Headlines from the past week.

This is an Open Thread.

40 Replies to “Midweek Roundup: isolated incident”

  1. RE: Land Value Capture Op-Ed

    I think using tax increment financing to generate revenue for capital projects like Sound Transit is fairly interesting, but it’s worth pointing out that TIF is both new in Washington, relatively limited in scope, and subject to specific requirements. The most important of these is that the value in a TIF district cannot exceed $200M when the ordinance is passed (RCW 39.114.020). Even with 10% YOY growth, a $200M TIF district can only expect to receive $300M over a 30 year term (at a 1% property tax rate). To close the $8B budget gap would require 25% YOY growth in the TIF district – something that is surely never going to happen.

    Seattle would have to go to the state legislature to get a specific carve out (the way Bellevue did for the 405 connection project). Maybe this would be doable, but by my estimations the beginning base value would need to be around $10B to generate even half of the $8B budget gap for the Ballard Link (assuming 5% YOY growth). That’s about 6% of Seattle’s total assessed value, which would likely have an appreciable impact on the City’s finances during a budget crunch.

    You can cut that down by assuming higher growth, but since TIF requires bonding (as the money comes at the end while the investment comes at the beginning), there are practical limits to how optimistic you can be in relation to the bond market. There are also timing issues for a TIF district on a project with such a long timeline. Ideally, infrastructure improvements should be completed near the beginning to show the nexus between improvements and development. Sound Transit projects are slow enough that this may be just generally infeasible.

    The op-ed has cool maps and it’s an interesting concept, but I find it frustrating that all that analysis went in without referencing the statutory limitations and funding challenges that this would present in practice.

    1. Whoops, that should have been 3% of assessed value in the City. Read the wrong column in the assessor report! Maybe that would change things a bit, but TIF money comes from somewhere and that somewhere is the property tax receipts of other taxing districts. If a TIF district is too large, the overlapping taxing jurisdictions will be upset about it.

    2. Property tax and land-value tax should be a much higher mix of the funding sources for public transit, both capital and operating spend … at the same time, the problem is Ballard Link is cost, not revenue. Throwing money at the problem simply obscures the bad inputs and bad policy decisions that are causing the project to be prohibitively expensive.

      1. Definitely agree. It’s unfortunate how little property and land taxes factor into transit funding in a national context. And definitely the biggest issue with Ballard is cost.

        But I think TIF in Washington is set up in a way that basically precludes it ever being used in Seattle. The $200M assessed value limit (and ~$100M 30 year revenue limit) means that it is practically useless as a stand-alone financing tool for any kind of large capital project. Bellevue needed a specific carve out just to get to $200M for one project (and then TIF is just 15% of that project’s budget). I think TIF is a useful (albeit flawed) public finance tool, but unfortunately the state leg approach for local finance is always give the least amount possible, so in this case it’s a marginal tool that won’t be usable in the majority of situations.

  2. The link to the article about the CID derailment highlights the complete lack of information provided by ST about the “root-cause analysis” of the derailment.

    There is mention of “broken bolts” which are a frequent (really, almost a “predictable”) result of a train running through a turnout (“switch”) set against the train from the frog side.

    But the train pictured is athwart all three tracks at the south end of CID Station, a result that can only come from running through a turnout from the points side with the leading truck taking the diverging path, the points changing position during the period before the next truck reaches the points at which time the second truck follows the “through” pathway through the turnout.

    This could definitely occur if the bolts were already broken, but ST has offered no explanation how that might have occurred or when.

    Indeed, operation in the normal traffic pattern southbound through that turnout would occur without error since the wheelsets of every truck would force the points against the west side stock rail for every train, regardless of its destination.

    It took a train running out-of-direction to “pick the points” and follow both paths through that turnout.

    This would therefore almost certainly point to poor track inspection at a turnout that has way higher than a 99% trailing-point operation.

