All posts by Martin H. Duke

• Volunteer for ST’s Citizen Oversight Panel
• Sound Transit appealing Mercer Island permitting decision
• Sharrows as a “compromise” between bike lanes and doing nothing
• Kitsap Transit buys a used foot ferry as a Southworth backup
• Here comes the Northgate Pedestrian bridge
• Virtual tours of this year’s new Link stations
• Everett considers an “offensive” to bump itself up in Link priority
• Checking in on C-Tran
• More ST land donated for affordable housing
• SBB reports on the endless quest to fix Mt. Baker
• Lowering highway speed limits
• Land use planning in the area south of Tacoma
• Two-person freight railroad crews ($) still required
• Suburban road grids make buses more expensive
• “Cut-and-Cover is Underrated”
• Study says it’s largely the sacred “public input” that makes infrastructure in the US cost so much

This is an open thread.

• Apply for the Seattle Pedestrian Advisory Board
• Seattle’s car population plateaued ($) at about 460,000 2017-2019
• Paid parking rates adjust
• Metro hiring a new finance person, no public agency experience required
• More towers coming to the U-District; as always, it’s not nearly enough
• Republican transportation proposal ($) has new taxes on bikes and transit to fund roads, but at least it focuses on maintenance instead of new highways
• Sound Transit asks the legislature to help out
• Metro’s long range vision slips from 2040 to 2050, includes new service guidelines; more on this later
• SDOT considering loosening West Seattle Bridge restrictions
• Everett Herald ($), like the TNT, is more excited for light rail than the Seattle Times.
• Over 5,000 tickets issued there already
• New research on how market rate construction affects rents; here’s the local version
• VMT Tax comes up again; just raise the gas tax!
• Rizal Bridge gets a PBL
• Spokane’s Downtown Master Plan is ambitious
• Conditions for successful rail

This is an open thread.

CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

[UPDATE: Sources say HB1157 will be ruled “necessary to implement the budget,” which gives it some more time to live. But it still needs your help!]

Two companion bills, HB 1157 and SB 5390, would create incentives for local government to allow more housing, but at least one of them must emerge from its committee Monday (Finance and Ways and Means, respectively) to succeed in this session.

Both versions of the bill have a bipartisan group of sponsors. In the Senate, it’s Liias (D-Edmonds), Gildon (R-Puyallup), Nguyen (D-West Seattle), and Saldana (D-Rainier Valley). In the House, there are 18 sponsors from urban, suburban, and exurban districts, including Fitzgibbon, Harris-Talley, Hackney, Walen, and Ryu from Seattle and its inner suburbs. Thank your district’s delegation for its sponsorship!

The bill would allow cities or counties to create “real estate excise tax density incentive zones” where they get a portion of the REET proceeds. To qualify, the zone must allow “Single-family detached dwellings at a net density of at least six dwelling units per acre [1], duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhomes, accessory dwelling units, and courtyard apartments.” To qualify, cities and counties cannot allow the units to be short-term rentals for more than 30 days per year.

There’s nothing that quite matches this community’s interests like open software in the service of transit. In a recent blog post, OneBusAway for Apple iOS maintainer Aaron Brethorst says that a complete rewrite of the software is ready for beta testing.

For most of you, know that beta testing will expose you to some bugs but help make the final product better.

For those of you who spend your lives gluing bits of software together, know that this new version is built on the ‘OBAKit’ library, which makes it much easier to build other real-time transit applications. There are certainly lots of rural transit agencies that don’t have the resources to deploy things of this nature, and this makes it easier for developers to apply their skills to help those in need.

• Prepping parking rules for Climate Pledge Arena
• There has not been enough attention to the bad behavior by Renton and others in burden-shifting the homeless
• See also Mercer Island
• Federal Way Link 25% complete
• Train cafe cars are dumb
• Transit managers matter

This is an open thread.

