All posts by andrew

Recently there has been a lot of digital ink spilled here on the subject of gas taxes and the 18th amendment. Outgoing Governor Christine Gregoire has proposed a wholesale motor vehicle fuel excise tax to help pay for school buses. This times article focuses mostly who would pay the tax, consumers or producers*, and whether or not it’s a good idea to use the gas tax to pay for school buses when there are other transportation needs.

I don’t have especially strong opinions on whether school buses should be funded with the gas tax. However, one topic the times article does not mention is the 18th amendment. Nor do any of the other other discussions of the idea. I asked the Governor’s Office if they have considered whether this proposal would violate the 18th amendment. They said they had considered it, and decided the proposal likely would not. Now, whole sale motor vehicle fuel excise taxes are pretty much exactly the sort of taxes the 18th amendment is about: “all excise taxes collected by the State of Washington on the sale, distribution or use of motor vehicle fuel“. It does follow that if gas taxes can pay for school buses, then gas taxes can pay for virtually any transportation project. Both Metro buses and Link carry Seattle public school children, for example.

Now I don’t think this will pass the two-thirds requirements in the state legislature, so we probably will never know whether this would have actually been constitutional. But my point is there are a lot of ways pass this 18th amendment hurdle, and there’s starting to be some talk of raising new revenues from a gas tax. Let’s see if we can get some of that money for transit.

* This is an econ 101 question, and the answer is both, but the degree depends on the price elasticity of demand.

Today is the last day of normal Metro bus service until January 2nd.

Community transit will have no service on Christmas and New Year’s Day, and reduced service Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. Sound Transit will operate similarly on those days, though Christmas and New Year’s will be a Sunday schedule. Unfortunately Pierce Transit’s website only shows holidays through February of 2012, but it appears there will be reduced service on Christmas Eve, Christmas, possibly Boxing Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

WSDOT has uploaded a number of photos of the SR-99 TBM machine onto flickr. However you feel about this tunnel project – I for one, have hated it from the get-go – this is an impressive piece of machinery.

Here are some previous TBM links on STB, including some of TBMs breaking through.

View Larger Map

I’m planning a trip back to Sweden, Denmark and Germany to visit some friends and relatives, I am need to make my favourite train trip in the world: the Rødby Harbour (in Denmark) – Puttgarden (in Germany) ferry train. That’s a train that rides on to a boat, and then back off again on the other side. I’m not sure how widely known this oddity of rail transportation is, so I’ve added a few videos I’ve found below the fold. Apparently a bridge is planned across the straight which will end the ferry train in 2018.

What other oddities are you aware of? Bus boats? Put them in the comments.
Continue reading “Ferrytrain”

A month ago, Martin posted this amazing video (watch it fullscreen with the audio off) from STLTransit. Since then (and before, too I guess), STLTransit has posted similar videos for a great number of cities around the world in their youtube feed. The Seattle one is impressive, but taken together STLTransit has really made something. I’ve watched all of them, and I have learned a few things comparing them that I’d like to share with you below the fold.

Continue reading “Visualizing Transit”

San Francisco is apparently exploring need-based transit fares, with the idea that pass prices could be based on income rather than simply age or disability:

A struggling 19-year-old service worker barely earning enough to make ends meet has to pay $64 for her monthly Muni pass. A wealthy 66-year-old homeowner from Pacific Heights can purchase that same fare for $22. Seem fair?

Apparently San Francisco has a “Lifeline” programme with a discount for “residents whose income equals or falls below 200 percent of federal poverty levels”, which isn’t a lot of money in a city whose average rent is well over $2500 a month. The article goes on to discuss the pros and cons of a need-based system.

I’ve noticed, however, in Seattle we have no low-income fare programme that I am aware of; our discounts are for the disabled, seniors and youth. Which is too bad because it’s for precisely the same reason transit fares could be burdensome to the disabled and the elderly that the fares might be burdensome to other passengers with low-incomes: lack of money and more likely an acute dependency on transit. A large part of me thinks we should try the same thing here: give everyone with low incomes the option of a cheaper pass. I think a tiered-system, based on income is a very good way to make transit fares.