    The normal use of the pocket track is that an out-of-service train from Forest Street or Line 2 approaches CID from the south running in the normal traffic direction toward the facing-point turnout between the northbound service track and the pocket, is routed into the pocket through the “wye” turnout at the south end of the pocket, is held until traffic permits, then passes back through the “wye” turnout and then the trailing-point switch that was broken, and continues on its way to Forest Street or the East Side.

    Thus all trains normally pass through the broken turnout from the frog side. The wheelsets simply force the points against the proper stock rail. The turnout could have been broken for a while with no deleterious results.

    But this time a train approached the broken turnout from the points side, and the first truck clearly followed the path toward the pocket wye turnout while the idler “picked the switch” because the points were not held against the westside stock rail and continued down the service track toward the southbound platform.

    This begs the question, “Why did the train leave the pocket at Stadium running out-of-direction if it was not just going to run directly into the platform position at CID? Why block the southbound main and take the extra time to duck into the CID pocket, back out onto the southbound service track and then move into the platform position?

    It certainly seems to have been the least efficient possible way to add a southbound train at the CID platform. It would still have exposed the inadequately constrained points, which would probably have failed also had the usual path into the CID pocket been used, because the train would have backed out of the pocket, reversed, and approached the unconstrained points from the south anyway.

    Why wasn’t the train just sent straight to the platform from its out-of-direction run? Maybe it was planned that the operator would change cabs in the pocket (its usual use). But in that case, why not use the northbound track between Stadium and CID? Using thecsouthboundctrack didn’t change how long it took to reverse the train.

    So, when did a train run through that turnout when it was set against it? Perhaps ST will never know, but they should “‘fess up” about it.

    1. There’s an error where I said “west side stock rail”. It should have said “the proper stock rail”.

      1. Also, the reference to “only one other” similar configuration and it having been service “for twenty years” is a bit misleading. EVERY cross-over has a facing-point movement from either its in-direction side or the out-of-direction side. There must be a pair (one facing-point set and one trailing-point set) to “single-track” operations around a stretch of track taken out of service.

        Just because this particular turn-out is part of a single-ended reversing spur doesn’t make it uniquely dangerous as it is made to sound in the discussion. It makes it uniquely safe, at least on the exit side as described in the original comment. Almost every train will pass through it in the trailing-point direction.

        I’m glad they’re making special inspections of every turnout and checking the quality of the steel in the point bolts.

        1. Yes. I forgot to close the quotation marks after the question mark. The sentence after was also a question, but not part of the main one. It was more of a hypothetical “head shake” or “that’s weird”.

        3. Btw, I think using begs the question to mean raises the question is acceptable, even though that’s not its original meaning.

        4. Nobody uses it “right”, because the so-called “right way” is archaic.

          If nobody outside of historical contexts uses the term to mean “attempts to escape answering a question”, but instead uses it to mean “demands an answer to a question”, then that’s what it means.

        5. Thanks, folks, for teaching me the interesting history of this cliche. Really; no snark.

          I remember having noticed a couple of other instances where a word or phrase morphed into its opposite, but can’t remember what specific words or phrases they are at this time.

  3. Thinking more about the extension of route 331 to Bothell… I wonder if it could be extended further in the southeast direction, perhaps to Redmond. If this extension were to replace both the 251 and the planned Sound Transit shuttle to Woodinville, it wouldn’t even cost anything extra, but would add a lot of useful thru connections.

    The tradeoff, of course, is it might make the route to long. If so, perhaps it could be split at Mountlake Terrace Station. The detour to teg station is already long enough to discourage thru riders. However, the transit system currently provides no better alternative to get between Shoreline and Kenmore, short of hailing an Uber. Ideally, the 522 would have extended to Shoreline, with a stop right at 145th, on the street, without a detour, but that ship has sailed.

  4. “King County Council Sets Aside Emergency Motion to Restore Route 372”

    I understand the frustration, but where were they a year or two ago? Deleting 372 is not a standalone piece that wouldn’t impact anything else if undone.

