Ben Schiendelman joined in 2007 to better consolidate news and information about our upcoming transit expansions, and to build a better base to further grow our system. He previously wrote the blog Higher Frequency, and worked on the 2008 Mass Transit Now campaign. Ben refuses to own a driver's license.
Tuesday’s mayoral election will help decide future of transit in Seattle for years to come, and that decision will be made by those voters who bother to return their ballots. Not very many people have sent in their ballots, and that’s not a good sign for transit advocates.
King County Elections has predicted turnout for this election will be 35%, but even that may be optimistic. So far, only 15% of voters have sent in their ballots. That’s not good for transit.
Early voters are usually older, many of them over age 65. That age group is statistically the least likely to support improving public transit, from saving Metro bus service to expanding rail in Seattle and our region. They are the most likely to be influenced by the Seattle Times’ attack on sustainable, dense, transit-friendly policies as being some kind of “war on cars.” If turnout remains this low, then it will be those voters who decide which two candidates face off against each other in November. And the candidates they choose might not be good for transit in Seattle.
We can’t let that happen. We need pro-transit voters to turn in their ballots now – and then make sure their family and friends vote too. Seattle Transit Blog has endorsed Mike McGinn for mayor because of his strong pro-transit, pro-density record. You can find our complete 2013 primary endorsements here for other important races, too.
Seattle residents are strongly in favor of transit. We shouldn’t let our elections be decided by the small minority that is anti-transit. Please vote.
Yesterday, Seattle Times editorial board member Bruce Ramsey poked Mayor McGinn for including the Seattle Transit Master Plan’s map of future high capacity transit corridors on one of his campaign mailers, calling it McGinn’s map of “imaginary rail lines.”He goes on: “…if you vote for Mike McGinn, Seattle will have rail lines to West Seattle, White Center, Georgetown, Rainier Beach, Seward Park, Interbay, Ballard, Fremont, Lake City, Maple Leaf and Aurora North.”
Exactly. And it’s not just Mayor McGinn. That’s the plan our City Council unanimously voted for last year. Ramsey makes the point for us, though – McGinn is the only mayoral candidate championing this future. Creating that future is why I started Seattle Subway, and it’s one of many reasons I support him.
On Monday, at the full City Council meeting, all the cards were laid out on the table, and the Ship Canal Crossing Study didn’t quite have a flush.
The study will, if funded, build on the work being done in the Ballard to Downtown Rail Study to make sure any new infrastructure serves everyone. It will start with the options for transit crossings, figure out how they’ll work with the existing bridges, where bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure should be, and where cars should go.
In order for this study to give answers that the city needs in time for Bridging the Gap and Sound Transit 3, it needs to start at the beginning of 2014. It takes three to four months after the council approves funding for a project for the scope to be written, bid on, and the contract awarded, so the funding has to come well before the beginning of 2014 – really, now.
So on Monday, council member O’Brien ran an amendment to the first quarter supplemental budget to fund the study starting now, instead of in 2015, where it’s currently scheduled.
After a long debate, three other council members stepped up: Conlin, who’s been a good friend to transit for some time; Bagshaw, who supports bicycling infrastructure (and this would be a biggie); and Harrell, who put mayoral politics aside to support this critical study. Thank you to all three of them, and of course to O’Brien for running the amendment.
The other five, though, had other ideas. I can’t speak to Burgess’ or Godden’s motivations. On Facebook last night, Clark indicated she hadn’t gotten a briefing on the crossing – this is understandable if it’s the case, as this was previously just before the Government Performance and Finance Committee, but she’s a member of that committee, so I’m surprised. I’m following up to find out who’s been briefed.
The two who are especially frustrating are Licata and Rasmussen.
Licata, the same day as the amendment, ran an insert in the Seattle Times with one of the worst false premises I’ve ever seen in Seattle politics. On Metro, it says: “We must not reduce its service in order to build major new rail projects.” This is unreal – in no universe is Metro’s funding shortfall related to rail. The worst part about a campaign message like this is that it makes people less able to understand what’s going on with transit funding – and because they’ll waste their time on a fake battle, it makes getting Metro revenue harder. It’s completely irresponsible on Licata’s part.
According to one source, Rasmussen has been briefed more than once on the ship canal crossing and the importance of the timeline. Unfortunately, he decided that it was worth risking rail to Ballard to add a little bit more funding to the Fauntleroy Green Boulevard project – a street reconfiguration that doesn’t even include bike lanes.
This may have been the last chance to have the ship canal crossing study done early enough that it could influence BtG or ST3. I plan to get more details from SDOT about the shortest possible timeline for the work, and whether it could still provide guidance before being entirely complete. I’ll report back on a path forward in the next few weeks.
Update: Sally Clark was briefed by SDOT and the Mayor’s staff on this project on May 2nd.
This weekend, we learned that Councilmember Mike O’Brien will be introducing an amendment to the budget at 2:00 today to move the Ship Canal Crossing study from 2015 back to 2014.
This study is key for both Bridging the Gap’s renewal in 2015 and for a potential Sound Transit 3 in 2016. For Bridging the Gap, as the Ballard Bridge is high on the list of SDOT’s priorities, having a plan for configuring the ship canal crossings is key to making the right investments for repair or replacement. For Sound Transit 3, we need to be sure SDOT has the right data to ensure Sound Transit’s next line works well with existing traffic and transit service, and potentially serves bicycles and pedestrians, whether it’s a bridge or an undercrossing.
