All posts by Bruce Nourish

Coming up, on the evening of April 18th, Town Hall Seattle is hosting a debate between two well-known transit authors:

Authors Darrin Nordahl and Jarrett Walker discuss public transit from two different ends of the bus route: technical simplicity—and fun. Most everyone agrees that public transit is a powerful tool for addressing a range of urban problems, but while Walker, author of Human Transit, believes that transit can be simple if we focus on the underlying geometry that all transit technologies share, Nordahl, author of My Kind of Transit, argues that when public transit is an enjoyable experience, tourists and commuters alike will willingly hand in their keys.

Regular readers won’t be surprised at all to learn that I am completely in the tank for Walker in this debate, as I am in most. In fact, almost everything I’ve written here on STB has been dedicated to the proposition that a simple, high-quality all-day bus network designed to maximize frequency, directness, and reliability would serve the city far, far better than what we have today. Two of the County’s best bus routes, the 358 and 120, were created out of mediocre services in a restructure process that was predicated on exactly the same ideas. And besides, what could possibly be more fun and enjoyable than travelling on the 358?

Sadly, my travel plans don’t permit me to attend, but I would commend this debate to the attention of anybody who takes an interest in promoting transit use, which is, I presume, all of you. STB is a co-sponsor of this event, for which space is limited.

Yesterday afternoon, King County Metro made public the legislative package which, after formal consideration (and possible amendment) by the King County Council, will turn the Fall 2012 restructure into a reality. To get to this point has taken about six months, during which Metro has presented two comprehensive restructure proposals, hosted several open houses and made numerous presentations to neighborhood groups. The process is now in the home stretch, but nothing is final until the full council votes.

As noted on the Metro Matters blog, the next opportunity for public input is on April 16th, from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM, at Union Station, where there will be an open house followed by public testimony to the Transportation, Economy and Environment Committee. Helpfully, with this latest revision, Metro has spared me the necessity of digesting all the changes for each area before I can discuss them: for a custom pamphlet describing the changes for you neighborhood, go the the System Restructure page on the Have a Say site, and click on the map in the “Neighborhood information sheets” box.

From the perspective of building a better transit system — one that serves more people and serves them faster, more frequently and more reliably, with the same amount of money — the primary effect of the public process so far has been to water down the original proposal, removing unpopular components and keeping popular ones, seemingly without respect to their merits, which sometimes results in strange routes that are almost certain to perform terribly. This pattern continues with yesterday’s revision.

After the jump, I’ll get into the details on the major changes since February.

Continue reading “Fall Restructure Further Watered Down”

The album above is a selection of the photos I took today at the Second University Link breakthrough at the future Capitol Hill Station. My only camera is an SLR, so I couldn’t shoot video, and unfortunately, I didn’t have my tripod on hand, so these photos can’t quite be made into an animation, but I hope they convey a sense of what happened. Also, some great photos over at the Seattle PI. Enjoy!

Congratulations to Sound Transit and their contractors on another safe breakthrough, moments ago.

This is the second of two posts on this subject; you can read the first one here. 

In the previous post, I discussed the difficult problem Sound Transit will face in providing the legally required compensation for lost parking on the Northgate Mall property during construction. In this post, I’ll discuss the two other issues in play.

Long Term Park & Ride Capacity Loss

As is well known by now, the North Link ROD stipulates 1:1 replacement of all P&R capacity permanently displaced, and this fact has dominated most of the previous coverage of this subject, including mine. In learning more, I’m increasingly convinced this is perhaps the least vexing of the problems that faces those of us who don’t want publicly-financed garages at Northgate. Let’s look at this in more detail.

First, the 1:1 stipulation does not require that the current total capacity of roughly 1,500 stalls be maintained indefinitely into the future, and even if the language of the ROD did not change, it could perhaps be skirted by simply reducing total P&R capacity independent of the North Link project.

More importantly, the ROD dates from 2006, before the 2008 ST2 ballot measure, so the ROD actually refers to the original “North Link” project that extended as far as Brooklyn Station and was subsequently extended to Northgate with the passage of ST2. There would be a compelling case to go back to the FTA and argue that circumstances have changed since the signing of the ROD, and that the language of the ROD no longer aligns with local policy as applied to the extended project. The biggest hurdle would be getting a majority of the ST board to agree, which isn’t a vote I’d care to wager on either way.

