All posts by Matt Gangemi

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Free or reduced-priced compact flourescent light bulbs have been a successful way for utilities to help customers reduce energy use.  In return, power companies don’t have to add as much power generation capacity thanks to the lower demand.  But what about water?  Building sewage treatment plants costs money.  Without fanfare or any media notice (except at QA View), Seattle Public Utilities began giving out brand new efficient toilets, delivered to your home and installed by a professional plumber – all for free.  You have to be fairly low income to qualify, and you have to have an old toilet and live in your own home, but other than that there aren’t any strings – just a shiny new piece of porcelain ready to save you around 24,000 gallons of water and $140 a year.

If this turns out to be as popular as their kitchen compost bin giveaway (more compost = less trash to haul down to Oregon), they’ll run out of toilets quickly.

Hey, toilets are infrastructure.  Sort of.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

In our attempt at making cities more friendly for bicycling, we often talk of bike paths as being the gold standard.  But cars never settled for paths – riddled with stop lights, crosswalks, and pedestrians – for their ideal commute.  I think it’s time to consider a bicycle freeway downtown.

My idea of a bicycle freeway would be an 8′ wide ribbon of concrete placed around 15′ in the air over a sidewalk.  There would be a simple railing on both sides, and would look a bit like a pedestrian overpass.  The bicycle freeway would allow bicyclists to speed past street-level obstacles and quickly enter the heart of the city.  Exit ramps would be curved and would be roughly level, which would be accomplished by exiting in the uphill direction (thanks to downtown’s hilly nature). 

Additional benefits would include a bit of shading and rain protection for pedestrians below, and the potential for hill leveling to allow for an easier ride.

 (please excuse the low-quality MS Paint rendering)

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I’m a fan of tearing down the Viaduct, think we should downscale our ferry terminal, and believe we should get rid of 520 as well.  Just as road capacity creates sprawl, reducing capacity builds density.  It will be painful at first, as people increase their commute times until they decide to move near their job, but the end result will be beautiful.  Knute Berger recently wrote up a great article on this topic: Mayor, tear down that bridge.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Apropos of nothing, let’s consider how car ferries impact Seattle’s waterfront.  Even in a car-based world it makes little sense to put such a large source of cars right in the middle of the city.  In such a world it’s a bit of a stretch to think of a far-west sider driving on to a ferry to drive and park in Seattle.  But Seattle is quickly changing into a foot-based city, which brings this situation from inefficient to absurd.

How many car-ferry based trips either start or end in the city?  I’d guess very few.  This means cars get off in Seattle and drive through city streets to get to freeways.  That’s not efficient for the cars, and certainly isn’t efficient or attractive for either the pedestrians or the drivers on our streets.

Imagine for a minute our new transformed, viaductless waterfront.  The one choke point and large waste of space I can see is the ferry terminal.  Imagine if instead of a vast stretch of parking lot we had a boardwalk space similar to San Francisco’s Pier 39 with tiny retail stores, restaurants, and common areas for entertainment and picknicking.

We’d keep ferries coming and going of course, they’d just be foot ferries – far less expensive to maintain and run.  We’d also keep a path open for car ferries by running more to West Seattle and Edmonds, or pick somewhere else out of the way.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I’m taking my son and niece on the light rail to find parks today, and found this resource.  It has walking maps of all of the Rainier Valley light rail stations.  It looks like it’s been around a while and people around here may already know about it, but I hadn’t so I thought I’d share.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The Seattle Times has been running a full court press to build 520 in any way the state (and Microsoft) wants.  It’s always felt to me that money drives news in our local papers (now paper), but with Microsoft paying $40,000 for a full page ad supporting the bridge it’s not even being done under the table.  I don’t blame Microsoft for this – $40k is a great deal if it helps them get their multi-billion dollar road subsidy.  When credible news sources have a conflict of interest, I at least usually hear a disclaimer in the story – not so with the Seattle Times.  Should newspapers be ethically bound to drop or at least moderate stories that directly benefit them?

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

We all know WSDOT loves cars, but this is just sad.

1. Go to the WSDOT home page to see their list of priorities, click on “Climate Change.”
2. Look for their “Climate Change Tools,” click on “Moving Washington.”
3. Notice first that this page is aimed at reducing congestion.  Then notice that their first strategy is to add capacity*.

So according to WSDOT, more capacity = climate change tool.  Which is absolutely true – adding road capacity is one tool to change the climate.  I just don’t think that changing the climate should be one of our goals.

* I recognize that they actually say “add capacity strategically”, which is defined elsewhere as freeing up bottlenecks.  But that’s beside the point.  Freeing up bottlenecks will reduce traffic, encouraging people to live further from their jobs.  Implying otherwise is blatant greenwashing.

