All posts by Ben Schiendelman

If you thought Bellevue’s light rail saga was over, think again.  Over the next two weeks, the city will host two public meetings – an open house next Tuesday and a public hearing the Monday after – all on the subject of East Link, namely mitigation for the B2M route and terms of an MOU with Sound Transit to fund the downtown tunnel.

With ST’s adoption of the final preferred alignment, these meetings shouldn’t end up being about routing or mode choice, but that won’t stop Link opponents from using any tactic possible to drag this process on longer. The City Council’s latest complaint? That the timeline for the October 24th MOU deadline is “unrealistic,” according to City Councilmember Kevin Wallace. We’ve heard rumors that the pro-B7 council quorum might try to push this deadline out, possibly even after the council changes next January.

If anyone’s at fault for the short timeline, it’s the City, which has had plenty of time to execute an outreach process and work out an agreement with ST – but instead, it’s been wasting its effort and money pushing for options that are already clearly not cost effective, like B7-R and the Vision Line. Pinning the blame on ST certainly won’t make Bellevue look any better. If the City Council wants to get serious about collaboration and getting the tunnel it wants, it would do well to stick to ST’s timeline, which it has already impacted.

The upcoming meetings, especially the public hearing, are going to be an important chance for Bellevue citizens, the majority of whom voted for East Link, to stand up against these tactics and join other key regional voices in pushing for mass transit now.

Today, at 5:30pm at City Hall, we’ll have the opportunity to ask the Seattle City Council to place a long term, $80 Vehicle License Fee on the November ballot. There are a number of competing proposals, and all but one of them are, quite simply, bad for transit.

As Martin wrote recently, the efficiency winner (by far) of the streetcar corridors in Seattle would be the 4th/5th connector, bringing the SLU streetcar and First Hill streetcars together. Building it would dramatically reduce negative perception of the SLU streetcar and dramatically increase visibility for the streetcar network overall. With such a connector in place, any future streetcar expansion will be more cost effective and poll better – this is the project that would lead to a snowball effect for rail transit.

It’s also the easiest project to showcase during a campaign for the VLF – while wonks like us appreciate small efficiency projects and planning, a new rail corridor through downtown is a lightning rod that earns votes and creates a simple, cheap campaign message. Remember that votes are rarely about how good projects are – they’re about how easy the projects are to understand and repeat to others.

Surface/Transit/I-5 is a great example of a counterpoint – it’s unarguably the most cost effective viaduct replacement solution, but it’s the most complex and difficult to explain, so it gets short shrift. In the case of this streetcar, we would have both a good project and a simple project – exactly what we need for a November win.

Here’s the problem: Only a long-term, $80 VLF will fund this connector – and the Council hasn’t seen much pressure to put that on the ballot. Most of them are interested in a $40 or $60 package that has nothing exciting – a package that voters won’t care about or talk about, and will end up being ignored on thousands of ballots. Today, at 5:30, is our one chance to put on that pressure.

There’s another, long-term reason this is very important.

Next year, the legislature will be discussing a huge transportation package, possibly for a statewide vote. With the transit master plan largely complete, Seattle will be in a strong position to go to Olympia to ask for transit funding for one of our half dozen unfunded high capacity transit corridors. Olympia knows they need our vote to overcome rural and suburban anti-tax voters, and they’ll be open to providing us a good incentive to come to the polls.

Our best argument to demand real funding for transit is to be bold today. I want to walk into a hearing room in Olympia next year and testify that Seattle uses every penny given to it by the legislature – and that we want more, from a progressive funding source. The only way I can do that is if we tell the City Council, today, to use all $80 that the legislature has provided it, and to use it to build rail. If we only use $40, or $60, legislators will ask why Seattle isn’t using the funding they’ve given us – and they will balk at offering more.

So I urge you to show up tonight, at 5:30, at city hall, and demand rail transit now. This is your chance to have it today and tomorrow.

People fear change for many reasons. In the International District, unfounded fears have reared their ugly head again, this time in opposition to tracks for the First Hill Streetcar.