More after the jump. Continue reading “In Depth on Northgate Parking, Part 2”

Over the last year or so, we’ve covered the parking situation in the Northgate station area as it has evolved, consistently advocating against the use of scarce transit dollars to build parking in urban areas. Unfortunately, the situation is becoming more complex, not less, as time goes on and more details come to light, and in a pair of posts, I’m going to examine all the issues and possible solutions I’m aware of in depth. There are three distinct problems Sound Transit must address, and a handful of solutions, most of which involve ST building a parking garage and some (rather tenuous) ones which don’t.

First, let’s take a look at all 1,500 or so parking stalls currently provided, by public agencies, to transit users in the Northgate area. Below is a map of the area (from the recent Capital Committee presentation), showing the location and capacity of these lots, followed by a table summarizing all the information related to capacity and displacement, both at the height of construction and at the completion of the project; I’ll talk about the “private uses” section of the table later.

Continue reading “In-depth on Northgate Parking, Part 1”

King County Metro, Sound Transit, Community Transit and the City of Seattle are hosting an open house on Thursday, 4:00-6:30 PM, at Union Station, to discuss their plans for the elimination of the Ride Free Area and obtain feedback from the community. Done right, RFA elimination could boost Metro’s revenue, reduce casual fare evasion, and eliminate Metro’s arcane “when to pay” and “where to exit” rules. Done wrong, RFA elimination could make buses even slower and less reliable on the surface through the CBD, and dramatically reduce the peak capacity of the downtown transit tunnel.

Metro has studied RFA elimination extensively, but it remains to be seen whether the agency has the time and money to get this right by September. In addition, as I’ve pointed out before in comments, one way to mitigate bus congestion downtown is to run fewer buses downtown, by requiring riders on underutilized radial routes to transfer to frequent, high-performing trunk routes, thereby ensuring that every bus entering or leaving downtown is a full bus. What we’ve seen so far in this respect with the Fall restructure process is not encouraging.

UPDATE: Metro’s Linda T. notes that if you can’t make the meeting, you can also provide feedback and learn more at this page on the Metro site.

Transit agencies and city host open house on elimination of
Ride Free Area in downtown Seattle

Metro also moving to pay-on-entry system countywide in September

The Ride Free Area for buses in downtown Seattle is scheduled to be eliminated on Sept. 29, 2012. At the same time, riders will begin paying when entering the bus for all trips.

These changes will help King County Metro Transit save money and preserve bus service. Sound Transit and Community Transit are also preparing to act on similar changes for their bus operations in King County.

The three agencies and the city of Seattle are hosting an open house to update the community and get feedback:

Thursday, March 29
4-6:30 p.m.
Union Station Great Hall
401 S. Jackson St., Seattle

Metro is currently working with Sound Transit, Community Transit, and Seattle on an implementation plan for the Ride Free Area changes. This includes options to address transportation needs of low or no-income people who use the Ride Free Area to travel to essential services in the downtown area.

The Sound Transit Board is scheduled to vote in June on charging fares for ST Express bus trips within the downtown area, consistent with current policy for Link light rail.

As a followup to last week’s post with the presentation from the North Link Open House, click the image above to see the slides from the presentation that Sound Transit staff gave to the ST Capital Committee earlier this month, covering similar information but in more detail; tomorrow, I’ll have a post discussing the parking issues at Northgate at length. Below is is a video shown in the public meeting, that gives a sense of the broad outlines of the construction process and the finished product.

Click the image above to see a PDF of the slides from the Northgate Construction Open House. Next week, I’ll have a post following up on this morning’s editorial, discussing in depth the issues relating to parking at Northgate, and what paths forward there might be. In the interim, there’s a lot of good information about parking (and a raft of other issues) in this presentation, and I encourage everyone to read it.

Over the next few weeks, Sound Transit is hosting three community meetings about the North Link project, which will extend the region’s light rail system from the U-District to Northgate. If you can’t attend, but have thoughts or concerns on these subject, you can reach ST’s outreach staff via email instead. The dates and times are as follows:

• March 21, 6:00 – 8:30 PM Northgate Station to Tunnel Portal Construction
  Olympic View Elementary School — 504 NE 95th St, Seattle
• March 26, 6:00 – 8:30 PM Roosevelt Station Construction
  Ravenna-Eckstein Community Center — 6535 Ravenna Ave NE, Seattle
• April 11, 6:00 – 8:30 PM — Roosevelt Station 60% Design
  Roosevelt High School Commons — 1410 NE 66th St, Seattle

Generally, construction meetings are oriented primarily towards neighbors, and focus on the details of construction effects and planned mitigations; nonetheless, it’s still a great chance to talk directly with agency staff, and interesting questions do sometimes arise in the public question period. Design meetings are more substantive, and fairly major changes have arisen from public feedback at those meetings, as happened with Brooklyn Station’s entrances. One thing that’s not going to change at Roosevelt is the decision not to design for TOD over the station box: the ST board voted to reject a plan to spend additional money for that last month.