Something else I’ve noticed about the Puget pass relative to other San Francisco’s passes. As you can see, the monthly Puget Pass takes more requires more transit trips to pay for itself than Muni’s pass does, however, you can use one Puget Pass for multiple transit systems’ service here. So it’s a bit apples and oranges. But still, the discounts offered here to the disabled and seniors are larger than those in San Francisco, for single fares, but the discount for getting a pass is smaller for everyone here. Just a point of interest.

[Update] I wrote this post a few weeks ago, at that time Oscar Niemeyer was still living. As the358 points out in the comments, Oscar Niemeyer has since died.

Recently, I watched Gary Hustwit’s Design Trilogy on Netflix, and I thought the last the last film, 2011’s Urbanized, would be something this blog’s readers would be interested in. The film interviews city planners, architects, politicians, and activists – among others – on the topics of urban design and cities against the back drop of cities around the globe. I’ve been extremely interested in this topic for almost a decade, and still a lot in the documentary was new to me.

The topics are pretty varied: sanitation in Mumbai, safety in South African townships, sprawl in Phoenix, and socially just transportation in Bogota to name just a few – but all are interesting, and the cast is pretty impressive. Who could be better than Oscar Niemeyer himself comes out to make a case for Brasilia’s design (by the way, here’s a list of things younger than Oscar Niemeyer)? Bogota’s Mayor, Enrique has some of the best quotes in the piece. My favourite:

People seem to imagine parking is a … fundamental right… So if you ask me where you should park, the mayor can tell them it’s almost as if you ask[ed] me where you should put your food, or your clothes. This is not a governmental problem.

The movie seems to be trying to take a balanced approach, but the advocates for “New Urbanism” are more numerous and more effective than the advocates for other approaches to the subject. Jane Jacobs also gets covered in favorable way. I’m okay with that, but if you want something that celebrates sprawl as much as it celebrates density, you won’t get it from Urbanized.

Also, the film leaves a lot of history out, which is unfortunate. It also has a lot of discussion on aesthetics and function, but not much on regulation or zoning. Of course this doesn’t make the film less worth watching, but it does leave me with my major complaint: this is pretty awesome 90 minute documentary, but I think it would be even better as a Ken Burns-style PBS documentary.

This can probably be filed in the “projects that will never get built” folder, but here are some sexy renderings of a proposed gondola system in Austin, Texas. There’s also a decent, brief article discussing the pros and cons of gondolas as public transportation. I’ve never been to Austin, but I can imagine a number of places here that a gondola would be useful.

The St Louis Federal Reserve has a pretty cool data graphing tool on their website, and I recently learned from Matt Yglesias that they now have vehicle miles traveled (VMT) statistics for the last 40-odd years. I knew per-capita VMT has been down for a few years, even pre-dating the recession. Some of the reasons are explored in this article, so I won’t drill into them in too much detail here. But I was surprised to find that total VMT is also down, even though population has increased. I’ve put a couple more graphs below the fold if you are curious.

Continue reading “Vehicle Miles Traveled Statistics”

Matt Yglesias had a great short post on why passenger-miles-travelled is a poor metric for measuring the greenness of a mass transit system:

The whole idea of trying to talk about which city’s mass transit system is greenest in terms of emissions per passenger-mile is terribly flawed.

Just think of it in terms of cars. Driving 5 miles in a 20 mpg car takes a quarter of a gallon of gasoline. Driving 25 miles in a 45 mpg car takes over half a gallon. Being the guy with the 5 mile commute and the 20 mpg car is considerably greener than being the guy driving much further in his Prius. The point of intra-urban transportation networks—whether you’re talking about the mass transit element or the private cars or bicycles or whatever—isn’t to transport people arbitrary distances, it’s to get people where they’re going. Having trips that aren’t very long isn’t cheating, it’s a great way to achieve efficiency.

Of course, greenness isn’t the only useful measure of a transportation system. I’ll just add two points on top of what Matt has said.
Continue reading “On Passenger Miles and Greenness”