The City’s Charles Street Service Center, at 8th and Dearborn, is to be the site of the streetcar maintenance facility. Lead tracks will extend south from the line at Jackson to Dearborn. These will be the same as any other streetcar – downtown Portland, the South Lake Union Streetcar, and many others around the US and the world.

I could understand if this were an opposition, say, along a major cycling route – cyclists riding parallel to the tracks can catch a wheel in them. I could also understand an issue if there were fast-moving trains here. But – neither of these are the case. The Seattle Chinatown International District preservation and development authority, or SCIDpda, is “worried” and “concerned” that people crossing the street will trip and fall.

Now, when I first heard about this, I was given an example of a senior citizen catching a walker or cane in the rails. I can see that happening, as there’s senior housing right next to 8th – so I asked how often it happens. It turns out… it doesn’t. The city hasn’t found any instances, nor has the SCIDpda, or any other groups who have picked up on this claim. What’s more, SDOT went on to investigate in Portland, just to be sure – and heard back from Good Samaritan Hospital, located in the streetcar loop in Northwest Portland, and a retirement facility next door. They’ve never heard of a problem.

These groups say their concerns are being ignored – but they claim “hazards” and “risk” without any evidence at all. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if street safety improves – as crossings and sidewalks will be improved throughout this project. If there were ever a legitimate claim here, it’s lost in an unwillingness to accept reality.

Roger Valdez over at Seattle’s Land Use Code has a pretty amazing piece today about the analysis – or lack of it – that went into Sound Transit’s decision to waste the airspace above the Roosevelt station and build what amounts to a suburban commuter station.

This isn’t really new. In the US, transportation agencies aren’t incentivized properly to get involved in land use. Their incentive is to build the lowest risk option available to them, which is, unfortunately, generally a terrible choice for the neighborhood.

In this case, Sound Transit claims they did no economic analysis of potential development on their Roosevelt site before deciding it wasn’t worth it. With a six story mixed use building adjacent to them on one side, and a developer who’d like to build 12-15 stories on the other side of the street, I have no problem calling that decision embarrassingly dumb for the neighborhood.

Unfortunately for us people who care, it’s quite smart for the agency. They’re not a developer – they can’t spin up a limited liability corporation to build a building and then let that LLC declare bankruptcy if the building fails. They’re stuck with what they build, which means the risk to them is very high – both financially and politically –  if they don’t have an absolutely sure thing. It makes sense that they wouldn’t do an economic analysis, because the chances are vanishingly small that it would show them anything other than “don’t build anything but the station.”

What really needs to happen here is that we need to fix Sound Transit’s incentives. There aren’t easy solutions here – it’s essentially impossible for them to partner with a developer when they have a ten year planning timeframe. But there are solutions, and we need to make them happen soon enough that the agency doesn’t become hated by the neighborhoods it builds in – because that’s a great way to sink ST3 and beyond.

At yesterday’s briefing to Sound Transit’s Capital Committee, a subset of the Sound Transit board, Link staff brought forward an improved design for the Brooklyn subway station. Two months ago, we reported that Sound Transit had chosen a low risk, but less effective, station design – a single entrance halfway between NE 45th St and NE 43rd St on Brooklyn. That plan would have been a poor choice for many reasons, notably reducing station visibility and increasing the surface walking distance for most users.

Sound Transit has now confirmed that they’re moving to this new plan – a north entrance just behind the Neptune theater, and another prominently on the corner of 43rd and Brooklyn. See full presentation here. This design maintains the lower risk that originally caused the one entrance plan – keeping the station box away from UW Tower (the former Safeco building), while significantly improving station accessibility. This is very encouraging – it continues to show that Sound Transit is taking pains to ensure their long-term infrastructure is designed well from the beginning.

Last week, Mayor McGinn announced that he intends to ask for $10 million to get to 15% design for 8 miles of westside light rail.

This sounds great in theory. But Sound Transit plans to do basically the same work in a few years – they have $12 million set aside around 2015 to study the same corridor.

Stepping back outside the political arena, what makes the most sense here is for McGinn to ask voters for money to accelerate Sound Transit’s work. Having study work done a few years sooner gives us more time to build public support and look for grants.