I do have some good news on the parking situation at Northgate: multiple sources tell me that Sound Transit are in discussion with the City and other agencies on this subject, and the possibility exists (which I had previously been told was very unlikely) that ST could ask the FTA to remove the stipulation of one-for-one parking replacement in the North Link Record of Decision, a mitigation measure which would effectively force ST to build a parking structure at Northgate. If, like me, you believe that spending millions on “free” parking in a nascent urban center and transit hub is a disastrously awful idea, I would encourage you to attend ST’s Northgate meetings, or to email their community outreach staff — especially if you live near the future Northgate Station.

Starting next Monday evening, March 5th at 9 PM, WSDOT will close one lane of southbound Aurora Avenue between Republican and John Streets until mid-April. While the road will remain open, substantial traffic congestion can be expected, especially during rush hour, so Metro will detour southbound Routes 5, 5X, 26X, 28X and 358 at Valley Street for the duration of the closure. No detours will occur northbound.

The detoured buses will travel into downtown on 5th Ave N and Cedar St — essentially the alignment of southbound Route 16 — and serve only two stops, on 5th Ave N at Mercer and John, before rejoining their regular alignment on 3rd Ave. Route 16 will not be detoured, but could (I suspect) suffer rush-hour traffic delays. Similarly, Route 54 riders could presumably be affected if the 54’s through-route partner, the 5, suffers delays. Leaving the regular route might limit OneBusAway’s ability to make accurate predictions for those routes.

Full WSDOT press release after the jump. Continue reading “Six Week Detour for Aurora Buses Begins Next Week”

With Friday’s unfortunate announcement that Routes 2 and 4 will be remain largely unchanged, we’ve lost one of the best parts of the Fall 2012 restructure, with anything beyond “small adjustments to the frequency and running hours” on the 4 ruled out. As I pointed out months ago, the eight-terminal network that now serves Queen Anne to Madrona is intrinsically less efficient and comprehensible than the three terminal network that was proposed; with restoration of the 4, most or all of that is probably lost.

While it’s all water under the bridge now, it’s worth noting that Metro had an unpublished draft plan that would have kept the crosstown Route 2 on Seneca (with a one-seat ride to the Seattle Center) while still improving Route 13 to all-day frequent service and providing service every 5-8 minutes during the weekday from Downtown to First Hill (it would also have raised the south part of the 2 to frequent service on weekday evenings). The thousands of people who use those buses daily — far, far more than who use the tails of the 4 — who will pack onto overloaded buses on James St or suffer the woefully inadequate service on Queen Anne Ave to Seattle Pacific are the real (but evidently unpersuasive) human cost of inertia.

Nonetheless, there are a couple of minor changes that would noticeably improve Queen Anne service, cost nothing overall, qualify under the rubric of “small adjustments … to running hours”, and upset almost no-one, thus fitting quite well with what’s left of the Fall proposal.

Continue reading “Salvaging Minor Improvements for Queen Anne”

Another update just came in from Metro Deputy GM Manager of Services Development Victor Obeso:

The proposals Metro presented for feedback were designed to improve the efficiency of our service to serve more people to more places. Talking with you and others helps us understand how existing service is an important part of your lives and neighborhoods. When proposals include long established high ridership routes within a diverse and multifaceted setting, public outreach helps Metro weigh technical considerations with human factors.

We have received valuable feedback. We’ve heard that there are factors that deserve further review, analysis and understanding. As a result, Metro has decided to postpone the route 2, 4 and 27 proposals. Issues were raised of coverage and traffic congestion on Madison Street, and more information about the unique travel needs of those that live and work in the area is needed. For now, we are not proposing to change existing routing of this set of routes. Instead, we are proposing to just make small adjustments to the frequency and running hours of routes 4 and 27 consistent with demand.

