All posts by Sherwin Lee

• Sounder extension to Lakewood already helping spur development.
• U-Link and North Link station names finalized.
• Efforts are underway to save the vintage waterfront streetcars from being carted off elsewhere.
• Mayor McGinn releases a bold rezone proposal for South Lake Union.
• What not to do when operating a streetcar.
• Eastside mayors talk future growth, transportation.
• New federal money to help underrepresented communities get engaged in East Link planning.
• Link rounds out the top five in METRO magazine’s Top Rail Project survey.
• A small tussle over restrooms at the future S. 200th Station reaches resolution.
• An interview with Sound Transit CEO Joni Earl on KUOW.
• New European studies try to explain rail bias.
• A primer on Sound Transit Board actions Thursday, including East Link and North Link.
• Agreement finally reached over trees in Group Health’s Redmond redevelopment.
• First Hill Streetcar tracks finding their new home.

This is an open thread.

A few months ago, I opined about the nuanced exaggerations the media sometimes resorts to when it comes to linking where crime occurs and geographically proximate “factors” like transit, which I argued is often used as a scapegoat.  My own quick and dirty analysis revealed that criminal activity aboard transit largely reflects existing patterns in the neighborhoods where said crimes occur.

The Chicago Tribune completed a much more in-depth analysis for the Windy City over a two-year period, examining the types and locations of crimes that were occurring within the CTA system.  While there’s some jabbering about anecdotal experiences and riders’ own perceptions of crime, the underlying findings largely mirror my own:

The geographic examination of city data from 2009 through June 13 of this year demonstrates that crime patterns on the CTA closely mirror Chicago’s demographics, in terms of population density and income disparities (emphasis mine).

I still think the way police captain Lemmer frames “safe” and “unsafe” stations is a little off.  There’s really no such thing as an “unsafe” station, except those that are purposefully built to be unsafe.  Safety, at least as it relates to crime, or the illusion of it merely reflects the goings-on in the surrounding environment.  Whether a crime takes place on a subway platform or on the street below has little to do with the station itself.  Similarly, the article’s headline: “Analysis reveals hot spots for CTA-related crimes” is also misleading in this regard.

Ultimately, I think the analysis only adds to evidence that crime is a structural problem.  Unfortunately, the way we segregate policing by jurisdiction (i.e., Metro Police will respond to a crime on a bus, while Seattle PD will respond to a crime on the street) seems to uphold faulty notions about transit or even the people who use it.  If anything, we should use transit as a tool to combat crime, building vibrant community spaces that attract the attention the eyes of all its users.

“Competitiveness” is commonly used when we want to describe how transit matches up with other modes, particularly the automobile.  The value of transit competitiveness can be quantified in different ways, but travel time is most often used as the proxy, at least in the simplest terms of discussing how transit competes.  If a rider expends 10 minutes traveling between Point A and Point B aboard transit versus 12 minutes driving, we like to say that transit is competitive in that instance.

Of course, using travel time alone is probably a poor way of describing the breadth of how transit competes.  Cost, comfort, reliability, etc. are all variables that should be taken into account.  As such, the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) does have what’s called a Transit Competitiveness Index— a composite index that takes into account a multitude of factors in quantifying how transit competes with automobiles for any given origin or destination in the region.

At any rate, the problem with using competitiveness as a measuring stick of success is that it’s constructed on the basis of a singular rider experience, instead of an entire population, which is what transit is designed for.  If we try to minimize the travel time for that rider between A and B, it’s probably at the expense of the riders who live in between those two points.  Similarly, if we try to maximize comfort for each individual passenger aboard a transit vehicle by providing cushy armchairs, it means less people can get on that vehicle.

I think that where applicable, transit competitiveness can be appropriately used as a marketing tool, but it shouldn’t be the be-all end-all of how we plan our network.  Ultimately, people care less about lining up their mode choices side by side and judiciously selecting the most optimal one, and more about whether or not transit can meet their needs.  As long as that criteria is fulfilled, then our primary concern should be maximizing it for as many people as possible.

Starting today, the curb lane between the Dexter off-ramp and Mercer on Aurora Avenue southbound will be converted to a BAT (business access and transit-only) lane.  Unlike some other BAT lanes in the city, the right-turn and transit-only designation applies all day and night, which means single-occupant drivers can get dinged for a citation if caught traveling in the lane, even at 2 in the morning.  The conversion helps pave the way for the E Line in 2013 while also acting as mitigation for upcoming roadwork.

From SDOT (.pdf):

King County Metro Transit will be starting RapidRide E Line service on Aurora Avenue North in 2013, but the lane will be designated earlier to keep buses moving during several ongoing construction projects. Metro carries almost 30,000 passengers a day on the Aurora corridor, which helps significantly reduce the number of cars on the road.

Two upcoming projects are the City’s Mercer West Project and the WSDOT’s Route 99 Tunnel Project. Traffic congestion is expected to increase on southbound Aurora when lanes are temporarily closed for these projects and optimizing transit travel will provide commuters with a better option for avoiding possible delays.

For more information, questions/comments can be sent to the project lead, Jonathan Dong, at jonathan.dong@seattle.gov.

In this day and age, anti-transit politicos generally don’t get very much airtime to espouse their opposition to transit investments.  Media coverage of transportation spending is subdued at best and the overwhelming consensus among planners is one that aspires for a greener less auto-oriented future.  Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean transit advocates can kick back and relax.  Opposition still remains staunch and is generally focused indirectly, through groups like the highway lobby and property rights advocates.