[update]

Cool.  Someone from WSDOT must read this blog.  Some time between yesterday and today they’ve changed their website to remove the “Moving Washington” link from their climate change page.  They are still greenwashing road building, they’re just hiding it.

Compare the current page to the older page (thanks Google archive).  Strangely, they also removed their goals for reducing VMT by 50% in the next 40 years.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

KUOW* recently played one of Alex Steffen’s Town Hall talks from a few months ago, and I highly recommend listening to them.  He claims that Seattle has a world reputation as a green city, which is based purely on our clean hydroelectric energy source, not the way we run our city or region.  But we could use this free marketing with our geographic luck and some hard work to convert our city to the world’s first that is carbon neutral – setting an example for other cities to follow.

Our luck extends beyond geography.  It turns out that our own Bill Gates has announced that he will use his foundation to try to get the entire world on track to be carbon neutral.  Perhaps we can convince our politicians, businesses, and citizens to get on board as well.

* if you listen to podcasts I highly recommend adding Speakers’ Forum to your list.  It’s a weekly broadcast of speakers from a wide range of subjects at local venues.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

It occurred to me that the electronic signs in Link’s windows telling you their destination are almost useless, since we currently only have one line.  Also, the electronic signs announcing departing trains will be a bit sad, with only one destination announced per direction.  I therefore suggest the following use, for one day humor value:

1. Change train signs to destinations in other cities.  Since everyone in Seattle seems to come from California, I think something along the line of “N Judah” or “Pittsburgh / Bay Point” might be sufficiently disorienting.

2. Why limit the electronic signs to announcing the soonest trains to depart?  I’m picturing:

• Westlake Center: 2 minutes
• Westlake Center: 8 minutes
• University District: 6 years
• Overlake Transit Center: 20 years

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I love the stickers someone placed on Metro buses. Stabbing Prohibited and No Urinating.  This should remove a few common bus faux pas.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

SeattleBubble just posted some very interesting numbers for the 25 most populated cities in the US.  There are a few lessons from this set of data, but my favorite is how cheap this city is – as dense cities go.  Click on the “Density” tab, and we’re #8.  Our Income/Rent ratio is 5 – much higher than most of those above us.  The next cheap city is all the way down at Denver – with a bit over half the density we have.

Of course San Francisco nearly catches us with an I/R of 4.9 and is over twice as dense as us, so although we’re less expensive, if you want density at a reasonable price you may consider SF.

Owning is a completely separate matter.  While owning a home is much cheaper (per income) here than NY, LA, or SF, anywhere else more dense than us is a better deal.  And housing in Detroit – just one under us in density – is practically free (seriously, $25k for a house?  are they missing a zero?).

Why does any of this matter?  Well, there’s the human aspect of wanting to be paid well yet not paying a fortune for housing and still living in a city.  But what I see in these numbers is the drivers of density.  To create density we need an attractive place to live and enough supply.  Lumped in with an “attractive place to live” is income and cost of living, which includes rent.  The price of housing alone doesn’t tell you much, since this can be offset by income.  But an I/R ratio exposes this piece of “attractive place to live”.  Of course, as a city becomes more dense it’s harder to meet housing demand with supply, so rents go up.  So we expect I/R ratios to drop with density.  The fact that ours is still high shows that we’re a comparatively attractive and affordable city, at least by this measure.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

It looks like funding restrictions that favored the suburbs are being rescinded. Anyone know if there’s a chance this could help Link or even McGinn’s light rail proposal?

DOT press release here, and Ray LaHood’s speech on the subject here. His speech is filled with encouraging phrases like “livable, sustainable communities” and even, in reference in what he’s hearing, uses the sentence “They want the opportunity to leave their cars behind.”

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

(update: this is a complete re-write, as I originally thought this project was for the SeaTac airport station)

It looks like the the city of SeaTac is building TOD at Tukwilla Station (press release [pdf]). This will be less than ideal for Link users, having to walk through Link’s parking lot to get there. Remind me again why we wasted valuable pedestrian space at a station with parking?

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

If so, SDOT will give you a pile of free stuff.

If not but you’re a single occupant commuter, promise to change your evil ways for two months and they’ll still give you $60 in bus tickets and a discounted Zipcar membership.

Already doing the right thing? Well, no free stuff for you. But thank you anyway.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I noticed the coupon at the Fremont PCC grocery store. Travel by May 21, 2010, anywhere Cascades runs (Eugene to Vancouver BC). There are a handful of blackout dates – mostly at holidays. The discount code is H815, but it says you have to present the coupon when you travel. They had a pile of them at the checkout counter at PCC, or I’m sure you can call Amtrak to find out where else you can get a coupon.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Vote over at the Slog.