HB1304, which would allow existing monorail taxing authority to be used for light rail, happened to show signs of life at just about the time that ST3 projects sank into serious financial trouble. Inevitably, these two subjects have merged in the discourse. That’s unfortunate, because the bill is best thought of as solving a long-term structural problem rather than a current revenue shortfall. Transit advocates should seize the opportunity to clear this legislative veto point and then argue about how to use it.

The design of Sound Transit is driven by the “spine” between Tacoma and Everett. The basic narrative is that local leaders in Pierce and Snohomish Counties thought, and continue to think, that light rail is important to the economic development of their core cities and convinced the legislature to authorize an agency large enough to take their interests into account. And so supermajorities in Seattle offset skepticism in outlying areas to allow each subarea to fund its stated priorities.

• Just end design review altogether
• Senate transpo package not as progressive as the House one
• Kenmore may speed up housing permits
• All Metro buses getting mask dispensers
• Stay Healthy Streets may run out of money
• West Seattle Bridge enforcement cameras are working
• 4th Avenue PBL to be extended
• SDOT completes its Covid-19 impact assessment for Move Seattle
• HB 1075 would require ride-hailing services to reduce emissions
• A high-speed bus chase in Moses Lake
• On hygiene theater ($)

This is an open thread.

Over the last few years, Sound Transit has eased the region into the idea of paying for scarce parking spots at Transit Centers. Before the pandemic, it was possible to guarantee yourself a spot by paying a monthly fee, less if a carpool or a low-income driver. ST had issued 1,100 permits at 14 facilities, according to ST Deputy Director Alex Krieg’s briefing at this month’s Executive Committee (see 1:30:00). ST froze the program as utilization cratered over the past year.

The main purpose, of course, is to manage demand. Before permits, spaces were strictly rationed based on willingness to show up early. Permits allow the agency to apply other criteria, as well as discouraging parking by riders with other easy alternatives. If free, why not drive 5 blocks and take up a spot, instead of walking?

Last fall Sound Transit thought East Link construction would require three weekend closures in the 2nd Quarter of 2021 and two later in 2021 for testing.

In last month’s East Link Extension update (pdf), which has nice photographs of progress at each station, next quarter will now see five closures, two of which are for removal of the temporary platform at Pioneer Square. The two later closures will still be necessary.

The briefing didn’t name specific weekends. It’s unfortunate that the center platform is going away: while a center platform at Chinatown/International District Station would have been ideal for transfers between Link lines, Pioneer Square would at least provide an option for the mobility-challenged and those with a lot of luggage.

Alas, a permanent platform requires emergency egress and ADA accommodations. Still, if I were ST I’d just leave the platforms there and just not open the doors on that side in the hope that someday there could be a shovel-ready stimulus project to finish it.

In much better (and bigger) news, the project float is still intact, so pre-revenue testing should begin in early 2022, and if the float holds, service could begin later that year, well ahead of the formal target of September 2023.

• Seattle tweaking signals to favor pedestrians
• Sound Transit Board deliberates on the ST3 budget gap
• I-976 is gone, Seattle transit projects are coming back again
• Mountlake Terrace Transit Center rearranging for Link construction
• Vision Zero not zeroing ($)
• Northgate Link stations “substantially complete“
• Pierce Transit has a new trip planner
• PSRC Passenger Ferry study is out
• Could 45th become a true multimodal street?
• Gondola advocates making a bit of progress in West Seattle
• There are some numbers for lidding I-5
• House bill would ban fossil fuel car sales by 2030
• Remnants of the Port Townsend Southern Railroad
• Lots of gadgets and big capital projects out there, but sometimes you just need to run more buses
• Dockless bikes not a business dead end in China

This is an open thread.

• Seattle and King County have a new bus service contract
• South OMF EIS coming March 5th, will be pivotal in getting ST to avoid/take responsibility for a landfill site
• A report from “brainstorming” ST realignment
• West Seattle Bridge is stable
• An interview with Metro GM Terry White
• and CT’s new CEO, Ric Ilgenfritz ($)
• Many apartments ($) coming to Lynnwood TC
• Thanks to the transit fairy ($)
• A smaller water taxi for two weeks
• Pacific Transit has a new Director
• Pausing highways, fixing culverts ($)
• Good luck to Kevin Desmond
• No one else thinks Covid-19 is a long term problem for transit

This is an open thread.

