All posts by Zach Shaner

This is my 485th and final post here at Seattle Transit Blog. As I move on to an exciting new opportunity, I wanted to take a minute to thank the reader community here. For the past 7 years I have been able to take for granted having substantive policy conversations every day, a rare treat in today’s media landscape. What passes as contentious or petty in our comment threads is downright graceful just about anywhere else. And your generous support has allowed me to get paid to do this for the final two years, a blessing given the bleak outlook for the economics of journalism.

This has been a consistently rewarding experience, a supplement to my professional life at Pierce Transit, Commute Seattle, as a business owner, and soon at Sound Transit. Numerous agency officials have become confidants and friends, and I hope I’ve earned their respect as much as they’ve earned mine.

This blog analyzes the tiniest needles on each policy tree, but as I reflect back on the last 7 years, I am astounded at how healthy the forest has become. Growing up in Coeur d’Alene, my experience of Seattle was limited to semi-annual trips to the Kingdome and Pacific Science Center. We’d drive over and park in “South Lake Union”, then a bleak stretch of concrete the workaday crowd drove through on the way out of town, with the remnant neighborhood of Cascade hanging on by a thread. We’d walk over to 1st Avenue to catch a free bus to Pioneer Square, and 1st Avenue’s then much seedier nature shocked my young evangelical eyes.

After 8 years of college and graduate school on the East Coast and abroad, I finally moved to Seattle in 2009. Freshly minted with a master’s degree and desperate for income, I took seasonal retail jobs at Bellevue Square and Pacific Place. My first experience of Puget Sound’s transit was the monthly trek up to Kemper Freeman’s offices to pick up my paper Puget Pass. Link opened the month I moved here.

In 2017 there is still much to criticize, of course. Our agencies still struggle to coordinate on matters of service and fare integration. The customer ‘friction’ of our overlapping, complex systems still presents a psychological barrier to the average citizen. We struggle to provide sufficient transit priority, and we waste taxpayer resources spending excessive amounts of transit funds on the resulting schedule padding. There are still too many injury and fatality collisions in our city, and bike facilities remain fragmented. Our one-way grid in Center City still prioritizes the fast movement of vehicles over people, and continues to revolve around access to/from I-5. And our transit activist community remains too white, too male, too nerdy, and on its worst days, too condescending to new entrants. A ton of work remains to build an inclusive, mobile city.

But consider the growth we’ve experienced . Thankfully I missed the days when the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel closed on nights and weekends, or the pre-Sound Transit days when just getting to Everett or Tacoma without a car was an epic adventure. When I moved here real-time information was in its infancy, a graduate student project that I used by text message on my flip phone. Now I use one app in most major cities in the world, and it works nearly flawlessly. Not so long ago the flagship 71/72/73 were all hourly in the evening, combining for 20-minute service in the University District. When RapidRide C and D launched, they planned for half-hourly evening service. For crying out loud, until 2012 you couldn’t even take a bus between Ballard and Fremont without crossing the Ship Canal twice, via Route 17. Today, Route 40 is something we’d never again try to do without.

These days, Seattle is down to just one hourly weekday service (Route 22), and frequent service has become both an expectation and (mostly) a reality citywide. The Night Owl network is about to be radically improved after a half-century of waiting. Link has shrunk the city and brought us closer to our friends, family, and partners. Trips that were difficult and frustrating just two years ago (Capitol Hill to Safeco Field, say) are now effortless and reliable. Outside my Beacon Hill bedroom window, I watch my Route 36 go by every 5 minutes, taking me to a train that comes every 6.

Voters have consistently opened their wallets to boost service, with affirmative votes on ST2, multiple Metro measures, an unprecedented city top-up of Metro service, and of course ST3. Metro’s Long Range Plan proclaims a solid vision for our future network. The next few years will be ones of painful growth and transformation, and I can’t wait to see what things look like when we emerge on the other side in 2023, take a quick breath, and then start digging to Ballard. I now have the chance to work on these things from the inside, and I can’t wait. But thank you all for your indulgence and grace. It’s been fun!