    This service change has been out there along with all the Lynnwood Connection changed implemented two years ago. If they acted two years ago, things might be different.

    1. “where were they a year or two ago?”

      A year or two ago there wasn’t much public or city opposition to the change. That all came up in the past week. People apparently didn’t notice it until it was about to happen. That happens all the time. It’s why there isn’t much opposition to the the long DSTT1-DSTT2 transfers downtown, just us. Most people don’t know it will happen, some don’t understand the extent of the transfer walk, and some can’t picture how it would affect them until it opens or is about to open.

      1. I’ve been paying attention to this 372 change for years, but most of my fellow commuters have been in the dark. One problem is that it was folded into the Lynnwood light rail project, and riders in Kenmore and Bothell tended to ignore those notices, because they didn’t think Lynnwood news would affect a Northshore/UW commute. During the earlier planning, I complained about the roll out of the info. Metro’s defense that they put up info stands at community events to inform people was laughable. At this point, I have to believe that there is some conscious effort to minimize outreach (and thus minimize criticism).

        1. One problem is that it was folded into the Lynnwood light rail project

          I agree. It should have also been part of the Stride discussion. Note: For sake of discussion I’ll call Shoreline, Lake Forest Park, Kenmore and Bothell the “suburbs”. From the perspective of the suburbs, the 372 and Stride 3 complement each other quite well. Stride 3 is the express to Link, using the fastest possible approach. The 372 gives riders a direct connection to Lake City, U-Village and the middle of campus. The routes also work well with transfers. If someone is trying to get from Kenmore to Sand Point or Wedgwood they can make a transfer and get there without a big detour. It is a nice pairing from that perspective.

          The problem is, it costs a lot of money and doesn’t get a lot of riders. Almost all of the ridership is within Seattle itself. Worse yet, the section in Shoreline and Lake Forest Park gets very few riders. This means that just getting to Kenmore is a bad value. So from the perspective of Metro — which has to make tough choices — the northern part of the 372 is just not a good value. Since Sound Transit is making a major investment in the corridor (running buses so often they will be called “BRT”) it is overkill to run another bus there.

          Thus it would have been quite reasonable for Metro to just truncate every 372 where it does on weekends once ST committed to running the 522 every fifteen minutes. They didn’t in part because that layover (where the Fred Meyer used to be) is not ideal. While ridership is highest at 125th, ridership is high for all of the Lake City Way stops. It is only when the bus leaves the city (and the road becomes Bothell Way) that ridership drops off of a cliff. Thus ending at 130th would result in a fair number of riders in greater Lake City being out of luck. They would have the 65, but that is slower and a bit different. From Metro’s perspective it made sense to just wait and then send the 372 to 148th Station. That would then cover those bus stops on Lake City Way.

          The problem is that the two agencies never talked to each other. Riders in the suburbs had no idea that Metro would ever get rid of the 372. They had no idea it was essentially obsolete. It is no wonder they overwhelmingly favored the short route to 148th Station. But if they had known that the 372 was no longer going to go the suburbs, it is quite possible they would have wanted to send it to Roosevelt Station (or better yet, the U-District).

          The basic problem is that Metro never told ST they might alter the 372. Either that, or ST ignored them. No one at either agency had any vision of the overall network. The folks at ST were too busy building monuments (“This is BRT!”) while the folks at Metro were largely ignoring what ST was doing.

        2. “It should have also been part of the Stride discussion.”

          It was front and center in the Stride discussion. It was in all the Stride concepts and proposals. The only change is that the station was built at 148th instead of right at 145th.

          “Metro never told ST they might alter the 372.”

          That’s more of Metro changing its values or tradeoffs. The scenarios in the 2010s envisioned keeping the 372 and a downtown peak express. In the pandemic ridership fell. And Metro has to keep restructures revenue-neutral until the county or cities pass an expansion measure, so Metro was weighing keeping those hours for the 372 vs creating other routes or making them more frequent, and it felt the others are higher priorities. That’s a judgment call that’s prone to change depending on when the decision is made, who is making it (which planners or management individuals), and the values zeitgeist at the time.