ST3’s project list may be locked down early in 2015, as the legislature needs to provide them authority, and any Sound Transit proposal must go through a state expert review panel before it goes to the voters. Bridging the Gap will probably be assembled in early 2015 to go before voters in November of that year. To be ready, a year plus long study must happen soon to be complete before BtG or ST3 are put together.
With both SLU and Ballard growing quickly, no matter what your priorities – cars, transit, bicycles, pedestrians – this study is a key piece in serving everyone. Delaying the crossing study could lead to missing high priority transit projects, or wasting money on fixes that turn out to be temporary.
Yesterday morning, I read a confusing story ($) about a bug in the Sound Transit bid system, and how a contractor was using it as a reason to ask for a rebid of the North Link tunnel contract.
During the bidding process, communications are sometimes made to bidders about changes. In this case, nine days before the bid window closed, Sound Transit posted a change to the schedule on which contract payments are made – they would no longer withhold 5% of payment until the end of construction. Payments on these projects are often doled out on a schedule anyway, so this just shifts that schedule a little.
There was a glitch in eBid, where notification of this document likely wasn’t emailed to most contractors. They still could see it appear in their dashboard, they just didn’t get a notification.
Last week, Sound Transit and the City of Seattle released eight options for rail from downtown to Ballard. When they presented these options, they said “mix and match” – don’t just take these as complete lines, consider each segment of each line and piece together what you’d really like to see. I wrote up a complex explanation of what a best case scenario might look like, but I got feedback that we really need a map.
Fortunately, an anonymous designer agreed to help, and voila – Option 9. The great thing about this map is that it also includes the study area’s urban centers and urban villages. These are where growth is expected to go in the next decades, so they’re a good indicator of what we should be connecting. So this map combines what we could do here, in Seattle, with what Sound Transit could build, to serve everything.
At the Ballard farmers market this Sunday, I got almost universal positive feedback about this map (and a huge sunburn). Let’s cover the frequently asked questions I got there:
Tonight will be our first chance to comment on alternatives (PDF) from Downtown to Ballard. The first thing I want to say is that none of the eight options are perfect – and that’s okay. While the handout at tonight’s meeting (PDF) will ask people to “pick an option”, SDOT and Sound Transit pointed out yesterday that these are “mix and match”. For any given part of the corridor, there are many options, and they were arranged into eight examples that represent different levels of service and cost. They offer a range of outcomes in the evaluation matrix, which I highly recommend perusing, as it also shows how each option serves the various urban villages and centers. Four of the options go through Interbay, and four through Fremont. The handout link above has a great page with all eight together. I’d say open that up and have a look. I know a lot of people looked at these last night – thanks everyone for the great twitter conversation!
And there’s something here finally in writing:
Planned light rail extensions to Lynnwood and the East Side will increase train traffic in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel (DSTT), leaving no room in the tunnel for a Ballard rail line to safely operate. If the Ballard rail line used a separate parallel tunnel to enter or exit Downtown Seattle, underground walkways could connect passengers to the DSTT.
After a great phone call yesterday afternoon, I realized that this is a good time to write a little more about park and rides.
In general, free parking is bad. Don Shoup’s paper (linked) is excellent and hasn’t been successfully challenged. His work has influenced parking policies in many cities, leading to improved traffic and improved economic activity with reduced emissions – basically, great stuff.
However, for transit stations outside Seattle, there seems to be a disconnect. While cities are implementing priced parking and increasingly re-purposing street parking for bicycle, transit and pedestrian infrastructure, transit agencies are still catching up. In 2008, Sound Transit had many parking garage and surface lot expansions in the Sound Transit 2 measure. Today, they’re looking at other station access options, but it’s still taken as a given by many transit supporters that park and rides are good. I used to be one of these, but now I’m not, and I want to explain why.
We often view ridership as an end goal of a transit system – it’s the metric we measure in the short term, and it’s a good indicator we’re on the right track, but getting riders on a train isn’t why we build transit. We build it for its positive impact on our economy, and because it increases quality of life, mostly as a direct result of more people walking to their destinations and fewer people driving. Sound Transit was created because the Puget Sound Regional Council – then the Puget Sound Council of Governments – adopted a policy for linking growth to transportation. Their 1990 Vision 2020, which said we needed a regional transportation body, and now their Vision 2040, are about managing growth – we’re building transit to create compact development, not to its own end.
Thanks to Mayor McGinn’s work collaborating with Sound Transit for the Ballard Rail Study, we now have alternatives for rail to Ballard!
Four alternatives for High Capacity Transit (Sound Transit) and four for rapid streetcar (Seattle DOT) will be unveiled on Thursday, June 27th, from 5-7pm, at the Ballard High School Commons.
From what I’ve heard, you’ll like what you see. We’ve been told the HCT alternatives include a 2nd Ave underground alignment, through Belltown, Uptown, and under Queen Anne hill. If that alternative gets through the initial screening, that opens up amazing opportunities – we could build a line fast enough to continue on to Northgate and Lake City (and beyond), and we could even work to automate it!
We’ll get more information on the alternatives at a press briefing on Wednesday, but for now, I’d just like to ask you to make the time to come, and be ready to submit comments at the meeting. Please RSVP on Facebook or by emailing me. I’ll see you there!