The wet winter and spring have taken a toll on our railroads. Since the beginning of this year, nineteen (19) landslides have cancelled more than fifty (50) Amtrak Cascades trains. However, unlike the famous problem areas near Mukilteo that have plagued Cascades and Sounder alike, these mudslides are in a new trouble spot. Two-thirds of the total mudslides in the corridor this year have occurred in Clark County, just north of Vancouver in the Felida/Ridgefield area. Given BNSF’s mandatory 48-hour moratorium on passenger service following a mudslide, every slide can knock out as many as 20 trains. Compounding the problem, the Coast Starlight has been quietly out of service for more than two weeks now due to bridge damage in Northern California.

Mudslide mitigation in the Everett/Mukilteo area has been a great success, with millions spent on slope stabilization, homeowner education, and more. Cancellations have been sharply reduced in the northern corridor this year. But officials are scrambling to coordinate and plan a response to these new trouble spots. In an email to WSDOT, officials would only say that, “Representatives from WSDOT’s Rail, Freight and Ports Division are talking with Clark County representatives to determine how we can apply this same approach in this new area of concern.”

Fortunately, the legislature has provided ongoing funding for landslide mitigation to the tune of $33 million through 2030, a clip of roughly $2.50 million per year. Unfortunately, however, like everything else it is subject to politics and the need for biennial renewal of its funding. And though the annual outlay is generous, the current biennium only doled out $1m total, leaving agencies strapped for mitigation funds just as they finish up nearly $800m in 2009-era rail improvement projects in the corridor. So this problem may persist for a year or two.

Sometime this autumn, Cascades will add two new roundups to Portland, shuffle schedules to permit same-day business travel, and shift trains to the Point Defiance Bypass between Tacoma and Nisqually. Another wet winter and widespread cancellations could significantly hobble the new services just when they need to attract passengers most. Let’s hope the legislature will recognize the problem and approve mitigation funds in a timely and bipartisan way.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of taking high speed rail from Dallas to Austin, rolling past Mesquite trees and into the Hill County at 200mph. I had the pleasure of doing this because Obama put $47 Billion for high speed rail in his 2013 budget.

Except that didn’t happen of course, because Presidential budgets are generally all smoke and no fire. If there is one thing you can count on from Congress in this polarized age, it’s the ability of habit and inertia to overpower the bluster of the Executive.

Trump’s recent budget was a disaster for transit and red meat to our Manhattanite President’s ironically anti-urbanist Republican base. It sought to zero out long-distance Amtrak funding, cut TIGER and New Starts grants, and even deny those projects in their last few months of project development, leaving projects with nothing after nearly a decade of work. Critically, it not only hung a cloud over ST3, but also threatened ST2 projects such as Lynnwood and Federal Way.

Yesterday, the outlook brightened a bit, with the plan for a Continuing Resolution floating around that would fund the government until September. Fearful of a government shutdown despite universal federal control, Republicans have been cutting deals and ignoring the President’s will. Amidst higher profile squabbles such as Trumpcare and the border wall, most other discretionary spending was retained in a business-as-usual sense. Funding is explicitly retained for Lynnwood Link, the Center City Connector, and SWIFT II. Lynnwood is further along in the New Starts process (Engineering) whereas Federal Way was not mentioned, as it is still technically in Project Development.

Amtrak also retains $1.5B in funding, including the long-distance network. TIGER is funded at $500m, and total transit spending sees a 5.5% boost. There’s no telling what 2018 holds, but for now we may pull back from the edge.

With the whirlwind of news, One Center City, potential restructures, and proposals for fare policy revisions, there has been no shortage of public surveys lately. Below are five surveys from Metro and Sound Transit that you should spend a few minutes of your Saturday filling out.

Link Customer Satisfaction

A general survey of Link customer satisfaction, covering fares, access, speed, reliability, and more. (Link)

SR 520 Link Connections Survey

A survey encompassing all riders in the SR 520 corridor in the context of One Center City and possible Link truncations. (Link)

Sound Transit 545 Riders Survey

Similar to above, but a Sound Transit survey limited to riders in the 545 corridor. (Link)

King County Metro Fare Revisions

A survey asking riders to respond to Metro’s Options A and B for fare simplification. (Link)

King County Metro General Bus Satisfaction

A coordinated survey done with 14 other transit agencies for comparative purposes, this survey gauges general customer satisfaction with Metro’s services. (Link)

It tells you something about an agency’s workload when a $130m purchase of light rail vehicles isn’t the headlining agenda item. At Thursday’s packed-agenda Sound Transit Board meeting, the Board approved the vehicle buy, discussed the recent controversies relating to MVET valuations and Mercer Island litigation, and defended its record hiring disadvantaged businesses.

