All posts by Bruce Nourish

Since the defeat of Prop 1 in April, many assumed that it was merely a formality for the County Council to adopt and implement the cuts to Metro service. But in a surprising and somewhat messy development, the King County Council’s Transportation, Economy, and Environment Committee, led by Chair Rod Dembowski, passed an ordinance yesterday that would implement only the September 2014 cuts, with service levels in “2015 and later…determined in a manner consistent with adopted policies and the King County budget for those years.” Citing the rising economy and the ability to further raise fares, Dembowski’s ordinance reads in part:

“An opportunity exists for the council and executive to work collaboratively with each other, stakeholders and cities throughout the county to identify alternative cost savings, efficiencies and updated estimates of revenue and expenditures that could reduce Metro’s annual budget gap, thereby decreasing the number of transit service hours required to be reduced in 2015.”

The ordinance split the Committee and passed 4-3, Dembowski being joined by suburban Republicans Hague, Lambert, and von Reichbauer. Phillips, Upthegrove, and McDermott opposed, and Dunn and Gossett were absent. If Dunn joins those four councilmembers when the ordinance goes to the full Council next week, and assuming Gossett opposes (neither of which are certain), that would mean a potential 5-4 vote to delay the bulk of the cuts. It would then be subject to a possible veto by Executive Constantine, who has said that the integrity of the public process and the Prop 1 vote requires that service be cut until new revenue materializes.

At first blush, Dembowski’s move seems like a risky punt. His plan seems to be to implement the cuts that cannot be staved off (September), try to further squeeze cash from Metro’s capital programs, defer plans to replenish Metro’s cash reserves, raise fares, and wait for a tax windfall or a generous Seattle electorate.  To the extent that the tax windfall, increased fare revenues, or city buybacks fail to materialize, it’s not clear what cuts will happen and when, or what the Council will have gained by not simply executing the cuts as proposed by the executive.

In general, I (and other STB authors) are favorable to anything that improves Metro’s cost and revenue structures in a realistic and sustainable way, and to the extent that Dembowski’s ordinance can achieve that, I am cautiously in favor. I am, however, highly resistant to delaying inevitable pain by spending down more reserves, or looting what’s left of Metro’s capital funds: that is a continuance of the pathological pain-avoidance “leadership” style which the Council has applied to Metro since the beginning of the recession. This has given us an agency that is managed by crisis, where all service planning and public outreach must take place against a background of increasingly precipitous, but uncertain, cuts. It seems to me that the sensible, good government way to approach this problem is to pass a modified cuts plan but allow Metro to add back service (according to their Service Guidelines) every service change if revenue exceeds projections.

We are reaching out to Councilmember Dembowski for further details on his thinking and will have an update in the coming days.

Tomorrow, 5:30 to 8:00 PM at Fremont Studios, the city will be holding an open house for the single most important bike project currently underway in Seattle, the Westlake Cycletrack. If you care about safe, flat, stress-free bike connectivity between Ballard, Fremont, Greenwood, Wallingford and South Lake Union, you need to be there to make your views known. Seattle Bike Blog explains the options the city is considering, which have been whittled to two protected bike lane options on either side of the Westlake parking lot. Construction for this long-overdue project has been funded by PSRC, so if you’re tired of looking at maps of ambitious but unfunded plans, this is your chance to show up and support something that you’ll be able to ride by Spring 2016.

Since the opening of Central Link in 2009, the process of restructuring the Rainier Valley’s bus service to feed the rail spine has advanced in fits and starts. With money from the 2006 passage of Transit Now, Metro extended Route 36 from Beacon Ave to Othello Station, connecting south Beacon Hill, and likewise Route 14 was extended to Mount Baker Station, connecting the Mount Baker neighborhood. Subsequent restructures eliminated the downtown-oriented Routes 34X and 39 in favor of a faster two-seat ride on the (unfortunately still-too-infrequent) Route 50. The notorious Route 42 finally croaked last February.

Despite this progress, one crucial loose end has remained: Route 7, the Rainier Valley’s core bus route, retains its pre-Link terminal loop in Rainier Beach, along with a complex turnback schedule whereby every third outbound bus continues on to the Prentice Street loop before returning to the layover on Henderson. This service pattern means the 7 can do nothing for riders heading south on Link, and the almost-useless Prentice St service pattern unsurprisingly attracts little use. A couple of years ago, I wrote (to mixed reviews) about one possibility to restructure this area, namely splitting the 7 and and connecting the two parts at Othello.

The recent failure of Prop 1 has brought about the next wave of changes in the Rainier Valley, which are a mixed bag. Several core routes are suffering frequency cuts in the midday and evenings, and loss of late-night service, all of which is very, very bad news. The redundant and underperforming Route 7X is being axed; that should have happened in 2009. One major, positive change is splitting Route 8 and combining the section south of Yesler with Route 106; this is very, very good for Renton, Skyway, and the Rainier Valley, although bad for a smaller number of riders in the Central District. The 7’s Prentice St loop will be cut back to a few trips in the peak, which is also bad.