Backing off the changes Route 2 and 4, by necessity, returns the Queen Anne-Madrona corridor more or less to its current structure, complete with the 4’s vestigial tail to Judkins Park. This is an extremely regrettable decision that abandons one of the most promising, pro-rider parts of the Fall restructure.

Yesterday, the Transportation Choices Coalition (and the Kitsap Sun the day before) wrote about a most unfortunate component of WSDOT’s plans to upgrade and retrofit Colman Dock. From TCC:

 WSDOT is undergoing a process to plan for the replacement of the Colman ferry terminal.  We fully support preservation projects and our state’s ferry system, but the current replacement project will eliminate the existing passenger ferry dock, which will threaten the King County water taxi and other passenger ferry services in and out of Downtown Seattle.

In addition to the Vashon Island and West Seattle water taxis, the Sun notes that, within the next few years, there will most likely be three cross-Sound public agencies operating passenger ferries to Colman Dock, from Port Townsend, Kingston and Bremerton. After 2015, where those services will dock, and how the money will be found to construct or upgrade such a dock, is not at all clear.

Continue reading “WSDOT Plans Would Displace Seattle Passenger Ferries”

Today, Metro begins its second round of open houses to gather feedback on the revised Fall 2012 service change proposal. These open houses are a great opportunity to share your thoughts on these proposals directly with Metro planners. The schedule is as follows:

• Monday, Feb. 13 – Ballard High School
• Wednesday, Feb. 15 – Madison Middle School, West Seattle
• Thursday, Feb. 16 –Chief Sealth High School, Delridge/White Center
• Tuesday, Feb. 21 – Union Station, Downtown Seattle
• Thursday, Feb. 23 – Queen Anne Community Center
• Monday, Feb. 27 – Washington Middle School, Central Area/Mt. Baker

All of these open house meetings will be held from 6 PM–8 PM., except the Feb. 21 meeting at Union Station, which is from 12 PM–2 PM. There are also a raft of other, smaller presentations to neighborhood organizations on Metro’s calendar. If you are a resident of one of those neighborhoods, those meetings are another great chance to make your opinions known. If you can’t make any in-person events, you can submit feedback via the survey on Metro’s Have a Say website, and email Metro at haveasay@kingcounty.gov.

Last night, the Waterfront Seattle Project held their second open house, and it’s the one many of us have been waiting for. The topic was Mobility and Access: all about improving connections between the city and the waterfront, and of balancing the needs many different transportation modes that must coexist on the rebuilt waterfront: pedestrians, bikes, transit, freight and cars. Along with the waterfront team, staff from the city and Metro were present in force, and the meeting was well attended (a lot of cyclists, in particular), with vigorous conversations at each table for the duration of the meeting.

The event began with a presentation discussing the background and general considerations and goals of the project, along with a segment by segment discussion of the right-of-way cross-sections, from Belltown to Pioneer Square. The presenter noted that a streetcar had not been eliminated as a possibility within the roadway, although it wasn’t included in the cross-sections. After that, everyone was turned loose to five discussion tables to share their opinions with staff taking notes.

More after the jump. Continue reading “Seattle Waterfront: Mobility and Access”

Tonight, from 5:30 to 7:00PM at Town Hall, is the second Waterfront Seattle open house, and the topic will be Mobility and Access; i.e. getting to, from and around the post-viaduct waterfront, ideally without a car. Much of the discussion will, I suspect, focus on transit along the Waterfront, and that’s appropriate and expected; tomorrow, we’ll have a summary of the event, with an open thread for discussion of anything waterfront-transportation related. In this post, however, I want to talk about improving one aspect of the much less sexy, but far more heavily travelled and regionally important Madison corridor, which connects the Waterfront to First Hill and points north and east.

One of the components of the Fall restructure proposal is splitting Route 2 and moving the south part of Route 2 from the Seneca/Spring pair to Madison/Marion, extending the route down to 1st Ave, where it would turn around without stopping. Route 12 would be split off from its current through-route to Route 10 on 1st Ave, and join Route 2S in the same maneuver, with schedules arranged to provide very frequent service. I mention this only by way of background, as we have debated the pros and cons of these proposed changes to death (and then some) in previous comment threads, and further debate in that vein is off-topic for this post. What we are discussing here is if this proposal (or some future similar proposal) goes forward, how we should improve this connection. Continue reading “A Better Colman Dock Connection”