But the big news was a draft release of the agency’s blueprint for ST3, the System Expansion Implementation Plan (watch beginning at 51’00” in the video below). The plan details timelines for project development, design, and construction phases of all 24 concurrent projects, including remaining ST2 projects. Given the layer cake of local, state, regional, and federal jurisdictions with veto points over various aspects of construction, the report spends most of its ink discussing process improvements needed for further expediting of projects. These include streamlined permitting, earlier and more intensive public outreach, and significant internal shuffling for efficiencies. ST will also attempt to shave a year off of the time each project takes to get to an FTA Record of Decision (the final step in the environmental process), from 5.5 years to 4.5 years.

Continue reading “ST3 Kicks Off”

Over the past month the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has been quietly testing their new Intelligent Transportation Systems program on the Mercer Street corridor. Usually shorthanded to “signal retiming”, the $13m Move Seattle project creates a dynamic corridor that adapts to traffic conditions in real time. 32 signals have been updated with the new software on Mercer, Roy, and Republican Streets from 3rd Ave W to Fairview Ave N.

The primary management imperative seems to be to shorten signal times in periods of heavy traffic, theoretically reducing the cascading gridlock that occurs as queues form during lengthy cycles and spill over into neighborhood streets. In times of heavily asymmetric traffic, such as the end of major Key Arena concert late at night, the system could keep eastbound lights green far longer, and make the lesser amount of north-south traffic wait. Anyone who has ever driven Mercer Street on a sleepy Sunday morning will attest that the current system has been rigid and static, slow to drive even when no one is on it if you miss the green-light wave.

SDOT’s early data shows significant improvement in travel time reliability for most drivers, significantly better eastbound flow, and slightly worsened westbound flow (see SDOT images below). Eastbound in the PM peak, when volumes are highest and delays worst, travel time has decreased by 2.7 minutes and average speed has increased by 1.4 mph. Doing a little math, for a 1-mile corridor this implies travel time improvement from 12 minutes to 9.3 minutes, and average speed improvement from 5mph to 6.4mph.

These are significant relative improvements, but put another way $13m just went to making peak car traffic go from barely faster than brisk walking to about half the pace of casual cycling. To the average observer, or to the driver whose sense of time is dilated by rage, the corridor will still feel very slow. SDOT estimates that the average peak driver will save about $4 per year in reduced fuel costs.

So signal timing can work to improve east-west vehicle flow. But when it does so, it must also impede north-south traffic, and all transit in the area is north-south. A total of about 13,500 vehicles use Mercer during the PM peak, and their prioritization can’t help but downgrade the priority of the thousands of peak commuters on Routes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 40, 62, 63, 63, 70, 309, C, and the SLU Streetcar. If aggregate flow improves sufficiently that total systemic collapse is avoided, then maybe everyone actually will be better off. But even at its best, it tinkers at the margins at great expense. The fundamental space constraints that generate traffic will remain, and those who think tech will save us from traffic will continue to be disappointed.

In a public process starting today and running through May 5, Metro is asking for public feedback on two fare overhaul proposals. There is a new survey up here, and a final proposal will be taken up by the King County Council later this summer.

The overhaul comes after 4,000 survey responses and 2 meetings with a 19-member Advisory Group. Whereas currently there is a complicated 3-layered fare structure – a base fare of $2.50, a peak fare of $2.75, and a peak fare of $3.25 for trips crossing the Seattle city limits – the new proposal would significantly simplify things:

• Option A: a flat fare of $2.75 for any Metro route, anywhere, anytime
• Option B: a flat fare of $2.50 during off-peak periods, and a flat fare of $3.00 during peak

So no matter the outcome, Metro will do away with zoned fares, and any surcharges will be based upon time rather than distance or geography. Metro will also not consider pricing based on class of service, where peak expresses would be priced differently than the all-day network.

Metro estimates both revenue gains and modest ridership losses from either alternative. The $2.75 flat fare would reduce ridership by an estimated 400,000 annually, while the $2.50/$3.00 structure of Option B would reduce ridership by just 200,000. While this may seem like a lot, it’s worth noting that it’s less than 1 day’s worth of Metro ridership, or 0.1-0.2% of the total. Revenue gains are estimated  at between $3.5-$4m annually, again quite modest in the context of Metro’s overall budget.