          Metro can’t promise what it will do in the future, how it will weigh the tradeoffs, or whether a new generation of management will tell it to do something else.

      2. One of the undiscussed outcomes of Link was a structural shift of the fundamental transit structure from a hub and radial spoke model to a spine and crosstown rib model.

        For decades, Seattlites enjoyed the former — and then voters drooled over getting trains and didn’t fully get that it would fundamentally change the bus route structure.

        Of course, worsening arterial congestion is a reason to change the route structure. But even then, Seattle has eased this by wide use of BAT lanes and signal priority in many corridors.

        There will always be issues serving high demand destinations like UW. It’s just one of many reasons that I feel that service structures should be screened better with a committee review that’s exclusively riders and drivers. Advocacy groups and STB can note these things, but there remains no broad official forum to debate these issues.

        It’s too late to reexamine how the restructures have been procedurally developed — but the lessons learned should not focus on just losing Route 372 but on advocating for a different process when restructuring in the future. After all, there should probably be some retweaking of the many restructuring outcomes across most of King County in the past decade. With everything Link-wise opened by this fall, the travel patterns and resulting deficiencies are now less speculative and more observable.

    2. LFP protested at the time. I listened to the LLC staff presentation. LFP wrote a letter.

  5. Overheard on a 2 Line train while crossing the lake today. This is from mid-conversation on. Before that, I think some lady was saying she didn’t like crossing the lake in a train … Rider 1, “I don’t mind crossing it in my car, because I figure I could get out if it sank.” Rider 2, looking around, “If we sank, I don’t see any instructions on how to get out of the train.” Rider 3, “This kind of glass would be hard to break.” “Oh, wait, there’s an emergency latch.”

    1. The trains are so heavy that the glass is going to pop inward pretty quickly anyway, but everyone would be too deep to reach the surface. Let’s all hope that the safety rails work as designed; they almost always do.

    2. That is funny. Assuming you get out of the car, then what? Swim?

      Judging by previous bridge problems around here, it is most likely the bridge will be closed before it collapses. The only counter-example is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, where it was obvious that it was about to collapse, and everyone on the bridge escaped on foot.

      Your chance of survival is definitely lower driving over the bridge – deadly car accidents happen all the time.

  7. I miss the frequent service going up and down the Ave (via the 71, 72, 73, and kinda the 74).

    As someone who often goes to a spot between the u-dist station and roosevelt stations, I’ll now pop out of one of those stations and find that the next 45 is in 15 minutes or 28 minutes or whatever. And that can be at 5pm, it’s even worse at night.

    Maybe the 77 will slightly improve all that, I haven’t really studied the schedule specifics.

    I kinda wish there was a little shuttle that just went up and down the Ave. I swear it seems that north of 50th has less people/students visiting from further south, but I have no actual stats for that. Awhile back students could hop on a 7X and head up to the Knarr or the Emigrant and then easily head back down the Ave hours later. Those days are gone. Maybe Lime Gliders have replaced some of that. It’s a different world.

    Yes, I appreciate light rail and being able to zoom to Lynnwood and other places, but sometimes you have to be nostalgic for what was lost.

    1. Being on the Ave means a slow crawl for the bus, and frequent re-routes for the Farmers Market. Make the Ave car-free, and move routes to other streets, but with combined average headway in mind.

      1. The problem for me isn’t the Ave, I’m fine with all the stops along it and the “slow crawl”. It’s the delays that happen before they even get to the Ave, from the north or south.

        The other day there were three 45s in a row as they reached the Ave from the north. I don’t know if there was a traffic incident earlier or what.

        1. Perhaps no longer having the 45 through-route with the 75 will make a difference. Maybe. If it is not a live loop at UW Station.

      2. The market is on most Saturdays. Seattle could find another market place; how about Brooklyn Avenue NE? Mayor Durkan liked that concept.