Yesterday, I had a chance to discuss with Metro staff the details of the revised Fall restructure proposal that was released last week. From that discussion,  a few clarifications to my original post about this restructure arose:

• RapidRide D’s schedule did not change at all, but the headways listed in the public documents were changed to more precisely conform to Metro’s time period definitions. In particular, the D Line will operate every 15 minutes until at least 10:30 PM, seven days a week; and every 10 minutes in the peak direction from 6-9 AM and 3-6 PM (slightly less in the reverse-peak direction). In the common segment of Routes 15 and 18 from Downtown through Queen Anne and Interbay to Leary, riders are losing Monday-Saturday midday frequency (10 to 15 minutes), but riders on 15th Ave NW are gaining full-time frequent service.
• Adding back a handful of trips to the 15X and 55 was indeed done primarily to save money on RapidRide coaches that would be used only for one or two trips a day. Metro considered operating standard coaches on RapidRide routes, but decided that would dilute the RapidRide brand more than restoring those trips. In the case of the 15X, it also served to restore coverage to a pocket of Blue Ridge. At some point in the future when Metro has more money, these choices could be revisited.
• I was sloppy in my discussion of the stop-level data for Route 37. Of the inbound riders on that bus, 20% are at stops shared with Route 56 in the Alki area; 48% are between Alki and the West Seattle Bridge, who have access to Water Taxi shuttles; 32% are south of Hinds St. The last number includes a cluster of riders around Beach Dr & Carroll St, who, depending on how far you believe people will walk to useful transit service, may or may not be considered cut off from the from the bus network if the 37 were deleted. I remain unconvinced either that this route is viable in terms of Metro’s performance criteria, or that the small number of city residents who will unquestionably lose service (west of Me-Kwa-Mooks park) provide enough “geographic value” to offset performance figures that will surely be terrible.
• The increased midday headway on the 11 was indeed a typo, and never planned in this restructure.
• Also, within the next couple of weeks, I will elaborate on what I meant when I opined that the extended Route 1 was a “mess”, as well as a modification to that extension which would, I believe, be more useful to the riders served.

Finally, this isn’t quite in keeping with the topic, but I can’t find anywhere else to put it: Metro’s application for a TIGGER grant to help pay the costs of electrifying Route 48 was, unfortunately, not funded. This project was already in jeopardy due to the failure of Prop 1, which would have provided the local matching funds.

Thanks to those Metro staff for taking the time to meet and discuss these issues, and answer my many questions.

Metro has published systemwide maps for the Fall 2012 restructure revision. As before, they’re broken up in to North Seatlle (all-day and peak) and South Seattle/Burien (all-day and peak). In addition to making the way the whole network fits together more clear, there are a couple of things that stand out to me:

• Westwood Village. As you can see on the map above, the east side of Westwood Village is now a transfer point on a par with 1st & Mercer and Alaska Junction, turning it into a transit crossroads.
• Interim Routing for the D Line terminus (not on map above). I’m assuming this is due to delays in the required reconstruction of the 7th Ave NW roadway that will be used to turn around the coaches, but I’ll check with Metro’s staff.

I suspect the alignment of the 31 in Magnolia is erroneous, as I believe Metro reverted  away from its revised alignment on Dravus in favor of maintaining service on Emerson.

Please head on over to my last post on the subject to continue the debate.

Yesterday afternoon, King County Metro released a revision to the September 2012 restructure proposal originally made public in November. These changes arise from the introduction of  RapidRide Lines C & D in September, and are guided by Metro’s new Strategic Plan which including new performance-oriented Service Guidelines. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to focus mostly on the revisions, and refer readers who aren’t already familiar with the original November proposal back to my post on the subject.

Before we get into the details, some bad logistical news: Metro has not yet released any maps other than individual route maps and narratives, making it very hard to visualize how these changes will fit together as a network. You can obtain these individual maps (and others as they become available) by going to the System Restructure page on the Have a Say site; select the map you want from the drop-down box on the right. Metro staff tell me that citywide and neighborhood-by-neighborhood maps will be available by the end of the week.

For regular readers who are already familiar with the November proposal, I’ve saved you all a couple of hours of your life by including at the end of this post a summary list of all the significant differences I could find for every single route in this revision. Note that Metro’s route-by-route narratives neglect to mention many cases where frequencies have been cut or improved; my list contains those changes.

We’ll get right down to the nuts and bolts after the jump.

Continue reading “Metro Waters Down Fall Changes”