How can Metro make more money from fewer riders? In Option A 33% of riders would pay $0.25 more, while 7% of riders would pay $0.50 less. In Option B, 30% of riders pay $0.25 more, while 7% of riders pay $0.25 less. The increased revenue from current Seattle or intra-suburban riders pays for the cut to current city-to-suburb fares.

Any simplification is welcome in reducing customer ‘friction’ and creating a more legible system for riders. But simplification also magnifies tradeoffs, and these proposals are no exception. Option A ($2.75 flat fare) would further increase the price for off-peak urban trips by 10%, while reducing peak suburban express trip fares by 15%. Urban riders may feel that this further incentivizes long commutes, sprawl, and Metro’s most expensive services. A rider from Black Diamond to Seattle would pay the same as someone riding from Belltown to Pike Place Market.

On the other hand, Option B would be closer to status quo for short trips, with the same price off-peak, a 9% fare increase for peak urban trips, and an 8% reduction for peak suburban trips.

Both options would still align awkwardly with Sound Transit’s fares, though the outcome would be much better than the status quo. A flat fare of $2.75 would match Sound Transit’s one-county fare, which would finally align fares between agencies for routes across Lake Washington and from Seattle to Federal Way. Retaining a peak surcharge would make Metro more competitive with Link during off-peak hours, yet make it even more uncompetitive during peak. Metro also notes that peak pricing complicates the implementation of the ORCA Next Generation project.

Please take the survey and let Metro know what you think. There will also be two public meetings on the proposal:

• Tuesday, April 25, 12–2 p.m., King Street Center, 201 S Jackson St, Seattle
• Thursday, April 27, 6:30–7:30 p.m. This is an online meeting. Please send an email saying you would like to participate.

No matter their ultimate veracity, the sex abuse allegations against Mayor Murray will make for a chaotic mayoral race this summer and fall, with everything suddenly seeming possible. Murray could resign before the primary, he could survive into the general as a wounded candidate, or he could emerge victorious if the field becomes crowded and dilutes the anti-Murray vote.

To everyone’s surprise, yesterday morning former Mayor Mike McGinn threw his hat into the ring once again. Long seen as a one-and-done Mayor who left few friends at City Hall, what is McGinn’s legacy? Does he stand a chance?

First things first, McGinn was nearly always right on the substance of growth and transit issues. A friend of the blog and endorsed by STB in 2009 and 2013, McGinn took the hottest of the early ‘bikelash’ heat from the mainstream press, famously earning the moniker of Mayor McSchwinn. His passion for a calmer, safer city that prioritized people rather than vehicles is undoubtedly one of his best legacies.

He was unflinchingly pro-transit, albeit sometimes in ways that made him seem erratic or indiscriminate. He called for another Ship Canal bridge at 3rd Avenue West, a long overdue idea that still needs to happen. He wanted rail to Ballard, and got pre-ST3 studies funded. But he also waffled on grade separation, pitching MAX-style streetcars instead. He often seemed to favor set-piece, symbolic transit that made for attractive, European cityscapes, but he also lacked a passion for optimizing transit’s capacity and performance.

He was an untraditional candidate and mayor, in ways that both helped and hurt him. You could often see him cycling down 5th Avenue towards City Hall, looking like a quintessentially Pacific Northwest, disheveled everyman.  His reputation as a go-it-alone, process-eschewing mayor was well deserved.

In McGinn’s defense, let’s remember that in 2009 the economy was terrible, money was tight, and everyone was angry. The SR 99 debacle was approaching its Gregoire-era strongarmed finale, with a tunnel no one really wanted (but no majority wanted any of the other options either). Into this morass McGinn benefited from both anti-tunnel and anti-Nickels fever, and he then triumphed over the milquetoast weakness of Joe Mallahan. He emerged as a victorious neophyte, and it showed.

He was brash and passionate and had a steep learning curve on which backs you have to scratch to get things done. He announced his budget and dropped a seawall ballot measure without talking to Council. He burned bridges quickly, and they never really got rebuilt.

Which is really too bad, because he grew in office and became a much better Mayor by the end. His early missteps hardened public perception of him unfairly, and much of the opposition to his policies began to look like anti-McGinn obstructionism. Against this reputation, the powers that be desperately wanted a traditional candidate, and Senator Ed Murray checked all the boxes and more. This coalition propelled Murray to a 52-48 victory.