• Better access to NE 130th and NE 148th Stations
• SBB on bike access to lots of stations
• Northgate train testing has started
• Complete streets in Bellevue
• ST donating land for affordable housing; you can comment
• Olympia floats a big transpo package
• Bellevue’s ADU rules are not good
• Peter Rogoff talks about ST3 woes
• West Seattle, Ballard tunnels don’t seem so expensive now
• Another bill would let monorail authority fund light rail
• Uber, Lyft drivers now earning more
• PT Chief Sue Dreier retiring
• Comment on the curb space around Climate Pledge Arena.
• More research about high infrastructure costs
• Biden USDOT starts staffing up
• ST gets $1.4m from feds for commuter rail
• Sounds like infrastructure week again
• New stimulus proposal has $20 billion for transit

This is an open thread.

As the Sound Transit 3 news gets worse and worse, Sound Transit 2 continues a stream of good news as the bulk of the projects converge on opening. Today, we found out the South Bellevue parking garage will open in September, which restores the spaces for route 550 and 241 riders, and then some. This may be as much as two years before the Link line itself.

The garage has 1,500 spaces.

This publication is not a big fan of parking garages. But if there’s anywhere in the Link system there ought to be a garage, it’s here: hemmed in by a wetland and a neighborhood that won’t countenance upzoning (also up a steep hill), this station exists because it is on the way to downtown Bellevue, sits at an elbow in the line that allows it to draw from a wide swath of the Eastside, and proximity to two interstates.

As the County returns to full economic life, Metro is ramping up service. In keeping with their normal service reorganization procedure, there will be a citizen advisory board:

We are looking for participants for a workshop to provide input on how we prioritize what service to restore. 

Participants will: 

·         Attend a virtual workshop in the first two weeks of February 2021 to review Metro’s response to the COVID outbreak, 

·         Help Metro planning staff evaluate what types of service are most important to communities, 

·         Be compensated for their time and participation, and 

·         Be accommodated through interpretation and ADA access, as needed.  

If you are interested in this opportunity to participate in Metro’s planning, please respond to mjahshan@kingcounty.gov by January 21, 2021.

Longtime readers know I did one of these boards back in 2008 (unfortunately for me, well before one got paid to do so). It was an interesting window into the many considerations planners actually balance, as well as an education into what ordinary people in your community really think.

As always, I think people with a solid grasp of planning principles and a system view can be a useful corrective to narrower interests, as long they are willing to listen, open-minded, and empathetic.

• Kirkland considers 300′ towers around BRT stations while Seattle tinkers with 4-story buildlings around Link; maybe suburbs deserve HCT investment more than Seattle
• Point Defiance Bypass testing resumes
• Learn about last century’s streetcars
• Redmond hiring a transportation manager [UPDATE: this position closed in September]
• C-Tran will turn off diesel engines where pollution matters most
• Senate considering $10 billion for highway removal

This is an open thread.

• Free vanpools for West Seattle
• Uber prices rising due to new regulations on labor costs
• An excellent preview of the coming Transportation agenda ($) in the legislature
• Washington’s draft “Active Transportation Plan“
• It’s likely it’ll turn out fine, but the fact that the I-90 bridge is so innovative is a cause for concern as well as pride
• City rankings are dumb, and the article title is simply incorrect, but 10th best carfree city in the US sounds about right
• 20 years (!) of Tacoma freeway construction
• How to pick a bus battery
• Paid parking coming to the Junction
• Sounder mudslides are back
• Another grant means another “microtransit” program instead of just more buses
• Alon Levy reports that the Seattle Process is spreading, which is bad news
• Demand dropping, rents drop too, upending years of sloppy thinking about gentrification
• Seattle Children’s Hospital seeks a transportation planner

This is an open thread.