        Instead, the Ave could have a pedestrian AND transit focus. It needs fewer cars. Push out the curb and widen the sidewalks to the level of the current bus bulbs saving one pullout for load zones on each block. Short term parking? Fill the Temple site with short term parking topped with several layers of wood frame housing (Is the social housing provider ready?).

        Yes, Metro should better follow its common market tactic and place more routes on the same pathway to provide shorter waits for riders oriented to common markets. Before U Link, March 2016, all the routes serving U Village and Lake City served the same bay on NE Campus Parkway nearside Brooklyn Avenue NE; then they were routes 25, 65, 75, and 372. With the projects in March 2016, fall 2021, and fall 2024, that has slipped away. Routes oriented to U Village and Lake City have several different pathways and there is no common stop or place to have short waits; routes 30-31, 65-67, 75-77, and 72 are all different. My suggestion has been for routes 72 and 75 to follow the outbound path of Route 65 serving UWMC and UW Link. The inbound pathway has to be Stevens Way (until SDOT provides a BAT lane on southbound Montlake Boulevard NE, as was suggested decades ago during U Link planning; the left turns would have to be sacrificed; I doubt it will ever be done). Further, more of these routes should use the Ave and not use 15th Avenue NE.

        RossB has suggested a great consolidation of routes 348 and 67 in Mapleleaf. Routes 65 and 75 could be broken from their partner routes; they serve Lake City on NE 125th Street and are the appropriate ones to become crosstown routes to Shoreline CC via South Shoreline and Pinehurst stations respectively. Route 77 stems from Metro reacting to the timing of the ST Route 522 and Pinehurst changes. The crosstown connection and the Route 522 filler should not be connected via the same route; it means that all Lake City transfers are walking ones. The existing Lake City hub stops should have been used.

        1. The situation in the U-District is complicated. But I agree with most points. There are several guidelines worth considering. There should be common stops for various destinations. Pairs of buses should be timed to work together whenever practical. Triplets can form a “spine” without being timed. There are multiple common corridors:

          1) U-Village to U-District Station.
          2) Montlake Triangle to U-District Station.
          3) Roosevelt Station to Campus Parkway.

          I think there is widespread consensus on these ideas. The details are tricky and debatable. I think the first connection should be achieved primarily via campus (Stevens Way) both directions. This means no bus from the triangle to Children’s. The additional connection along 45th (on the 31/32) is OK. The second combination should be via 15th and then Pacific. The third should be via The Ave.

          The particulars get complicated. Through-routing is tricky. Lynnwood Link and the change of the 522 has put pressure on extending the routes to 148th Station if not further. Thus the routes are long. Through-routing long routes is problematic. There are a lot of different ways to through-route. We can’t ignore other needed changes. I propose the 75-77 combination like the one on the right shown here (https://sites.google.com/view/copy-of-comparison-of-proposed?usp=sharing). That would be the only through-routed bus in the U-District. It is still pretty long but not crazy long.

          The 72 and 65 are then independent. They all go on Stevens Way both directions, forming a spine (ten buses an hour midday). They are not timed. The 45 goes to the triangle. The 67 should as well. The 67 could eventually be merged with the 348. The 45 and 77 combine from Roosevelt to Campus Parkway. They should be timed to provide a combined 7.5 minute headway. I would have the 45 turn on Roosevelt so they share the stop with the 67 as well. The alternative is to have the 77 turn east on 65th. Either way they would share bus stops from Roosevelt & 65th to Campus Parkway. Should the 67 go on the Ave or continue to serve Roosevelt? It is a judgment call but I would leave it alone.

          Eventually I would extend the RapidRide J up to 67th (at least). That was one of the previous plans. That gives you frequent (enough) service on the Roosevelt couplet from 67th to the University Bridge (and beyond). It connects to Link at Roosevelt Station (for those that want to continue north). It complements U-District Station (instead of detouring to serve it). Once that happens, you can send the 67 to Campus Parkway via the same pathway as the 45 and 77 (basically Roosevelt/Ravenna/The Ave). This becomes another spine (and we no longer need to time the 45 and 77). If the 67 merges with the 348 it could end at Campus Parkway to save a little money and improve reliability (assuming we have enough buses heading to the triangle).