It makes sense for several reasons to have Sound Transit as lead on a West Link project: they have experience in planning and building light rail, and they’re experienced in winning federal funds. A partnership here would save millions – if not tens of millions – and could result in a line built with both Sound Transit and city of Seattle funds, rather than a low capacity option likely to be the result of city funding alone.

The Mayor has said before that he doesn’t want “Cadillac” light rail, but we already know from previous study work that the West Seattle and Ballard corridor would develop more ridership than any of Portland’s lines, and these neighborhoods will only become more dense with time. The monorail project was right to want grade separation, at least in the city center.

We can’t afford to be in the position Portland is today. Their light rail is already running into serious limitations, only twenty-five years into a hundred year system. Trains are packed at peak times on the older lines, and there isn’t room to run them with more cars or more often.

While I applaud the Mayor’s initiative in pushing to build more mass transit, I’d like to see him work together with Sound Transit on this issue, rather than going it alone.

The Seattle Times reports that McGinn wants to ask voters for $10 million to do 15 percent design on an 8 mile potential light rail line. This is a good first step – it would do enough work to design a real ballot measure for construction, and to start looking for federal money.

I would be concerned about putting even a small measure on the ballot in 2011, but with West Seattle and Ballard residents still looking for solutions since the monorail project and light rail under way to other parts of the city, now is always the best time.

I think it’s important for the city to work with Sound Transit to prevent duplication of effort with the agency’s planning in the same corridor, but with Sound Transit’s work not planned for several years, I don’t see much risk there – Sound Transit can scope their future work to avoid overlap if they feel they can use some of the city findings.

This is encouraging – we haven’t seen any movement in this corridor since funding ST2. Any news is good news!

We all make decisions about what transportation mode to use. For most of us, these choices don’t change very often – we have routines and have thoroughly explored our options. But we do still make them – if we change jobs, if we move, if a new light rail line opens.

These decisions, like most, are largely cost-benefit: What’s the cost of busing to a suburban job and losing flexibility? How much would I save on parking if I bought a bus pass instead? They’re often complex, trying to balance everyday needs with exceptions while trying to predict future changes.

Most of us are here because we want to see those costs and benefits change: Some directly for ourselves – we want to be able to use transit, walk, or cycle more easily. Some more indirectly – we want to see lower carbon emissions per capita, or the political and social changes that come with more dense neighborhoods.

I think it’s important to recognize that an individual’s decisions about what mode to use are almost entirely a product of their environment. We all have preferences about what we want – a downtown condo and a subway, a rural house with a sports car – and these are equally valid desires. We each value our desired lifestyle differently – some people are willing to pay more than others toward their preferences – but for the most part, we are maximizers, looking for the best deal possible.

This is where public policy comes in. Public money spent on infrastructure has for centuries changed the costs and benefits for an individual when making their transportation choices. So much, in fact, that today ‘transportation choice’ is practically a code phrase for ‘not a car’, when only a hundred years ago road trips didn’t even exist – much less international flights.

The transportation and land use policy changes you’ll hear wonks and ideologues like us suggest are about changing those costs and benefits. The single largest reason these are so hard to change is that people everywhere around us have made future plans assuming the status quo. These can be as simple as “I plan to drive to work tomorrow” and as complex as “I plan to vote to expand this highway because I was elected largely due to contributions from employees of a labor union that does most of its work on highway projects.”

There’s a huge range in the relative difficulty of changing a transportation decision. On one end someone just might not know they can get a transit pass from their employer. On the other end, you might have to run challengers against entrenched politicians to stop a project. So the decisions we often make as activists are about the cost effectiveness not of transportation choices, but of our activism choices.

Activists like us can’t build a lot more transit right now. Link expansion is under construction, and getting significantly more means going to the legislature. Transportation for Washington is pushing bills to provide better local transit funding, mostly for bus agencies, but we won’t have a big opportunity to build rail for at least a few years, until today’s budget issues are worked out.

In the meantime, we can set up for the future: push to allow more development around transit, and to remove parking minimums. We’d let the market do our work for us – people who move into new buildings without parking are natural transit users, just like the vast majority of Capitol Hill voters who supported Sound Transit expansion. This is our low hanging fruit that makes the decision not to drive that much easier.

