Ben Schiendelman

Liveblogging from ULI Reality Check

April 30, 2008 by Ben Schiendelman

Update (daimajin): That’s a well dressed live blogger!

Good morning! I’ll be liveblogging from the Urban Land Institute’s Reality Check workshop today.

This workshop is about understanding growth, and planning for our urban layout as 1.7 million new people are born and move here by 2040. Where will they live? How will we move them?

Governor Christine Gregoire is currently standing in front of a breakfast with about 250 local leaders – from elected officials to business leaders to prominent researchers – explaining what we’re going to do today.

Wow, she’s just said (and I paraphrase): “What international city has on-street parking? What international city has two-way streets downtown?” She’s also just pointed out that I-5 brings us congestion – and that mass transit is part of the solution. The rail system we expected to start in the 1970s has been delayed nearly 40 years.

08:40 Update: She’s discussing funding mechanisms for transportation, and who permits development – the fact that we need to streamline permitting, for instance, where we now have a mishmash of city, county, state, and federal, rather than an integrated system.

She’s addressing framing very well here. She’s pointing out that we are not forcing anyone out of their cars, or to move to places where they don’t want to live, but rather we’re creating affordable housing and transportation that people will choose to live in, and choose to use.

She’s brought up LA and Houston as examples of cities where the choices made, where the planning used, did not effectively address growth – and that we don’t want to go that way, but we need to work together now, because we don’t have more time to wait.

It looks like we’re moving into the workshop room shortly. I’ll post again once people start.

A Google Maps tour of Central Link, part 1

April 28, 2008 by Ben Schiendelman

I was looking at Seattle on Google Earth this morning, and I noticed that much of the city has been updated with new images. This is fantastic from a transit standpoint – the last images were taken at a very early stage of construction. Since then, we’ve come a long way, and I just thought I’d link everyone to some highlights. Because Google Earth and Google Maps use the same image data, everything here is a link you can open in your browser.

Let’s start at the top. This is where the rails disappear into the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel. If we scroll out just a little, we can see the DSTT connects directly to the I-90 center roadway. If you happen to work in Seattle and ride a bus that comes in on I-90 in the morning, you probably use these direct access ramps today. These were designed with curves and grades that can be used for rail transit – these are why it makes perfect sense to build light rail over the I-90 bridge.

Moving south, we have Stadium Station. Last night I watched thousands of people come out of Safeco Field – many of them walked across 4th Ave S. to their cars, but they could just as easily have been walking to this station. This station also serves two Metro bus bases, the maintenance facility for Amtrak and Sounder trains, and likely many Port of Seattle workers. Just south of this station is a storage track – a third track in the middle of the other two. As Roger told us on the lunch bus tour this weekend, at the end of big games, this track can hold an empty light rail vehicle (or four) so that when a train leaves the station completely packed and there are many more people waiting, another train can run right away rather than making game-goers wait for several minutes.

Next there’s SoDo Station. This is right next door to the USPS parking facility, and a few blocks from both Starbucks (west) and Tully’s (east) headquarters – not to mention Seattle Schools’ headquarters building.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Link’s Operations and Maintenance base is complete in this image. We can see the nine tracks that enter the building, as well as the five long storage tracks just to the east of it. The tracks that go inside provide access to maintenance bays that provide access under and over the vehicles, as well as a painting room and a special bay for removing and maintaining the ‘trucks’ – the assemblies under the cars that contain the axles, wheels and electric motors (yes, I took a picture of an electric motor).

Near the base, you can see the west portal of the Beacon Hill tunnel. This is a bit old – see all those things sitting around just south of the track? Those are stacks of tunnel segments. Each stack builds a five foot long ring of tunnel – but they’re all used now, except for one or two extra that were probably kept in case of breakage. The truck leaving the site from the south is a great example of Sound Transit’s protection of the Duwamish waterway – you can see that the ground is wet around it. Sound Transit’s contractor, Obayashi, is required to spray down the wheels of vehicles leaving the site so that the mud doesn’t wash into city drainage.

