Martin joined the blog in Fall 2007 and became Editor-in-Chief in 2009. He is originally from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., but has lived in the Greater Seattle area since 1997. He resides with his family on Capitol Hill and works as a software engineering manager downtown. Key Routes: Link, 49, 10, 60
Today is the deadline to register online to vote in the November election. If you’ve moved here, changed address, or otherwise haven’t registered to vote, the time is now.
Please go to MyVote.wa.gov, which is a portal for whatever registration transactions you need.
Only Thurston County is offering a strictly transit-related measure on the ballot. However, all Washington voters can vote on the Carbon Fee, I-1631, which will both encourage low-carbon means of housing and transport, and discourage carbon-intensive ones. Congressional races touch a wide range of issues. Furthermore, state legislative elections are probably the most underrated in terms of public attention and the impact they have on everyday life. The party balance in Olympia resolves issues around authorized transit taxes and the primacy of highways.
STB endorsements on transit and land use-related issues will be available soon.
Two months ago I wrote about the Downtown Seattle Association’s experiment with a free waterfront shuttle. The pilot’s original term ended on October 1st, and the numbers are in.
Source: Commute Seattle
September 14th was the highest ridership day, at 1,674. The average weekday attracted 953 boardings, or 95 per hour. Weekends actually saw more usage, at 1,044 per day or 104 per hour. In absolute terms, this is roughly equivalent to a low-ridership Sound Transit Express route, and over much less distance. This isn’t moving the needle regionally, but isn’t bad for a new route with its share of quirks.
Source: Commute Seattle
But that’s not the really interesting news. After starting as a single loop from Pioneer Square to the Space Needle with unscheduled 25-minute headways, the shuttle is now three separate loops (see right). 3 to 6 buses per hour serve each of these loops, with the congestion issues you would expect. Commute Seattle data suggests all the but the green loop are pretty consistent through the day.
The DSA added the green (east) loop on August 31st “to circulate riders to Pike Place Market and the Retail Core & Convention Center from the waterfront,” according to spokesperson Margaret Steck. Weekly ridership jumped from 3,824 to 6,270 on either side of the change, although some of that may have been Labor Day weekend.
If you’re interested in this service, that’s not the most exciting news. Instead of ending last week, the DSA has the funding to run through at least Sep. 3, 2019, 10am to 8pm, except for Thanksgiving and the week between Christmas and New Year’s. One would expect ridership to dip in the bad weather months, and given the apparent leisure focus of many trips, it’s a bit odd to shut down over major holidays. But it’s always good to have novel funding sources create free transit in some of the region’s most constrained spaces.
Last week I pointed to some data from Gene Balk that transit ridership was higher for lower income brackets than higher incomes, consistent with conventional wisdom but disproving the argument that transit improvements are an elite project.
Among Seattle-area residents with a salary of $75,000 or more, 11 percent typically took transit to get to work in 2017. That’s higher than any other income group. Less than 10 percent of workers with wages below $35,000 took transit.
I asked Mr. Balk if he could explain the discrepancy. He pointed out that the first result was 2012-2016 census data, while the latter is just for 2017. Furthermore, the scope changes from King County to the entire Metro area. The 2017 data set shows that within Seattle, poor people still use transit more than rich people.
The data doesn’t prove much more, but it’s easy to speculate. In Snohomish and Pierce Counties, intra-county commutes are easy drives and dicey transit rides. If you’re going all the way into Seattle, it’s probably both a higher-paying job and one better suited to transit.
If you’ve driven to the San Juans, especially in summer, you know the horror: scheduling a ferry slot months in advance, struggling with an overloaded website when the slots are released, allotting plenty of extra time in case you hit traffic, and showing up no later than 45 minutes before sailing. And then you fork over $30-$50 each way (plus the passenger fare) to haul the car on board.
Last Labor Day weekend, I tried a different way: public transit all the way from Seattle, to join my party already on Orcas Island with the car. Google Maps told me to leave downtown Seattle at 3:15pm to make the 7:20 sailing from Anacortes. It’s a 90 minute drive under ideal conditions, though if you’re driving to the islands you’d best leave some extra time.
That same uncertainty did me in, even on the bus. It will surprise no Snohomish County commuter that my 512 capitulated to the traffic. The HOV lane failed, and even though I’d departed 15 minutes earlier than recommended, I didn’t come close to making the (hourly) Skagit Transit 90X to Mt. Vernon. I grabbed a sandwich and schemed to get as close to possible to the ferry before switching to Lyft.
Gene Balk has a typically informative column ($) about who is taking to transit to work these days. University professors, housekeepers, and computer programmers have the highest transit share of any professions in Seattle. He astutely points out how much this has to do with where jobs are located. Seattle is incredibly fortunate that Amazon continues to place the vast majority of its office jobs in the center city.
Someone might use that as a story of how transit is now just a “hipster” phenomenon, but professional definitions are arbitrary — I don’t know the difference between “computer programmer” and “software developer” in this context.
Credit: Mark Nowlin/The Seattle Times
Meanwhile, less arbitrary divisions, like the income chart above, show that low income people remain, in both absolute and relative terms, the biggest users of transit in the region. Moreover, transit’s mode share is relatively stable across income boundaries. Broadly speaking, we’ve made transit an attractive option, and this creates a positive feedback loop. Creating higher-income riders creates stakeholders with more political power — which leads to better and more attractive transit.
A twitter thread, since deleted, questioned which dollars the new Center City Connector cost estimates were expressed in. If the study counts year of expenditure (YOE) dollars, then simply deferring the project balloons the cost.
Absolutely obsessed with questions about YOE vs. constant dollars during the ST3 campaign, I was embarrassed not to think of this question myself. The Mayor’s Office responded like this:
Capital costs are estimated in current (2018) dollars with escalation included through mid-point of construction at 5% per year. The mid-point of construction was estimated to be in September 2020. KPMG used a 4% annual growth rate (real + nominal) to get to Opex figures, which are reflected in the increases.
Although the wording is unclear, it describes YOE dollars. The CCC is a relatively short project, so YOE doesn’t transform the numbers. The study summary is actually quite specific that delaying completion to 2022 accounts for $8m of the $54.8m capital cost increase. This is roughly in line with construction costs delayed for two years at 5% inflation ending up at $83m.
In the ST3 debate, these questions mattered a lot. Thanks to the long timeline, different units resulted in huge differences in headline figures in the context of a campaign. For the CCC, I’m not sure it matters. Apportioning blame is a fun parlor game. But most of the funding streams are fixed, so regardless of the cause, supporters will have to find the money somewhere.
Frank and I will tape another mailbag for our podcast as early as Wednesday night. Please fill this comment thread with your questions in the next day or so.