In this episode of “How You Can Help Get Us Transit,” we look at a couple of examples that help demonstrate why removing highways is not only not a big deal, but also good for transit.

I’m going to use two real viaduct commutes as examples. Both originate in West Seattle. One drives to work at Google. The other drives to First Hill – this is actually the commute of a doctor I know, so we’ve talked about it quite a bit. He usually takes the bus – he’s an occasional driver.

Today, both commutes are highly congested on the West Seattle Bridge, but not very congested on the viaduct itself. Neither spend very much time on surface streets in the city today, most is spent on highways. Google lady gets off 99 near Fremont, and doctor dude takes the Seneca exit.

If the tunnel were built, Google lady’s trip time would be faster – the deep bore tunnel is designed for this commute. It would be more expensive for her, but it would be faster. Her time on the West Seattle bridge would remain similar, but her time on 99 would decrease. At the same time, some of the traffic that was using today’s viaduct goes to downtown streets. So instead of the bus looking like a more attractive option than the toll, because she would have to take two buses *and* the buses are now a little slower, she keeps driving.

Doctor dude switches to I-5. His commute time increases overall for bus or car, and he’s very angry, because this tunnel thing was supposed to help. He votes for a Republican to replace Governor Inslee in 2016 because he remembers this is Gregoire’s fault. The Republican scuttles Sound Transit 3…

If a surface option were built, Google lady’s time on 99 would be a little slower than it is today – by as much as a couple of minutes. However, because the fast bypass through downtown isn’t there, a lot of trips aren’t taken, so the West Seattle bridge is less congested – making up time. Her total trip is still slower, but not nearly as slow as tunnel proponents suggest. Because the surface option also included transit improvements, there’s also a significantly better chance that she’ll take RapidRide and a local bus (or Dexter bike lane) the rest of the way to work. There’s another good discussion here about Central Streetcar and a future Fremont extension, but that’s for another post.

Doctor dude uses the new surface boulevard when he drives – it’s faster than sitting in traffic on I-5. He wasn’t spending that much time on 99 anyway, and the West Seattle bridge is now slightly faster, so his commute time improves. Transit improvements more than made up for that travel time decrease, though, so he continues to bus.

For both users, the surface option makes transit more attractive by encouraging trips to match corridors easily served by transit. In the longer run, this means surface gives us more potential ridership for serious mass transit to West Seattle. And it’s cheaper, so we lose a little pressure on the state’s backlog of highway maintenance and repairs – meaning it’s easier to fight for transit funding.

Transit advocates – this fight won’t stop with the referendum, but you know we’ll keep fighting. Please help: donate to the campaign, and email me to volunteer!

In 2006, the Congress for New Urbanism released a report that is still the most important piece of literature on the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project – a study that found major flaws in WSDOT’s work and suggested the surface/transit option was a good choice even from a traffic congestion perspective.

Chapters of this organization, such as Cascadia (not to be confused with Discovery Institute’s Cascadia), bring discussions like this local. Architects, urban planners, designers and more are all represented. This year, their summit (PDF) is in Portland, and focuses on how to bring urbanism to the forefront of the sustainability discussion.

CNU Cascadia has two great speakers lined up, Kingston Heath and Steve Mouzon – both write about sustainable placemaking, each with different focuses. They’ll also have a streetcar tour showcasing good design and urban planning – projects we can learn from here, especially in South Lake Union today and on Capitol and First hills in the next few years. Tickets are only $35, and it’s a good excuse for a trip on Amtrak Cascades.

Today the Seattle Times has a lengthy front page story about undisclosed business deals Councilmember Kevin Wallace had with GNP Railway while also advocating for the B7 East Link alignment. GNP desired to run freight and passenger trains in the BNSF corridor.

While prodding the Bellevue City Council last fall to study possible use of an abandoned rail corridor for a Sound Transit light-rail line, Councilmember Kevin Wallace was negotiating an extensive business relationship with a short-line railroad that wants to run trains on the same route.

He and his father, Bob Wallace, signed a nonbinding agreement in December to invest in GNP Railway and help raise $30 million for expansion.