More after the jump. Continue reading “Connecting Rainier Beach to its Station”

Per Bill Bryant, SDOT’s manager of transit programs:

SDOT is designing and plans to install new pavement markings to more clearly differentiate bus lanes from regular traffic lanes in locations where violations are a problem.

Initial locations include existing bus lanes on Pacific Street approaching the Montlake Bridge, Wall and Battery streets east of Third Avenue, and N. Midvale Place (Route 44) between 45th and 46th.

Success will be evaluated based both on compliance rates and on the durability of the painted bus lane surface. Other locations are likely if the initial installations prove successful. At this point we’re focused on 24/7 bus lane locations, but will try to adapt the new approach to part time (i.e., peak-only) locations if successful.

SDOT doesn’t yet have a cost estimate, but pouring a bunch of paint over an existing bus lane shouldn’t be that expensive. I suspect that this improvement, like all sensible bus improvements, will deliver measurable improvements to speed and reliability at almost negligible cost. On Battery St in particular (where I used to walk to work every day), the existing bus lane restriction is somewhat effective, but the channelization is complex and confusing to drivers unfamiliar with the area. A swath of bright red paint would help communicate to drivers where they aren’t supposed to be.

If these lanes prove to be effective (and they’ll still need more enforcement than today, to meet their full potential), I’d like to see SDOT go to the next step: mixing red color into the asphalt of the road surface the next time the road is paved. This ensures the color will last the lifetime of the road surface, and is the way most bus lanes seem to be implemented in the places (like central London, pictured above) where they are truly ubiquitous and permanent.

Every so often, a local anti-transit or anti-tax group will write a hit piece against Metro, alleging, for a variety of reasons, that the agency’s financial crisis is made up. These pieces invariably rely on creative graph-making, conflating Metro’s primary tax-funded service with externally-funded contract service (such as that provided to Sound Transit), or making some other obvious error of fact. In this post, I’m going to present Metro’s raw data for sales tax collections and services delivered for the last decade, and explode a couple of myths in the process.

Myth #1: Metro’s revenues have increased each of the last three years. The agency has loads of money!

The chart above will be familiar to anyone who’s taken an interest in Metro’s finances, but seems to elude Metro’s drive-by fiscal critics, who’s data mysteriously always begins in 2010. It’s true that Metro’s sales tax collections have increased each of the last three years, and will increase again this year, but that omits the crucial fact that revenue fell off a cliff between 2008 and 2009, bottoming out in 2010, for a total drop of about $72 million.

Despite this plunge in revenue, the total amount of service Metro provides has dipped only very slightly. Instead, over the last three years, that hole has been filled with a combination of fare hikes and operational cost savings, along with about $344 million of one-time cash transfers, notably including $180 million from axed capital programs and $41 million from operational reserves.

Those measures, taken at the behest of elected officials, whose directive to Metro was to preserve service at all costs, are now exhausted, but an ongoing gap of about $75 million/year remains between what Metro needs to continue offering its current level of service, and what Metro’s sales tax is bringing in. Closing that gap will require either a major cut in the quantity of service Metro delivers, or new revenue, which, along with helping the dire state of County Roads, is what Prop 1 will do.

Myth #2: We keep voting to give Metro more money. Surely the agency must have lots of of it by now.

Continue reading “Yes, Metro’s Deficit is Real”

About two years ago, I wrote a post comparing the speed and reliability of two transit pathways between downtown Seattle and Harborview Medical Center, James St and Yesler Way, using data from the Metro routes that currently travel on those corridors. That data showed what anyone who’d ridden those buses already knew: the buses on James St, which directly serve Harborview, are packed to overflowing, but crippled by appalling slowness and unreliability for much of the day, partly from being so busy, but primarily from all the cars on James St queuing to access I-5. By contrast, buses on Yesler run fast and like clockwork, partly because they’re less used, but crucially because Yesler is a very lightly-trafficked arterial with no direct highway connections.

Harborview and the surrounding area, which includes numerous other medical facilities, and the Yesler Terrace housing project (soon to be rebuilt at much higher density), comprise a major ridership center just beyond the periphery of downtown, cut off by a huge hill and a freeway. Better connecting that area to downtown should be a priority for Metro and the City of Seattle, and the combination of James’s incurable congestion, and Yesler’s almost equal directness and near-total lack of congestion, suggest that moving trolleybus service from James to Yesler is the smart way to do so.

Moving the James St trolleybus service entails building new trolleybus wire on streets that have never had it previously, as well as operating buses on a couple of short sections of 8th and 9th that have not previously had any regular Metro service, so implementation will require significant study and civil engineering work. This being Seattle, getting anything built will be a multi-year process, but, happily, this process has at last begun: in last year’s budget, the city allocated $150,000 for a study of transit service on Yesler, which will include a conceptual design for trolleybus overhead wire, expected to be complete by the end of the year. No funding is available for engineering or construction, but SDOT hopes the conceptual design will better equip the city to pursue more funding.

