars and tell passengers what’s going on.
“The tunnel segment under campus has a 35 mph speed limit, compared to 55 mph under Capitol Hill, to minimize ground vibrations near UW labs.”
“That leaves a possibility of a sagging cable sliced by rails, switches or debris. Rogoff said the agency has theories about the cable break but won’t share those until further investigation. Findings are due in 30 days.”
I read somewhere that along with the singing and the fogging of windows, some fans were vomiting.
The discussion was whether it was the singing or the alcohol.
This created that dreaded ‘sympathy puking’ situation. That could be reason enough to bail, I suppose. Would announcements have helped?
Short of banning inebriated football fans, they could be required to carry a barf bag around their necks when they board.
Lack of inebriation and vomiting wouldn’t have eliminated the darkness, lack of air, high humidity, covid incubator situation, lack of information, panic attacks, or fear and frustration that led to people getting off the train.
Sorry, none of those reasons are good enough to start venturing out into a potentially deadly situation around active train tracks without acting as if you knew what thee f#$% you were doing.
(Delete “without”)
While I don’t agree with Jim on this one, I do think there are other situations where it would be extremely dangerous and ill-advised for Link riders to self-evacuate. For example, if the train were ever to become stuck where it turns from southbound 5 to westbound 518, I don’t think riders should get out and start walking. Or, where East Link will turn from eastbound 90 to northbound Bellevue Way.
Those aren’t tunnels. You can see what’s around you, have sunlight, and can open the doors to get fresh air from the wind. You can see that society around you is unaffected, and hundreds of people in cars including police troopers can see you and any signs of distress.
For the first time in a long time, I rode Link home from the airport last week. Lots of people got on at the airport, and the train was quite full. Good to see that people are still riding it. (Perhaps the drastic increases to the prices of Uber and Lyft over the past year have something to do with it).
I use Link (along with Sounder, depending on the schedule) to get to the airport from the north end any time I fly out of SeaTac. (at least 3 times this year)
It’s always busy around the standard flight ‘rush hour’. Now that it goes to Northgate, it really works well for pick-up/drop-off. Can’t wait for the Lynnwood extension to come online.
It’s worrying to me that a train broke down yesterday in the tunnel between Capitol Hill Station and UW Station and forced single-track operation from Westlake Station to UWS for about two hours. This happened only a week and a day after the highly publicized train failure between UWS and U-District Station following the Apple Cup. After all the negative attention ST received last week, I’d expect maintenance to be especially active right now.
It’s not great, but remember that 99% of train runs don’t break down. The media reports on the three people in Seattle who’ve been robbed today, not the 750,000 who haven’t.
As someone who was impacted by this as I live within the district, here’s what happened. Prop 1 was passed by the voters within the Snohomish County PTBA in Nov 2015 after the state legislature granted the additional taxing authority in the transportation package earlier that year. The measure squeaked by (see results below). As a result of Prop 1 passing, sales tax increased by .3%, from .9% to 1.2%, within the district, maxing out the granted authority for CT. Hence, Snohomish County residents who live within both the CT and ST districts now pay a total of 2.6% in sales taxes dedicated for transit funding. Looking at it another way, this constitutes about 25% of total sales tax rate assessed in this area.
“Community Transit Proposition 1
“Under Votes 8737*
Over Votes 18
“Vote Count (Percent)
APPROVED 51,452 (51.11%)
REJECTED 49,219 (48.89%)
Total 100,671 (100.00%)”
Voter turnout was low (of course), this being an off-year election cycle:
“Registration & Turnout
422,871 Voters
“Vote Count (Percent)
AVU Turnout 1310 (.03%)
MAIL IN Turnout 146,842 (34.73%)
Total 146,973 (34.76%)”
*The undervote on this ballot item was significant enough to have flipped the end result.
This was meant to be a reply to @Bernie and @RossB in a discussion at the top of this thread. Apparently my reply didn’t nest correctly after having a little glitch on my phone. Sorry for the (unnecessary) confusion.
I would think a low turnout election would be bad for a transit measure. Mostly it’s old retired people that tend to vote in every election even if only dog catcher is on the ballot. I can see that demographic voting in favor of transit in Seattle but not in Snohomish County. I’m thinking that the large percentage that work in Seattle and on the Eastside probably carried the day so they would have better commute options than sitting in traffic or paying to use the Lexus Lanes.
The article on Metro’s Operator of the Year, Mary Hopson brightened my day. I admire the grace that she shows daily to the public. Congratulations, Mary!
This looks interesting as a form of first/last mile access that draws in car drivers by using on demand feeder transit.
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/seattle-area-counties-experiment-with-on-demand-door-to-door-public-bus-service-is-showing-promise/
By combining essentially first/last mile access (from doorstep to first form of transit including walking and driving to a park and ride) and the first form of feeder service this service competes with cars if the ultimate form of transit is faster like Link, eliminates parking, or necessary like a ferry.
This seems to me it would appeal to more suburban and rural areas in which the ultimate form of transit will be long, say Lynnwood Link to the airport, or a ferry to Seattle. The more urban or the shorter the distance the greater desire to just use Uber to the ultimate destination.
The article states:
“When Kitsap Transit began its experiment with app-based, on-demand buses on Bainbridge Island, Wash., in July, one of the primary goals was to lure back a portion of the riders who had abandoned transit for reasons ranging from convenience to fear of COVID-19.”
“But a funny thing happened on the way to the ferry terminal, the island’s most popular transit and ridesharing destination. The experiment, in conjunction with The Routing Company, didn’t just win back former riders, it roped in a whole new category of customers who previously didn’t use public buses.”
“What we are seeing is a more positive sentiment about transit on the island,” said Sanjay Bhatt, Kitsap Transit spokesman. “We’re encouraged that the pilot, so far, has attracted new riders to the service. It’s more convenient.”
I’ve always worried the flaw in the Link system is the feeder bus, plus access to the feeder bus and the transfer. Depending on cost, this on-demand system solves that issue. More importantly, rather than taking riders from buses it appears it is bringing in new transit riders who usually drove, at least to the ferry or Link.
The VIA on-demand service in Rainier Valley has seen great ridership, too. Transit service is only as attractive as the last mile solution, 30min bus service won’t cut it. We may get a lot more service if we would provide convenient last mile solutions than extending Link to Everett or Tacoma. Glad we built the bridge to NS College at Northgate! These on-demand services are one option in particular in residential and suburban neighborhoods, high frequency feeder buses with great transfer facilities are another, or gondola feeders to high ridership places such as Kirkland TC, South Center, BCollege/Eastgate/Factoria, Kent, Edmonds etc