Last, for now, is the Beacon Hill station site itself. Two round holes are visible here. The larger one, on the left, will have four high-speed elevators bringing riders into and out of the station, which is 165 feet below ground. These elevators get you from top to bottom and vice versa in 20 seconds – four is more than enough for the long-term needs of the station. The smaller hole provides an emergency exit stair. The station itself will be two relatively small structures called headhouses, one with elevator equipment over the large hole, and a quite small one over the other. Most of the property you see here will be returned to the landowner for redevelopment once construction is complete.

We’ll move on to the east portal and southward later.

I am Generally Content with Sound Transit

April 21, 2008 by Ben Schiendelman

So, on this blog, sometimes, we disagree. This is a response to Martin’s post below. There are things about Sound Transit I gripe about (and who doesn’t have nitpicks about anything they’re interested in?), but what Martin wrote about are not gripes I have. Here’s why.

1) When an organization’s leadership is replaced, like an administration, there is no reason to continue to use the benchmarks set forth by an old administration, especially when we know they were faulty. It’s pointless to tell someone every day that they are late when there is no way they could ever have been on time, because they inherited someone else’s work. It is meaningful to measure them based on the job they were given. Sound Transit is not a person. There is no “they” who made a mistake in the original estimates for Link. The people who made those mistakes are no longer making decisions that will lead them into the same situations, so benchmarking the agency based on those mistakes, made more than a decade ago, does nothing but create an attitude of distrust rather and foul any recognition of progress made.

2) The choice was: Build the Rainier Valley at grade, or build nothing. Those were your options. And Portland’s MAX is on time, as is Tacoma Link. I do not see how Central Link should be any different, as it is built to higher standards than either of those for grade separation. Also, I’d be a lot more worried about the South Seattle crossings than the ones in the Valley – those are the ones with long trucks and heavier game traffic. I’m still not worried.

3) Signal timing can only happen in one direction without completely impeding the flow of cross-traffic. Unless you have a fantastic new theory that transportation managers the world over would love to see, this is simply impossible to implement. You’d end up with wildly varying signal lengths. Sure, with a long section and only a couple of crossings, you can time trains to avoid this. You cannot do that with a dozen or more crossings in a handful of miles.

4) Critics can’t kill U-Link. We’re not voting on it again. I do agree I’d like to see some obvious work so people have something to look forward to, but I’m not that worried about it.

A Quick Comment on the Paris Metro

April 13, 2008 by Ben Schiendelman

A common lament about Link Light Rail is that it is light rail, rather than a “real subway” – and supposedly lower capacity.

So hear this! Our platforms on Link are somewhere around 120m – 95 foot cars times four. I’ve paced out a few Metro stations today, and a lot of them appear to be under 100m. Line 1 has platform lengths of some 75m.

Methinks Link’s capacity is just fine.

Oh, one more thing. Paris has made the mistake of using rubber tires on several metro lines. The lines still have rails – they could use rail rolling stock – but they’re using rubber. I’m sure it gives them slightly better acceleration, but boy are they a bumpy ride.

Headed to France for a Week

April 9, 2008 by Ben Schiendelman

Hey folks – I’m off to France until next Friday. Paris for a few days first, then Strasbourg for a few more. I’m going to ride SNCF’s new iDTGV service, through which I saved a few euro and got to print my ticket from the series of tubes. I don’t know if it’ll be any different from the regular TGV service, but if it is, I’ll let you know. I hear there’s a bar.

