All posts by andrew

The comment period on the U-District Urban design has been extended until Monday, and I strongly encourage STB readers to provide comment on the documents as whole and the three zoning “alternatives” in particular. I’ll briefly summarise the three options below, as well as give my personal opinions, but I recommend you have a look over some or all of the documents if you have the time. Either way, please send comment to dave.laclergue@seattle.gov endorsing either alternative 1 or alternative 2. Thanks!

Continue reading “Provide Feedback on U-District Urban Design”

A couple of months back I asked whether we should continue with the deep-bore-tunnel (DBT) replacement for the SR-99 viaduct. At the time, Bertha, the Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) had been blocked for months with no date for its unblocking (if that’s a word), traffic on the viaduct was way down (though that data appeared to be bad, other data does show decline), the tolling revenue looked to be much than expected and there was confusion over who would pay for the seemingly inevitable overruns. In the intervening weeks, we’ve learned a few more things:

1. The TBM will be stuck for nearly another year, restarting only in March. Assuming it does become unblocked by that date, the machine would have been blocked for 16 total months. That will lead to a 14 month delay for a tunneling project that was meant originally to take 14 months to complete.
2. The repairs to Bertha are meant to cost the tax payer another $125 million. Keep in mind, this is to repair a TBM that cost $80 million to begin with. The state has refused to pay this, though who will ultimately pay for any cost increases is certain to be only decided in court.
3. However, we’ve learned that one of the construction companies behind the tunnel has a decades-long history of suing to get extra payments from public agencies. They successfully deflected blame when projects have gone sour, and have forced government agencies to spend millions in court and legal fees. The company is already asking for $62.6 million in change order, and that figure is not a part include the previously mentioned $125 million. The original tunnel contract was for just over $1 billion.

None of this is very surprising, but what is surprising is that state transportation secretary Lynn Peterson is now saying there’s a “small possibility” the project could be cancelled. Now, I don’t know if these statements come from a bargaining position or an earnest assessment of the situation, but I hope more people wake up to the possibility of cancelling this project sooner rather than later; this project is unnecessary and promises to be a money pit far into the foreseeable future. Let’s cancel it now rather than throw more good cash after the bad we’ve already buried in this tunnel.

Vignelli Transit Maps by Peter B. Lloyd and Mark Ovenden is the story of Massimo Vignelli’s famous (infamous?) 1972 map of the New York City subway system. The map was controversial because it ignored geographic and station location and stuck to a strict 45- and 90-degree grid, and was eventually replaced by the MTA in 1979. You can see a high-resolution image of the map here.

The book covers the story and people behind the map, as well as the importance of transit maps and how they are designed. There are a number of interesting details on map features such typeface, colour, and cost as well as lovely images of the maps. Where the book does fall a bit short is on answering the question of whether the map was better or worse than those that came before and after it. Even though the book is rather large, some of the maps are illegible because they require even larger formats.

I think Vignelli Transit Maps is a nice companion to the 2007 work Transit Maps of the World. The former will give you some of the tools to help understand that thoughts that went into some of the later. I picked up my copy of Vignelli second-hand for much less than the Amazon price, but I would say it’s worth it if subway maps are an interest of yours.

French Economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been translated into English by Arthur Goldhammer, and it has made quite a stir. Paul Krugman’s review is probably the best, and Matt Yglesias’s is the best “TL;DR” version. To summarise briefly, Piketty studied wealth (capital) growth in the nineteenth and twentieth century and has concluded that without considerable government intervention the 21st century will look a lot like the Gilded Age. That is, wealth will continue to accrue only a very select few at the top of the wealth curve (the “.01%” you could say), and that eventually elites will inherit all of their wealth, with little chance of a change in social status between generations. Piketty says this undermine democracy and turn society into an oligarchy, if it already hasn’t.

What does this have to do with transportation? Well, capital and wealth accumulating to only a few is scary enough, but I think it also helps explain one of my pet subjects, the decline in infrastructure across the United States. Public infrastructure is capital as is any other. With all wealth accumulating to just a few, there’s less money left over for big public infrastructure projects, which is why the interstate system could be built in the middle of the 20th century, but a project of that scale is completely unimaginable today. Piketty does not go into any detail on this subject, nor does any of the commentary on the book, but it’s worth keeping in mind as an explanation for why it’s so difficult to even keep public buses funded.

As an aside, I do recommend Capital in the Twenty-First Century, even though it’s not the easiest read.

Update — As Cody pointed out, it might be nice to link to the actual article. Also, the original version of this post misspelled Ms Cutler’s second name.