I actually like the 3 and 4. I’m a 2, 13 (and recently 15 and 18) rider myself, and the 4 is a nice change – calm, quiet, with few stops and little traffic. But that’s up QA hill – maybe the problem is on the south end of the route.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Completely stolen from the Slog.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

When an audit was released that listed Seattle’s electric trolley buses (ETB’s) as more expensive per year than a hybrid bus replacement, I was amazed. Although the benefits of ETB’s are many, I’ve considered cost efficiency a large benefit. As the report did not list sources for its data, I took the next step of asking the auditor to view the source data. I was e-mailed two spreadsheets with almost all of the information I wanted.

Observations from the audit:

1. The main source of the cost difference is that the ETB’s are claimed to cost twice that of hybrid buses. I can imagine this if they bought just one, since it’s not an off-the-shelf product. But they’d be buying close to 200 – there has to be economies of scale there, and the components of an ETB have to be cheaper than a hybrid.

2. Hybrid fuel efficiency was listed at 5 mpg. This is in direct conflict with Metro statements in the past of observing 3.8 mpg.

3. “Engine overhaul” is listed at 6.7x as frequent for ETB’s vs. hybrids. This just can’t be right, as ETB’s don’t have engines. If they’re talking about the electric motors, these last a long time and shouldn’t cost the same as a engine overhaul.

4. Overall, operating costs are much cheaper for ETBs than diesels or hybrids. It’s really the initial cost of the buses that seems to drive up the price.

I am following up with a list of questions to the auditor, and will report back when I get a response.

[update] The new bus costs and “engine overhaul” data came from Metro. It’s almost as if Metro is trying to kill ETBs (tries to feign shock).

The scheduling spreadsheet also came in. It’s too dense of calculations for me to follow (without a paycheck for such things, that is).

Layover/service ratios appear to be much higher in trolley buses. The auditor’s explanation for this is that they can’t pass each other and they lack flexibility. But flexibility doesn’t mean that they can’t change routes (though this would help in case of an accident), but that they can’t pull double service for two routes.

My comments regarding flexibility:

1. Anecdotally, the reason passing is a large issue is wheelchair loading. The trolleys don’t have a kneeling ability, which can make a wheelchair stop take a long time. Combine a few such stops and you get a line of trolleys waiting for the one in front. If this is costing so much money, wouldn’t the obvious solution is to design in a kneeling ability into the next batch of trolleys?

2. If there would really be an efficiency gained by adding more routes together, couldn’t we just add more wire to create these routes? Why tear out a system that could in all other ways be much more efficient than hybrids? Go all the way and make as many routes electric as you’d need to remove routing inefficiencies. [/update]

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Mike McGinn has proposed a new light rail line be built to connect West Seattle, Belltown, Queen Anne, Ballard, Fremont, and Ballard to downtown. I have no idea of his exact plan, but I’d like to speculate. Based on my previous idea for an Aurora trolley line, I present the Aurora Light Rail:

With removing the Viaduct, 99 will have much less traffic. My idea is to reduce it to a boulevard with a single lane in each direction and light rail in the middle, from downtown to the bridge. This allows us to use the existing bridge, as crossing the ship canal may be the most expensive component to a light rail system.

Note also the new pedestrian tunnel from the waterfront to the transit tunnel. A common complaint about using the waterfront as a place for light rail is that it won’t be connected to Link. But it takes only minutes to walk from Link to the waterfront, and an underground tunnel with escalators will reduce this further.

The main detail that needs more thought is at the West Seattle side. I don’t spend much time in West Seattle and am not sure the best route. Ideas?

Also, I haven’t gone as far as thinking out station locations. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I’ve made it my personal conquest in local blogs and newspaper comments to argue against those that say new dense housing drives up prices. Simple supply v. demand economics tells us that when you have more of a good or service without new demand the price goes down. Why this tricks people is because they see new condos selling for more than the old houses they replaced, without perceiving the high demand that caused those condos to be built or seeing that the average price of housing overall goes down – say, old condos in a less desirable area that now have fewer potential buyers.

How can I ever get through to the deniers? Those that say that the cost of new housing will always be high whatever the demand? Well, a down economy helps. The Slog is reporting that Brix and Gallery condos are being auctioned off at bargain basement rates – $458k units are starting at $185k. Yes, I’m sure they’ll sell for more than that, but imagine what older condos will start selling for once their potential buyers all buy new condos.