All posts by Martin H. Duke

While we’re on the subject of art, one interesting tidbit I learned about at the MLK Street Fair was the origin of the pictograms associated with each station. It turns out they’re supposed to be constellations, as explained in this brochure.

The basic idea is that one plots out the locations of several points of interest in the vicinity of each station, and then connects those points in a way that suggests some shape, which then becomes the pictogram.

For example, in the Columbia City “map” at right, the leftmost “star” is the light rail station, and the other stars are various landmarks along Rainier Avenue. All in all, it requires a healthy dose of imagination, but no more so than real constellations.

I suppose the pictogram program is an attempt to make the system more accessible for the illiterate and non-English-speaking, and that’s fine enough. It might not have hurt to come up with a scheme a bit easier to reverse-engineer, but how such a scheme would work isn’t immediately clear.

Erica C. Barnett is considerably less impressed with Larry Lange’s P-I piece than I was.

When I read articles at 6:30 am, I promise to read them once more, after coffee, before commenting.  She makes some solid criticisms, in particular that the No campaign’s criticism that ST’s median income uses the wrong denominator is completely innumerate.

I still think Lange did a pretty even-handed job.  It’s clear that he asked ST to respond to the No campaign’s claims, and they covered most of the main points.  But extended analysis just pokes more and more holes in these tired arguments and scare tactics.

I understand John is putting together a mega-post on this subject, but Larry Lange in the P-I has really written a tour de force here, that carefully explains all the assumptions that go into the  conflicting cost numbers for Prop 1.  Every citizen in the district would be smarter for having read it.  In particular, I applaud his emphasis on per-adult and per-household numbers rather than raw totals, as that’s a number that means something to real people in the real world.

I would have liked to see a remark that some of the program costs are covered not by local taxes but federal dollars, but that’s a minor quibble.

While the Mass Transit Now campaign is holding its own on this argument, this is not favorable terrain for them.  The campaign really has to grab the narrative and focus more on benefits, rather than costs.   No one votes for a program because it costs less than other people say it does; they vote for it because they like the benefits it’s going to bring to them and people they know.

I saw this on the Slog, and thought it important enough to forward:

Since 2006, Washington’s Republican Secretary of State has canceled more than 450,000 voter registrations in an effort to “clean up” the voter rolls. Sure, many are duplicate registrations or persons who moved out of state. But many are persons who think they’re properly registered and intend to vote in November. I personally know people this has happened to!

It doesn’t take much to get removed from the voter rolls. You may have been removed if, for example:

(1) you haven’t voted in a long time,
(2) your signature on your absentee ballot envelope wasn’t deemed a match with the signature on your registration card, or
(3) your absentee ballot was returned by the post office (the post office doesn’t forward ballots to your new address).

Everyone should check to make sure you are currently registered at your current address. You can do this online, and in most cases you can update your registration online. But you must make any changes by October 4!

Please take a minute to check your registration by clicking here.

Please forward this message to your friends and family! Everyone should check their registration before October 4!

Thanks!

This is one of several reasons I’m a big fan of voting in person whenever possible, but that’s a subject for another day.  Anyway, check it out, because I think Prop. 1 is going to be a close contest.

The Times has a big piece this morning on the Mass Transit Now’s campaign’s efforts to mobilize Obama voters.  As a partisan of one side, I obviously wish they had printed more rebuttals to the statements of the other side.  At the same time, I think it’s better for the transparency of the issues to express the cost of the measure it terms of the average person or household, so I applaud them for that.  And I’m glad to see them linking.

However, there are two factual errors, one trivial, and one fairly important.

The trivial one is that Ben is not the founder of this blog, Andrew is.  Perhaps Ben is hogging the glory, but I suspect Mike Lindblom didn’t bother to ask the question. [UPDATE: This has been fixed online.]

More importantly, the plan summary says that Prop. 1 will add 100,000 hours of bus service, starting next year.  That’s unclearly stated, since there will be 100,000 hours added immediately, and even more added later.  This isn’t the Transit Now service drip-feed we’re used to, and it’s an important point given the criticism that this package doesn’t do enough right away.

I’ve been told that the service expansion plan will be out before the election, and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s released.  But for reference, assuming each round trip takes two bus operating hours, 100,000 bus hours gets you almost 6 additional round trips for every ST Express route in the system, 365 days a year, and 8 round trips if you add it on weekdays only.   That’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it means a lot more to most people than 100,000 hours.

[If you’re coming here for the first time via the Seattle Times, welcome!  To find out a bit more about who we are and what we do here, this post is both short and very useful.]

Commenter/sometime troll Sam, with characteristic grace, asks for a post on the LA rail crash.  I think that he wants us to apologize for the misconduct of the train engineer, or something.  I guess he expects it’ll turn out that that Bundridge or Schiendelman was texting him just before the crash.

I didn’t have much to say about this.  What can you say when the Friday evening commute turns into a grisly massacre?

If pressed, I suppose I’d point out that despite spectacular and telegenic crashes, rail and air travel are by far the safest per passenger mile traveled.  They’re safer than the bus and much safer than driving your own car.  Here’s an EU study that a quick Google search turned up:

Rail and air travel are the safest modes per distance travelled, followed by bus. The passengers of trains, bus/coach and planes within the EU have the lowest fatality risk per passenger kilometre. For the average passenger trip in the EU, bus travel has a 10 times lower fatality risk than car travel and air travel within the EU has for the average flight distance about the same fatality risk per passenger kilometre as train travel and both are half as risky as travel by coach.

That paragraph is brutally written, so to simplify, driving a mile in a car is as risky as riding 10 miles in a bus, or 20 miles in a train or airplane.   

And here’s a USDOT table that compares lots of apples and oranges, but does show that there were 0.398 transit fatalities per 100 million passenger miles traveled, compared to 1.47 for highway driving.  I wouldn’t get too wrapped around the axles about precise numbers.  Suffice it to say we’re looking at close to an order of magnitude difference in safety.

Unfortunately, I read somewhere that 90% of drivers think they’re above average, and that makes for a lot of people misjudging the relative risks of choosing each mode of transportation.  It’d save society a lot in health care costs and lost productivity if people assessed risks more accurately, and society gave them choices that made good decisions easier.

Equally unfortunately, it appears that biking and walking are just behind motorcycles in being more dangerous than cars.  I’m not a bike person, but I understand what they’re screaming about.  In my example above a motorcyclist could travel 0.05 miles and a pedestrian or cyclist about 0.13 miles at the same risk.

As for Sam’s suggestion to remove the window shade on LINK, meh.  Does the deterrent outweigh the distraction of people peering in, tapping on the glass, and taking photos?  I don’t know, but I strongly suspect that it’s significant enough either way to expend any energy on.

UPDATE: Yglesias makes the same point, at almost the same time.