Last week, Techcrunch’s Kim-Mai Cutler published an excellent – and detailed – summary of the history of housing, affordability and the housing development environment in the Bay Area. You may not be aware, but in the Bay Area in general and San Francisco in particular there has been a growing movement of people who are unhappy with gentrification and rising rents that they believe has been caused by the tech industry. Protesters have been blocking and vandalising Google buses and have even been known to harass Google employees at homes (full disclosure, I work for Google in Seattle). I highly recommend the post, it’s truly excellent, and a few interesting titbits jumped out at me, and I thought I would share them.

The big advancement in thinking in the article is about how rent control and NIMBYism interplay and create a startlingly hostile environment that pushes affordability out of anyone’s best interest:

San Francisco has a roughly thirty-five percent homeownership rate. Then 172,000 units of the city’s 376,940 housing units are under rent control. (That’s about 75 percent of the city’s rental stock.)

Homeowners have a strong economic incentive to restrict supply because it supports price appreciation of their own homes. It’s understandable. Many of them have put the bulk of their net worth into their homes and they don’t want to lose that. So they engage in NIMBYism under the name of preservationism or environmentalism, even though denying in-fill development here creates pressures for sprawl elsewhere. They do this through hundreds of politically powerful neighborhood groups throughout San Francisco like the Telegraph Hill Dwellers.

Then the rent-controlled tenants care far more about eviction protections than increasing supply. That’s because their most vulnerable constituents are paying rents that are so far below market-rate, that only an ungodly amount of construction could possibly help them. Plus, that construction wouldn’t happen fast enough — especially for elderly tenants.

So we’re looking at as much as 80 percent of the city that isn’t naturally oriented to add to the housing stock.

More below the fold.

Continue reading “Rent Control, Protectionism and Affordability”

Here’s what we know so far about the SR-99 tunnelling project:

1. Bertha, the tunnel boring machine (TBM) has been more or less completely blocked since early December.
2. The TBM was damaged in part by a metal pipe WSDOT installed to study this tunnel project’s feasibility.[1]
3. The tunneling won’t start again until the end of the summer, with the tunnelling contractor, Seattle Tunnel Partners (STP) hoping it will begin by Sept. 1st at the earliest.
4. The TBM had problems early on, during testing after construction in Japan.
5. Internal reports from the STP and WSDOT show that there are more problems with coordination and oversight. It also shows that the tunnelling was never on track, even before the current stoppage.

Here’s what we know about the traffic and funding for the tunnelling:

1. Viaduct traffic is down 40% in the past three years.
2. In order to raise the needed tolls to help pay for the tunnel, more trips would need to go through the tunnel than currently travel the viaduct. It’s worth noting the viaduct serves more locations[2] than the tunnel would.
3. WSDOT’s traffic projections have been off, as traffic as been declining on all roads, rather than increasing.
4. There’s also confusion over who will pay for the now-certain cost-overruns.

All of these bullet points are new bits of information since we last voted on the tunnel, back in 2011. Take a look at this map here. Continue reading “Should we continue with Bertha?”

The owners of the Seattle Greet Wheel, Great Western Pacific, have announced a plan to build a gondola from the Convention Center to the waterfront on Union Street. Here’s KUOW on the subject, and the Seattle Times has more details, including a potential route map, and this bit of detail:

At a news conference, Griffith said the system would run east and west; be privately financed; require no tax dollars; pose no risk to the city; and bring people into the waterfront area of the city, a region that is now difficult to access due to lack of parking and continuing construction.

I few bits of detail:

• The cars are supposed to be 40 or 50 feet off the ground, which would pose privacy issues for any apartments or condos on that street at or around that height.
• No word yet on how much a trip would cost, or whether an Orca could be used.
• The system would be paid with private financing, but use the public right-of-way.

I think a gondola there is a great idea, but I think there might be better ways to get it than let a private developer finance, build it, and operate it. With private operations, the system is likely to be a one-off, and the trips are likely to be rather expensive. I wonder if there isn’t a way to get this paid with private money but operated publicly.

Last time I was in London, I rode the “Emirates Air Line” (different from Emirates Airline), a gondola that opened in London for the 2012 Olympics. The gondola was originally meant to be entirely privately financed, but the project went significantly over-budget. In the end, Emirates Airlines paid £36 million of the £60 million price tag in exchange for 10 years of “branding” of the line, which is included on Transport for London rail maps along with the Underground, the Overground and the Docklands light rail.

Now, Seattle’s not London, and we’re not hosting the Olympics, but there may still be a way to get this or other gondolas paid for without significant public expenditure while still maintaining public ownership. The best thing about contracts for naming rights is that they can expire. What do you think? Is it worth it to let a private company put their own fixed infrastructure over the public right-of-way?