  8. Aren’t all derailments isolated incidents? Wow Sound Transit really out their thinking caps on now.

  9. Having new route 77 overlay with route 75 on NE 125th St seems wasteful, as does having route 75 turn back toward Northgate, duplicating various other routes along that path.

    I would have route 75 take over 77’s path along 125th/130th, serving Pinehurst Station.

    Route 77 could continue straight up Lake City Way and Bothell Way to fill in the LFP hole.

  10. If a bus gets overtaken by another bus on the same route….with 30 min headways, something is seriously wrong with the operator. Seems to be an occurrence on many routes.

    1. I’ve seen the pass-ups enough to know it is real, but usually for routes with shorter headways.

      Tempting as it is to assume an operator is trying to avoid picking up passengers, one bus would stay behind the other instead of passing, if that were the case.

      I have infuriatingly watched a driver wait until another driver pulled out first before starting his trip late, right behind the other bus on the same route. This was on a RapidRide route, which is supposed to have headway controlled from a center, as reported on this blog a few years ago.

      1. RapidRide started with managed headways in the daytime and no complete schedule (just “every 15 minutes” when the period was less than 30 minutes). That generated a lot of complaints because when a late bus finally came, the following bus was held back to the nominal headway. So the first bus would be overcrowded, or people/stops that had to wait a long 20 or 40 minutes didn’t get a following 5 or 10 minutes to compensate/mitigate it — they just got 15 minutes back, which seemed like a bad deal, and the net result was those missing runs were just lost rather than making headways shorter in the recovery period. So it felt like a bad deal.

        There were loud calls to publish a complete schedule for the RapidRide lines, and to limit headway management to when the nominal frequency is 10 minutes or better. Metro finally did start publishing complete RapidRide schedule a year or two after the initial launch, and has done so ever since. And it must have changed the headway-management maximum to 10 minutes because those initial frustrations stopped occurring.

    2. The GPS history data should provide a record of whether a bus began its run late or if the bus ended up running late because of what happened on a route. Surely, someone internal at Metro is paying attention, right?

      I will say that pauses to load and unload passengers with boarding difficulties does throw buses off schedule. That’s particularly true if the rider is using a wheelchair because it has to be locked once boarded and unlocked when leaving the bus. On a frequent and crowded route, the bus then gets more and more riders slowing it further while the subsequent bus has fewer riders because it’s so close behind. For a frequent bus route, it can help both buses if an empty trailing bus overtakes a crowded leading bus in both speed and crowding.

      At 30 minutes, there doesn’t seem to be much of a plausible way for two buses to cross runs. It takes many reasons to delay a bus so badly for that — and if it’s a lane restriction delay it would affect both buses sitting in the stopped traffic. And a bus that infrequent is almost certainly not running on a crowded busy route.

      1. It’s fine if it’s a one time thing, but I’ve observed this on the same operator and same blocks every day.

        Even today the North Bend 215 operator running bus 7351 is clearly having issues. Since the very first trip in the morning every trips been 10-20 mins late.

        I just don’t get what the reasoning is. It’s not traffic.

        The 102 for example really suffers from this. The main reason I’ve noticed is:
        1) they start the trip 10 mins late at minimum
        2) they drive extremely extremely slow. Like unbearably slow.
        If there is traffic, it’s not even worth riding. It’s just pathetic a suburban route without much ridership, low frequency, or traffic gets passed by another bus regularly.

        I get it on high frequency routes but it’s ridiculous to be a daily occurrence on peak hour commuter routes.

        The block shows it is the only trip they make too. I know some run late because they have to deadhead back after a previous run. That happens a lot on the 556 and 218/256.

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