Wallace Properties Development, a Bellevue-based developer of commercial properties, also agreed in a “memorandum of understanding” with GNP that the councilmember would hire brokers to sell preferred stock, invest $500,000 of its money and manage land acquisition and development of passenger stations, possibly with shops, offices, industrial space and homes. Kevin Wallace is president of the development company.

The Wallaces signed the GNP agreement the same week Kevin Wallace explained in a Seattle Times guest-opinion column why it made sense for the City Council to spend $670,000 to study whether Sound Transit should put its light-rail trains on the old freight corridor.

Because this is a blog, I can speculate a bit more than the Seattle Times can, and this is my own opinion: I think the Bellevue B7 study work basically offers free corridor information particularly pertinent to the business deal between GNP and Wallace. It smacks of using city resources to save GNP/Wallace planning money in the same corridor.

Wallace should have recused himself from these votes, but if he had, they would have ended up tied at 3-3. This could be part of why Aaron Laing (another B7 supporter) is running for Bellevue City Council this year, despite the fact that the council already has a majority – with a 5-2 split for B7, Wallace could take a slap on the hand and safely recuse himself from these votes.

The real kicker? As far as I’m aware, Bellevue doesn’t have a law prohibiting conflicts of interest for the city council.

Are you interested in how Seattle can build livable, walkable, transit accessible communities? The Seattle Planning Commission released their Seattle Transit Communities report (PDF) in November outlining tools and strategies for doing that. This Thursday at City Hall we have the opportunity to hear from three planning commissioners about what investments should be our highest priorities – like complete streets, transit stop improvements, mobile food, and more – and how we might fund them. While we’re in between major transit packages, these recommendations are the best things we can fight for to make the city more livable, so it’s important to be well versed in what our options are and what kind of benefits they bring. Take your lunch and bring along a coworker!

Seattle Transit Communities: Charting Our Path Forward
WHEN: March 10, 2011, 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
WHERE: Bertha Knight Landes Room, City Hall

Five new Tim Eyman initiatives were filed with the state this month, including one (PDF) which would drastically limit the uses of toll revenue and the way tolls are imposed.

Section 40 (commonly referred to as the 18th Amendment) of the Washington State Constitution has limited the use of fuel excise taxes to highway construction, operation and maintenance since 1944. Eyman’s initiative would limit toll revenue to the same purposes – in fact, even more stringently, to only construction and capital improvements of the highway, bridge, or street on which the toll is collected.

It would also remove the state’s ability to impose variable tolls, and require that tolling end once construction of a structure is paid off – today’s law allows tolling to continue for operations and maintenance, as well as performance management. This would eliminate congestion pricing, HOT lanes, and even simply higher rush-hour tolls.

A final section specifically changes language regarding tolling on Interstate 90. Current law directs WSDOT to work with the federal highway administration toward authorization of tolling on the I-90 bridge – revenue expected to help fund 520 bridge replacement, and to prevent I-90 from becoming even more of a parking lot when 520 is tolled this year. The initiative would specifically (and perhaps redundantly) restrict I-90 toll revenue to capital improvements on I-90.

It’s worth mentioning that this final section could amount to nothing but a shell game – I speculate that toll revenue on I-90 could, with legislative action, replace gas tax revenue used for projects elsewhere in the corridor, and an equivalent in gas taxes could be moved to 520.

With a transportation package on the table in Olympia this session or next, the rest of the initiative could have major implications. Tolling has been increasingly under consideration as an option for congestion reduction, and as a potential revenue source for transit improvements. Without it, the options for transit in the legislature would look even more slim than they already do.

Seattle Department of Transportation has a call out on their blog for survey responses on how transit is working in Seattle. The transit master plan hasn’t been updated since 2005, and with the monorail dead and Sound Transit 2 passed, an update now will help inform what investments the city should make next.

The transit master plan update will expand upon already identified important transit corridors and assign preferred modes to each. This will be the first time since the monorail that the city will officially take a position on what transit mode should be built in lieu of that project.

The other major purpose of the master plan is to improve existing service through small investments. The Transit Master Plan web page specifically mentions bus bulbs and signal priority as tools in the city’s purview.

Martin sits on the Transit Master Plan advisory group, which next meets on Friday at 8:00am in the Boards and Commissions room at Seattle City Hall.