So who is McGinn 2017? His press conference yesterday left a mixed taste in urbanist mouths. He made his traditional comments supporting growth and transit, and he called for progressive taxation via a city income tax. But he also sounded worryingly NIMBY, calling for more process on housing, and an increased role for neighborhoods in planning and development. He sounded much more anti-tax than usual, criticizing property tax levies that he said threatened to turn us into San Francisco.

Perhaps McGinn knows he can’t (and shouldn’t) run to the left of Nikkita Oliver, and that Murray will likely hold much of the neoliberal center and whatever exists of a “Seattle right”. If McGinn’s olive branch to neighborhoods is a way for him to try to hold the urbanist left while peeling off the anti-Murray neighborhood vote, it may be good triangulated politics. But it’s not coherent from a policy perspective, and increased calls for process will make most of us groan.

It’ll be interesting to see who McGinn’s constituency is this time around. If Murray survives, most of us think he’s done a pretty good job on urbanist issues. The left flank is far likelier to be excited by Nikkita Oliver, who brings a ton of energy and freshness to the race, even as her comments on housing are worrying. The bike-and-greenways crowd will be split between Andres Salomon and McGinn. Who votes for McGinn 2017? Let us know what you think in the comments.

In its Capital Committee meeting on Thursday, Sound Transit announced its intent to exercise a contract option for an additional 30 light rail vehicles (LRVs) to be purchased from Siemens. This option comes on top of the 122 vehicles Sound Transit ordered last September. The 30 new vehicles will arrive no later than 18 months after the original order has been fulfilled, and the total order will more than triple Link’s fleet to nearly 220 vehicles. Ordering now locks in a lower unit price from Siemens, with price escalation if the Board waits to order beyond May 2017.

Once Northgate is open in 2021, Link will move to all 4-car train operations. The 122 vehicles originally ordered are required to operate the Lynnwood and Overlake extensions opening in 2023, and the additional 30 are required for the Downtown Redmond and Federal Way extensions opening in 2024. The current operating plan calls for 8 minute peak headways on each line and 10 minutes off peak, with combined 4 minute peak and 5 minute off peak headways between Lynnwood and International District Station. Current riders from International District to Angle Lake will see their peak headways decline a bit, from 6 minutes to 8, but will also see capacity boosted by 25%, from 24 LRVs/peak hour to 30.

The Siemens S70 vehicles will be roomier, quieter, and have more bike storage than the current fleet. The aisles will be wider, especially in the center articulated section, improving passenger flow. Otherwise they will function much like the current Kinkisharyo vehicles, with 4-car trains and 8 cab cars running in fully interchangeable push-pull trainsets. This maximizes operational flexibility but also diminishes capacity slightly.

Sound Transit anticipates the new vehicles will begin arriving in mid-2019, with a steady but slow drip of 1-3 vehicle deliveries per month between 2019-2024. This delivery schedule means that though ST will be able to boost capacity on current operations between 2019-2021, they will also not be able to fully backfill the loss of tunnel buses within the One Center City timeframe. The vehicles take roughly 100 days for commissioning and testing, some of which can be done in revenue service, somewhat minimizing the need to do overnight testing. By purchasing off-the-shelf, the S70 LRVs are a known quantity and should be able to expedite burn-in processes. This model already successfully runs in places such as Portland, Minneapolis, San Diego, Salt Lake City, and suburban Paris.

As new vehicles arrive and are certified, the current Forest Street Operations and Maintenance Facility (OMF) will max out its capacity. Once the new East Link OMF is complete in 2020, a mix of old and new vehicles will be trucked there for storage, where ST promises to “keep the trains warm and move them around.”

Once fully operational, Link will have two nearly-maxed out OMF facilities, and additional cars will be stored on the lines overnight. Lynnwood and Redmond will be able to store two trainsets overnight, much like Angle Lake and UW can today. But in the south, Sound Transit is planning much more substantial storage. An extended tail track south of Federal Way will hold additional vehicles, and ST is also planning a pocket track between Federal Way and Star Lake that can hold 1-2 additional trainsets. Having vehicle storage at all 3 termini will allow quicker start of service each day, and minimize vehicle deadheading.

The full Board will likely approve the $132m option at its regular meeting on April 27.