More after the jump.
Continue reading “Better Connecting Harborview and Downtown”

SDOT has some great improvements in the works for residents of the southernmost sidewalk-less section of Greenwood Ave, between 90th St and 105th St. Previous plans to improve transit and bike facilities on this section of Greenwood have been expanded to include a continuous sidewalk on the east side of Greenwood, and design work for sidewalks on the west side, which then could quickly be built as funding becomes available. Once this gap is filled in, Greenwood will have continuous sidewalks to about 112th St, meeting a critical need on this heavily-trafficked, densely-populated arterial corridor.

I’ve previously discussed the bus and bike improvements slated for this section of Greenwood (essentially: stop consolidation, bus islands and bike lanes, similar to Dexter) and while those improvements have been refined, they don’t appear to have changed significantly; they remain an excellent idea. As before, my only criticism of this project is that the stop consolidation and bus island treatment should continue further south. The stop spacing Metro allows to persist between 50th St and 80th St, and the crawling sluggishness and unreliability thereby inflicted on Greenwood riders, is appalling. I can only hope the improvements between 90th and 105th, once built, will embarrass Metro into action further south.

The open house for this project is this Wednesday, 5-7 PM, at the Greenwood Public Library. SDOT hopes to begin construction this winter, finishing sometime next year.

Two small but significant trolleybus improvements are in the works for Queen Anne, both of them painfully obvious time- and money-saving optimizations to the overhead wire network that should probably have been built decades ago, but which I am overjoyed are finally happening. (“Better late than never” is the watchword of the STB Metro beat).

Under construction now is inbound trolleybus wire on Denny Way for Routes 1, 2, and 13. This is part of an SDOT-funded project, called the Uptown-Belltown Transit Improvement Project, which I’ve covered from its incipience, and which also brought us the new bus lane on Broad St. The new trolleybus wire will allow inbound trolley coaches to use Denny, just like diesel coaches have done for decades, and will save riders about two minutes per inbound trip. Construction is estimated to wrap up in late April, followed by a period of testing before Metro coaches switch to using the wire in-service. The eastbound Denny & Warren stop will be moved a block east, and upgraded with improved facilities.

The estimated cost of the project (which will likely change somewhat as construction goes on) is around $1.5 million. It’s worth pausing to mull his number for a moment: $1.5 million, for two minutes per day saved by thousands of riders from Queen Anne and Uptown, for the foreseeable future. The various Ballard rail options differ in travel times by about eight minutes per direction and in cost by billions of dollars. Obviously this comparison is somewhat apples to oranges: any of those alignments would serve far more people per day, and all aspire to provide a Rapid Transit level of service, which, if successful, provides more benefit per rider. Nevertheless, this frames a crucial point: any remotely sensible bus improvement on a well-used route will be amazingly cost-effective.

The final part of this project, a traffic study to evaluate whether outbound coaches could use a bus-only signal at 3rd & Denny, is ongoing.

More after the jump. Continue reading “SDOT and Metro Improve Queen Anne Trolleybus Routes”

SDOT’s Transit division is restoring and rehabilitating a pair of old streetcar stops, which, with the passage of time, have become rather dilapidated bus stops. One is in the Rainier Valley, for which a community meeting was held last week, and another is just outside Fremont, at the intersection of Westlake and Dexter, for which the meeting is this at 6:00 PM this Thursday at History House of Greater Seattle, in Fremont.

The Fremont shelter probably lost quite a bit of ridership in the September 2012 service chance, when Route 40, which runs through the heart of Fremont, replaced Route 17, for which this stop is the closest to Fremont. Still, the stop continues to serve about 50 riders per day, despite its current sad state. Getting this stop shipshape, ideally with better lighting and real-time arrival information, would be a real service to riders.

This weekend, we heard a rumor that WSDOT had found the money to fulfill their promise of viaduct mitigation funding through the opening of the SR99 Deep Bore Tunnel, scheduled for the end of 2015, a commitment which had been cast into doubt a couple of years ago.

This money, which amounted to about 40,000 hours of Metro service per year, was intended to provide drivers an alternative to driving on SR99, and to compensate Metro for increased running times on SR99 routes. Metro had used the money to improve schedule reliability on West Seattle routes, and add trips to high-performing commuter and all-day service in West Seattle, Ballard, and on Aurora. Those added peak trips are packed full of riders, so premature loss of this funding would have resulted in a “pre-bloodbath bloodbath” of cuts in July, falling extremely hard on West Seattle.

The potential loss of this mitigation money was one of the two fiscal swords hanging over Metro this year. The other, even larger one which remains, is the structural post-recession deficit of 600,000 hours per year. King County voters will get a chance to vote on additional revenue for Metro in April.

Quote from Dow:

“This is great news for everyone who commutes on the SR99 corridor, especially those coming from West Seattle and Burien,” says King County Executive Dow Constantine. “Viaduct mitigation has reduced traffic and increased transit use, and will continue to help manage the impacts of construction on businesses and the traveling public.”