Is there anything anyone wants to know about the systems over there? I’ll be in Paris and Strasbourg, so I’ll be using the RER and the Métro (check out this picture – and we’re complaining about Capitol Hill), then on the LGV Est between the two cities. The LGV Est is the most recent extension of the TGV system – standard gauge rail, with a top speed of 320kph. That’s two hundred miles an hour – faster than you can jog! What’s even funnier is that it’ll probably beat its own speed record – I’ve heard the line will likely run at 350kph once AGV trainsets are purchased. Brian might know more about this. This is the line where France proved that maglev doesn’t matter, by proving that conventional rail can go as fast (574kph) as Japan’s maglev test track (581kph). The train’s operator said that if the wind had been in their favor, they could have blown JR out of the water.

In Strasbourg (visiting my fiancée), I’ll be on the tram. A city less than half the size of Seattle – under 300,000 – has five tram lines, and will open a sixth – about when we open our first light rail line. They all look a lot like the Rainier Valley portion of our line; the trains are separated from regular traffic except at intersections. They run much longer vehicles, but only one at a time, not in groups. There is an underground section where two of the lines go under their intercity/commuter rail station downtown.

An aside: Her parents live in the nearby town of Sarrebourg, with some 13,000 people. They get not only regular intercity train service during the day (trains every couple of hours off-peak, more often on-peak), but they get two daily TGV services from Strasbourg. That TGV service alone compares to our Seattle-Vancouver service – and even the regular service is faster than our trains. Sad, isn’t it?

Biofuels And Climate Change

April 2, 2008 by Ben Schiendelman

In light of this week’s Time magazine article calling biofuels a scam, I think it’s well past time to bring up that which has been touted as a savior for the automobile lifestyle.

The basic idea is this: the carbon dioxide released by oil that we get out of the ground contributes to climate change. When we grow crops like soybeans, rapeseed, and corn, we get a source of oil to burn as the plants ‘fix’ carbon dioxide from the air. The biomass that we can’t convert to oil offsets the carbon dioxide released in the agricultural process, so at the end of the growing season we’ve both generated fuel and captured some of our previous carbon dioxide emissions – and the more efficient our crop, the more we capture.

As a result of this idea, several subsidies are now available to biofuel producers in the US and other countries, and a growing number of local governments have mandated that their fleets be partially fueled by biofuels. King County Metro is one example – our buses are fueled in part by biodiesel. These subsidies to producers are intended to help switch US fuel consumers to locally produced fuels, rather than foreign oil.

Here’s where the problems begin. For starters, most of that subsidized fuel isn’t staying in the US, because the producers can make more money in foreign markets. That’s bad for us, because it means our tax dollars aren’t helping at home. On top of that, our biggest biofuel subsidies go to corn-based ethanol, and it’s becoming more and more clear that corn is one of the least efficient ways to produce biofuels. In fact, there’s some disagreement as to whether corn ethanol production even nets us as as much energy as it takes to produce.

Some of the other biofuel crops fare better in that regard. It’s been generally accepted that some of today’s biofuel crops are energy positive, such as soybean biodiesel. Unfortunately, it looks like biofuel proponents (including, in the past, myself) have been missing a key part of the puzzle. As biofuels become more widespread and more profitable, as the original niche market for used frying oil has become a worldwide industry, land is becoming an issue.

Now, every time demand for biofuels increases, it results in rainforest in the Amazon being burned down for oil crops. This is what that looks like from above – please do look. As the New York Times recently reported, two new peer-reviewed studies published in the journal Science show that clearing this land emits hundreds of times more carbon dioxide than biofuels grown there can recapture. In fact, even when growing much more efficient switchgrass rather than corn, using existing US cropland has similar results. The soybean growers groups that funded the study responded to these findings by suspending their grants to the University of Minnesota, the institution conducting the research.

It gets worse. The price of food is increasing – in part because food crops now must compete directly with fuel crops for land and fresh water. The United Nations World Food Programme estimated a few years ago that the number of undernourished people today, some 850 million, could be reduced to 400 million by mid-century. They now estimate that this number will go up to 1.2 billion. This is not to say that biofuels are the only problem – Increased demand caused by prosperity in China and India could account for some of the price increases in basic crops, as well as investors shifting their money from stocks to commodities – but a problem they are.

