All posts by Matt Gangemi

On June 13th, all seven candidates appeared at the Queen Anne Community Center for a public debate sponsored in part by the Seattle Transit Blog.  Sponsoring this event was a big win for transit, as much of the debate revolved around transportation at the state and local level.

I was impressed by all of the candidates – though nobody beat Gael in political savvy, most were strongly pro-transit and each was sharp and had reasonably good grasps on the issues.  The candidates ranged from Left-Wing Linde that proposes a state banking system, to Republican Ryan that believes homelessness is caused by real estate taxes.

In regard to transit, here was an interesting series of questions:

Question: Should we prioritize road maintenance over building new roads?

Answer: Everyone says yes.

Question:What % of transportation budget should go to transit, bike, feet? (currently 7%)

Answer Ryan:  (I wrote “depends” in my notes, don’t recall exact answer)

Answer Evan: 15%

Answer Sahar, Noel, Gael, Brett: 50%

Answer Linde: 75%

Question from audience: How can you both increase transit spending to 50% of budget, while prioritizing road maintenance? Are you just telling us what we want to hear?

Answer: Nobody answers this correctly (in my humble opinion).  Gael answered best by changing the subject, saying that we need to spend money on transit at the state level to chase federal grants.  Noel had a reasonable approach, saying this 50% is a starting point for negotiations.  Brett said his 15% came from the proportion of people that use transit.  I think a fair answer anyone could have given is that the first question was effectively just saying we shouldn’t be building new roads, or at least focus on fixing our existing roads first.

One transit-adjacent issue that most candidates need to work on is the issue of toxic runoff.  This came up as two seperate questions, and I wasn’t satisfied with several answers.  Sahar  and Noel gave answers that revealed they need to study the issue more, and although Gael seemed to understand the issue well, her answer to the problem was very weak (#1 measure: improved government procurement).  Linde suggested we tax lawn fertilizer.  The shining winner on this issue was Brett, whose answers were detailed, intellegent, and implementable (get Puget Sound listed as a national Great Water, provide incentives for green roofs, subsidise transit and electric cars, and #1 solution would be reducing single occupant vehicles).

I’ve recently finished reading Darrin Nordahl’s ebook Making Transit FUN!, and it’s inspired a few ideas.  I’ll write up a review soon, but for now I present my latest idea: the Brooklyn Slide.  Imagine if instead of walking down two long sets of stairs or escalators in the future Brooklyn Station, you could shoot down a slide from the surface right to the platform.  This would save countless hours of passenger commute time, and would be fun.

Considering Sound Transit is only halfway done with design, there’s still plenty of time to add this little, cheap design enhancement.  Though I show a straight slide in my illustration, this could be helical after a straight section.  This could also likely work at the Roosevelt Station, Capitol Hill Station, or Bellevue Station, as they have similar designs.  If there’s any concern about safety, cleaning, liability, or maintenance, I refer you to previous designs implemented in parks throughout Seattle on city land, built safe enough for children to use.

Transit slides are not unprecedented, there are several that have been built as retrofit installations.  The difference here is that we have the opportunity to build one right into the station from the start.

In preparation for tomorrow’s Ride Free Area forum, I thought it would be a good time to discuss distance based fares.  One of the real problems I’ve had with ending the RFA is that King County Metro’s fare system is nearly flat. 

Flat fares are a bit like having a single price for ice cream, where someone buying a small cone pays as much as the next guy with his family-size banana split.  Of course this is a great deal for the hungry ice cream eater, but a terrible deal for the small cone customers and over time they just stop coming in.

Hopping back to the real world, let’s look at typical trip inside the current RFA.  Walking from 5th and Union to 3rd and Cherry, according to Google Maps, takes 11 minutes.  A bus trip, however, takes only 9 minutes.  Not a big difference, but if it’s cold outside it would be worth a little money and if you’re in a hurry every minute counts.  But how much is this trip worth to you?  My guess is that $4.50 round trip per person, is high for 4 minutes of time saved (that’s almost $70/hr!).  $5 a way could get you a taxi, which would be faster, involve less walking, and you could take friends for free.

Now compare that to a banana split trip on KC Metro.  Maybe a #15 from Blue Ridge.  That’s a 46 minute ride off-peak, shaving countless minutes off a walk or a large number of dollars off a taxi.  Yet the price is the same.  And that’s just within the city – go to a small additional fare for a 2-zone ride and you can go all the way across the county.

The market figured out a good solution to this problem a long time ago – charge a small enough amount for the small cones that people keep coming in for ice cream.  In the transit world, that’s distance-based fares.  Sound Transit’s Link light rail has done exactly this – charging based on distance*.  Link uses ORCA cards and requiring a tap-on and a tap-off.  If you forget to tap-off you’re charged the maximum fare.

Metro can and should copy Link’s strategy.  ORCA, combined with GPS, would allow this functionality.  All we’d really need are rear door ORCA readers – an upgrade that Metro failed to invest in last year because it wouldn’t work with their fare system (sigh).

An added benefit of this strategy is that it doesn’t just focus on downtown Seattle.  You would be able to get across any neighborhood at a reasonable price. 

* I still think they should go further – the minimum fare of $2 is likely not going to attract many short trip riders.  Make it $0.50 and more people will use it.

In my previous post, I proposed selling carrots on Metro buses, and allowing people to use their ORCA cards for this purchase. 

ORCA cards have the ability for what’s called an E-Purse.  This stores money on your ORCA card for travel that isn’t covered by a regular pass.  I use my E-Purse* to pay for the occasional ferry trip, which is outside the coverage area of my pass, and deposit money into it using a credit card and ORCA’s website. 