Though anti-transit ideology stems largely from the conservative crowd, there are a select few that have been vociferous in their support for transit while remaining staunchly conservative in other areas.  William S. Lind, director of The American Conservative Center for Public Transportation, is one of those few and has authored quite a bit of pro-transit literature from a conservative’s viewpoint.  As a result, we’ve not been unfamiliar with his work.

I had the privilege of corresponding with the Center and soliciting a few opinions from Mr. Lind about his thoughts on the matter.  While you may not find some of the nuances in his opinion entirely agreeable, his general argument does deliver a powerful and persuasive case for bridging the ideological gap on transportation.  The interview is below the jump.

Continue reading “An Interview with Pro-Transit Conservative William Lind”

One of the most cherished realms of contemporary planning is the allowance for public participation, a tool often embraced for fostering democratic processes at the most local level of civic engagement.  It also happens to be one of the most contentious aspects that planners and policymakers face.  Borne out of a certain necessity in reaction against the top-down planning fiascoes of urban renewal, public participation has yielded issues of its own, often wielded as a tool for obstructionism and calling into question the distribution of citizen power.

Will Doig at Salon has an excellent article on how the public participation has been misused and abused over the years, allowing a disproportionate amount of power to be consolidated into the hands of a few:

These rules, designed to check the power of city officials, now perversely consolidate immense power in the hands of a few outspoken “concerned citizens.” By dragging out the building process indefinitely, these people can make it so expensive that deep-pocketed luxury developers have a better chance of surviving it than anyone actually building affordable housing. Worst of all, these rules have created a new norm in which individual residents just assume that their personal opinions should carry great weight in routine planning decisions.

More below the jump.

Continue reading “Rethinking Public Participation”

For those of you who missed Jarrett Walker’s hat tip, TransLink has finally unveiled an excellent system-wide frequency map (PDF), a vast improvement over its predecessor (PDF), which bears several similarities to Metro’s current system map.  The map uses both color and line weight (thickness) to denote frequency while basic and limited services are deemphasized.  Frequent services include the three SkyTrain lines, the two B-Lines (BRT-style), and other routes that run at least 15 minutes during the day.

Unlike Spokane’s new frequency schematic  and Oran’s own design for Seattle, TransLink managed to use a geographically-accurate map base, aided in part by Vancouver’s very clear and regular grid.  The best part of the map is the ability to see the viability of anywhere-to-anywhere travel within Vancouver supported by frequent connections.  It’s also much easier on the eye than the old system map.

While Metro has yet to follow suit, they are beginning to the catch on to the frequency map palooza, with an excellent Eastside map that was released along with last October’s restructure.  However, as the agency aims to continue restructuring its system in accordance to the new service guidelines (PDF), what better way to educate the public than to do the same for the entire system?

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 232-190 to defund the American Community Survey (ACS), one of the Census Bureau’s most significant demographic data-collection programs in addition to the decennial census.  The ACS, conducted annually, effectively replaced the long-form of the census and provides important data to planners and policymakers at every level of government.  The program’s elimination is just one assault in a long line of legislative actions against transit and cities by the House.

The impetus for the cut is that the ACS is too prying and too costly.  What supporters of the bill are forgetting, however, is that the data the ACS provides informs how hundreds of billions of dollars are spent and which programs they go to, including those that concern transit, housing, and urban infrastructure.   Elimination of funding not only has a major impact on public policy, but would also effectively kill academic research and private economic development programs vital to the health of cities.  The Atlantic has a good synopsis on what kind of effects this move has:

The issue is that the information collected in the ACS is used heavily by the federal government to figure out where it will spend a huge chunk of its money. In a 2010 report for the Brookings Institution, Andrew Reamer found that in the 2008 fiscal year, 184 federal domestic assistance programs used ACS-related datasets to help determine the distribution of more than $416 billion in federal funding. The bulk of that funding, more than 80 percent, went directly to fund Medicaid, highway infrastructure programs and affordable housing assistance.

Reamer, now a research professor George Washington University’s Institute of Public Policy, also found that the federal government uses the ACS to distribute about $100 billion annually to states and communities for economic development, employment, education and training, commerce and other purposes. He says that should the ACS be eliminated, it would be very difficult to figure out how to distribute this money where it’s needed.

House Republicans are forgetting that there is a lot of money, both private and public, directly and indirectly attached to the ACS.  While the Senate won’t likely reciprocate defunding the program, this move puts the program in a dangerous political crossfire that jeopardizes funding for cities whenever voters feel like electing someone new every election cycle. That makes it a risk too great to toy with.  Call your congresspersons today to oppose the cut.

U-Link construction, as documented by the Traylor/Frontier-Kemper joint venture.

This is an open thread.

With U-Link coming online by the end of 2016, rail will serve some of our densest neighborhoods as well as one of the largest employment centers in the region.  To date, however, most of our attention has been absorbed by development opportunities and disputes further up around other North Link stations.  While the UW Station area is a less than ideal candidate for a dense interconnected grid of mixed-use development, it does provide a unique opportunity to reviving what has been a traditionally an auto-dominant area.

Because the station will be located just to the south of Husky Stadium and Montlake Triangle, a significant TOD barrier rests in the fact that the area’s immediate vicinity is all University-owned land, comprised of medical, athletic, and recreational facilities.  These are, by no means, small buildings, and the local geography and street network alone create irregularities in subdivision potential.  There are also major institutional hurdles to jump when even considering breaking up large tracts of University land for private development.

More below the jump.

Continue reading “UW Station, An Opportunity”