In addition, the loss of biodiversity caused by dramatically adding new farmland for growing fuel is devastating. We bring new diseases to the modern world by pressuring rainforest fauna into urban environments, and we seriously damage the ability of these ecosystems to adapt to hardships like disease and drought.

There could be a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s possible that algae-based, so called third-generation biofuels could dramatically reduce arable land use, using closed loop systems for water. Switchgrass-based biodiesel can use otherwise unfarmable land, but like used fryer oil, that’s a niche production market that largely serves to promote the biofuel industry.

Diesel Jettas aren’t going to solve our transportation energy problem. Personally, of course, I think the best real solution we have right now is to build electric rail transit so that we get a head start on adapting our community layout to a greener future. I hope this helps provide food (or fuel) for thought.

A Rehash: What Was Wrong With The Monorail

March 19, 2008 by Ben Schiendelman

A week ago, while talking about the viaduct, a friend said to me “If only we had just built the monorail…”

A few days later, when he regained consciousness and they took him out of the ICU (joking! joking!), I had calmed down. I gave him a list of why the monorail would never have worked, was a bad idea in the first place, and would probably have ended up half-built and bankrupt:

First, putting your technology choice in your law is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. Your law should always say something like “high capacity transit” or “fixed guideway transit” – something flexible – that way you don’t get backed into a corner. There were very few initial bids for the monorail – and only one that held up for long. This is not a standardized transportation system – there are many competing technologies for both trains and guideways. They’re generally proprietary – only one vendor will sell you the trains to go on your tracks. That means single bids, which kind of defeats the purpose of competitive bidding, don’t you think?

Second, don’t claim your fantastical technology will “pay for itself”. Seriously, that was how this all started – “it will be profitable”, we were told, “companies will be falling all over themselves to get the contract”. Yeah, and my buddies in Baghdad don’t know where to put all the floral arrangements. The original monorail group started out with that claim, then moved to $18-36 million a mile with operating costs recovered through fares (still no chance in hell), then more like $50-100 million a mile… eventually it became clear that it was, actually, a transit system, and that transit systems do, indeed, cost money. Too late: making all those crazy claims killed their credibility.

Third, and maybe even most importantly: This was supposed to be grassroots, bringing people together. Instead, it became an anti-light-rail festival of lies, alienating the support of transit users and people with brains everywhere. “Light rail can’t climb a grade”, they said, when the stretch we’ve built along SR-518 is as steep as their Hitachi monorail could do. “Light rail isn’t elevated”, they said… I hope everyone on this blog realizes the humor in that statement. “Light rail is so expensive”, they said (and I’m leaving out their capital letters and exclamation points) – but it turns out that the differences in cost between light rail and monorail are negligible. They poked fun at their base supporters, and it cost them.

Fourth, to cut costs, they planned to use single tracking and switches over the West Seattle Bridge (and they eventually cut Ballard from their plan entirely). Switches, for monorail, are huge, cumbersome devices that take many times longer than standard rail switches to actually switch over. The maximum frequency of trains over the bridge would have been choked off by switch actions between every set of trains. Even after making that decision, the monorail agency still advertised three minute headways – when they would have been physically impossible.

The rose-colored glasses the monorail agency looked through at every issue bit them time and again. They claimed that their real estate costs would be low because they “only had to pay for posts in the ground”, that their columns would be “thinner than light rail” (they weren’t), and that they would offer a “quieter, smoother ride” – they wouldn’t have. I’m not even discussing the financing plan – it was astounding. Along every step of the way, the agency lied, taking advantage of Sound Transit’s bad position at the time to hit as hard as they could at light rail, rather than collaborating. Oh, yeah, and they spent more on advertising alone than they were bringing in. …And their projections for car ownership (their funding source was an MVET) were far too high.