When writing the carrot piece I had no idea if ORCA cards could theoretically be used to purchase non-transit goods and services.  After all, if your employer is paying for part of your ORCA card and recieving a tax benefit for doing so, it wouldn’t make sense to allow people to buy carrots (or anything else) with that money.  So I sent an e-mail to the contact page on the ORCA website, and recieved this reply (emphesis mine):

The E-purse that is on the ORCA card can only be used for transportation services.  The reason for this is to prevent cardholders who receive transportation benefits from using them for non-transit purposes in keeping with FTA and IRS regulations.  However, there is memory capacity on the card to implement a second E-purse that could be used for non-transit purchases.  Although this isn’t on our short term horizon, it may be something that we explore in the future. 

So it’s possible.  Let’s think of the implications of carrying real money on your ORCA card.

• Just as it’s quick and easy to board a bus using ORCA, you could pay quickly at convenience stores. 
• Pay for parking with a swipe? 
• Vending machines.
• Bus carrots.

Of course, these benefits would be incentives for more people to carry an ORCA card.  And it turns out that there’s at least two systems that have already implemented this – Tokyo’s Pasmo and Suica Cards.

* Which I always coordinate with my E-Shoes – it’s a bold look for a man.

There was recently a long, passionate, and strange argument in the comment section of STB about whether food should be allowed on the bus.  Some of the more bizarre (to me) arguments include: buses are so slow, I need to eat at some point in the journey and people shouldn’t eat on buses because Americans are fat.

I have a solution.  I’ve been reading Darrin Nordahl’s book Making Transit Fun (we’ll have a review here in a few weeks), and this idea would fit right in to the theme. 

The idea:  change Metro policy to disallow all food except carrots.  Hire a pleasant, friendly salesperson to wear Metro orange from head to foot.  Buy large local organic carrots, wash and dry them, and cut the ends off (so carrot top litter doesn’t become a problem).  Then have her hop on and off not-packed-full buses, selling carrots for $0.50 each.  And give her an ORCA card reader to charge from your ePurse. 

Yes, carrots are loud.  But that’s part of the fun.  Imagine hopping on a bus and finding it full people crunching on carrots. 

Benefits include:

• Carrots are healthy.  There goes the Americans are fat argument.
• Carrots are food.  There goes the OMG I WILL STARVE argument.
• Carrots are clean.  They have little smell, aren’t wet or sticky, and have no wrapper.
• This would be fun.  It would support interaction between bus riders.  It might boost ORCA adoption, as you can actually buy something with it.  It might even drive up ridership, as people see the news stories about bus carrots.  It would certainly make the bus feel a little more friendly and inviting.

As BoltBus starts up 4x a day bus service between Seattle and Portland, building on QuickCoach‘s 7x a day service between Seattle and Vancouver BC, it might be a good time to look at a country with inter-city bus travel that really works.  I’ve already looked at Istanbul’s wide array of travel options, now let’s consider the best way to get between cities in Turkey.

Continue reading “Long Distance Buses in Turkey”

Although not a perfect case, the #35 does bring to mind an important point.  Details matter.  When you cut a bus service down below a frequent schedule, some people find it inconvenient to have to wait so they find other ways to travel.  When that schedule drops to a few times per day other riders find there’s not enough of a backup plan in case they miss the last bus, so they start driving to be sure they can get home.  And when these few buses arrive at strange hours of the day (the #35 arrives at 3:39 and 4:09 in the afternoon, and that’s it), it may drop almost all of its ridership since there are far stronger factors that affect work hours than just a bus schedule. Continue reading “The Tragedy of the Infrequent Route”

People love Seattle.  So what do we do about our popularity?  Here are our choices.

1. Allow additional housing capacity throughout Seattle (how and where to do this is open for debate), allowing people that want to move here to move here without kicking those with less money out.

2. Keep our restrictive zoning that only allows a small rate of growth, and allow affordability to plummet as rents go up to match demand.

The housing crisis won’t last forever.  We can ride the next building boom, or watch as the suburbs do it for us.

A conversation over at the Utility vs. Fun post reminded me of an idea I had years ago.  Note that this post is for fun only, and we live in a world that’s far too serious to ever implement such a plan. 

Spinland would be a completely constructed city, built on a body of water.  In this case I’ve chosen the north end of Lake Washington, as this will also provide a new pedestrian means of crossing the lake.  The inner portion of the city will float and turn using power from incoming water (additional hydro power can likely be generated).  It will turn very slowly, specifically three times per day (around 0.4 mph at the edge for this size city). 

Residences will be located outside the spinning area, and clustered together.  Businesses will be located on the spinning disk, and will also be clustered together.  A cluster of offices will pass a cluster of homes at 8am, and again at 4pm.  There will be clusters of retail areas, schools, and other services also located on the disk.  Continue reading “Spinland”

Matthew Yglesias, joining Publicola in responding to a recent Seattle Times editorial, pointed out on Tuesday that:

parking mandates are a regressive subsidy. The 16 percent of Seattle households with no car are a disproportionately low-income slice of the city’s population.

Let’s expand on that a bit.  I think it’s fairly clear that the main beneficiaries of parking minimums are those with more vehicles, which would tend to be citizens with a higher income.  On the other side of the equation, who do these minimums harm?  I would group the carless as either urban types that don’t care to drive, the elderly or disabled that can’t drive, or the poor that can’t afford to drive.  Yet these groups are currently being forced to pay higher rents, to make sure if they do ever buy a car they will be less likely to use up “free” street parking.
Continue reading “A Tax on the Poor, Benefiting the Rich”