I’m glad they’re gone. There was no opportunity for mass transit there – they failed so many times in so many arenas that I hope that’s clear. All they did was confuse the public and spend our money. Yeah, I know, Ballard and West Seattle residents feel cheated – but it’s like Publishers’ Clearinghouse – you weren’t actually going to win a million dollars. We don’t have the tax base in Seattle alone, especially not just with an MVET, to build mass transit in that corridor.

We will. Once light rail is built northward to the county line, those will be the next logical places for Sound Transit to build using North King money.

We Do Need Park and Rides (For Now)

March 14, 2008 by Ben Schiendelman

Will over at HorsesAss has weighed in on the Sierra Club’s changing goalposts for what they’ll support, and I certainly have an opinion. Parking places next to transit are eventually going to stop being a solution, but for now, they’re necessary.

ST2.1 won’t pass at all without park and rides. Only urban core voters – North King – will vote for a package without them, because they’re the only constituency that has existing development around potential stations.

Transit oriented development – building a mix of uses to directly take advantage of transit facilities – is slow. I mean, all development is pretty slow, but the process of going to city councils to change their city plan to build something that your neighbors are wary of – that can take a long time. In addition, this can be a multistage development process – you might not get mixed use all at once, it may take several investment cycles to fill in the space around a station. A parking structure brings potential users where few would otherwise tread. With fifty riders a day, no business can reasonably make a go next to a station where there is currently nothing – but with five hundred riders a day, they likely can. Those park and rides can eventually be torn down for more TOD, in a political climate where the vast majority of riders come from the adjacent mixed use. That has happened on Capitol Hill and downtown in recent years (parking structures and surface parking being replaced with mixed use).

Ridership would be abysmal for years without park and rides. We wouldn’t see another “Ridership Exceeds National Average by a Ridiculous Amount” piece in the P-I for a long time. Worse, and more importantly, you’d end up with newer ST lines branded as “poorly planned” as a result, compared to other systems in the US, and that’s big ammo to kill ST3. Just walking users don’t get you squat when all the nearby housing sits on full lots – the distances involved up near Shoreline and down near Federal Way are immense. Also note that there are often big parking lots along 99, so a South line would have nearly no walking ridership until TOD was in place.

In terms of environmental impact – in the short term, a short drive to transfer to transit for the longer portion of the trip (as we see with Sounder now) is by far a net environmental benefit, even if you account for the concrete structure. The vehicle miles prevented for those users vastly outstrip the ones they still incur getting to the station. That would be even more so with South Link, because you’d make the average trip for Sounder park-and-riders shorter (fewer people would drive over from Federal Way, etc, to get Sounder). In the long term, you give these people a permanent incentive to move closer to their rail station, creating demand for TOD. When they move (which they do, as we see residential development along Sounder), they open up a parking spot for a new person and the incentive recycles to a new user.

These park and rides aren’t perfect, but not building them is a good way to really damage ST’s public image and prevent us from getting more transit in the long run. I can’t say this enough, and specifically for you, Sierra Club leaders: The perfect is the enemy of the good. All of these environmental issues are complex, you know that very well. Addressing only part of any given issue, like park and rides, without looking at the whole thing, the overall environmental cost of sprawl, is a good way to lose sight of the real problems and the real solutions. We city people are going to be just fine walking to a subway station to get to everywhere we need to go – but someone in Shoreline cannot simply change their life to do that. The best we can do is provide them a choice that makes them consider their options. They will, and those park and rides are the best way to expose them to those choices.

Clearing Something Up about East Link

March 13, 2008 by Ben Schiendelman

The most common reaction I’ve seen, here and elsewhere, to Sound Transit’s plans for East Link light rail is:

“Why wouldn’t they go all the way to Microsoft?”

So, for the answer: They can’t right now, and it’s not really a choice for them because of subarea equity.

You may have heard of this, but for those who aren’t entirely clear on it, let me explain. Subarea equity is part of the state law that created Sound Transit. It requires that Sound Transit collect the same level of taxes in each subarea (of which there are five), and spend the money collected in a given subarea in that same subarea.

It’s a very good thing – Pierce and Snohomish portions of the Sound Transit district wouldn’t vote for their packages if they weren’t assured money collected there would be spent there!

The downside, and the reason Sound Transit can’t “just build to Microsoft,” is simple. If they got more money from the East King subarea, as in, collected a higher tax in that subarea to build that project, they would also have to collect a higher tax in every other subarea. We already know where that goes – post-election polling showed that Proposition 1 failed primarily due to its size. Sound Transit is also prohibited by state law from putting an identical measure (I suspect even one too close) to what they last submitted on the ballot, so changing things really is necessary.

So, before we get all riled up about Sound Transit building to the hospital, let’s step back. Do we want the agency to fail at the ballot again? No, so it can’t be so big that people kill it. Do we want light rail to Microsoft, ever? Yes, and it’s trivial to build an extension the next time around. We’re at least ten years out from opening East Link, so we can probably do it in the meantime – but if we don’t have an East Link to extend, what will we get? Nothing at all.

PS: With a new 520 bridge, there will be HOV lanes the whole way from I-5 to Microsoft. 60-minute 545 commutes will be a thing of the past long before East Link would open anyway.

Congestion Pricing Anytime Soon is a Bad Idea

March 11, 2008December 4, 2008 by Ben Schiendelman

Lately people have been tossing around an idea which I find, at best, dubious. The concept is simple: Add a freeway toll that varies – charging people more when traffic is heaviest, and presumably encouraging them to choose other methods of transport. This in itself sounds great – some people would shift to transit, and some would shift to working other hours, based on how congested the roadways are.

Wait a minute. Let’s say I live somewhere like Renton, and work at the UW (to allay potential confusion, I personally do neither). There’s virtually no effective transit service between those points – or most other regional commutes. I have to work on the UW’s schedule – a few commuters can’t change the schedule of the chemistry library or move a class, and I have to be there when students need me.

So, as that Renton-UW user, I’m representative of a large voting bloc in the region. I might be willing to take two trains to work, but I’m not about to take two buses when that’s slower than me driving – they sit in the same traffic I do. I have little choice – so I would start to consider this a tax. An unfair one, too, as it disproportionately affects little old me, an already struggling service employee who can’t afford to live in the city. I would also have to be reminded of this tax every day – unlike a property tax or income tax, this tax would be simple and highly visible. I would rally against it.

Now, let’s step back. That guy I’ve been describing? There’s a small chance any one of them would become a new Tim Eyman – and they would win. Any projects funded with congestion pricing would be flogged to death, and we’d start back at square one – just like many transit agencies were forced to when they lost the ability to collect MVET (a car tab renewal fee). How much money did Sound Transit have to spend on legal fees to defend the MVET – just to pay bonds issued after the public had already voted for them? How much service did King County Metro have to cut while they scrambled to get a sales tax to match the lost revenue?

The issues, as I see them:

There are no alternatives yet for many drivers. Sounder service is already packed – people are riding it as it becomes available. We don’t have that much rail (yet).
We’re already seeing rising energy costs that are encouraging infill development (converting parking lots to larger structures) in the city core. That will also help increase transit ridership and give more people new choices.
This would be viewed by many as a tax, and a contentious one at that.
Whatever is funded by this would nominally see revenue *decrease* over time, rather than increase. There would be no incentive for the programs funded to actually reduce congestion, as they’d lose money!
Reducing the number of people who travel will have a negative economic impact on the region.

I’ve been hearing from the local Sierra Club that they want congestion pricing to fund transit. Okay, so let me get this straight: We want to fund transit, something that costs more as more people use it, with revenues that decrease as more people switch to transit?

We don’t need this fight, we have plenty of battles already. We can’t punish people for going to work when they have yet no viable alternatives. I’d like to get some more light rail built instead of going on the defensive again.