Category: Guest Posts

by ANN DASCH

At the December 10, 2014 meeting of the Washington State Transportation Commission, Chair Anne Haley questioned whether ferry fares might be in danger of rising above the tipping point, where a small increase in fares causes households to make major life changes to dramatically reduce their ferry expenditures. Survey responses, Census data, and changing ridership and fare revenue patterns indicate that has already occurred for some ferry users:

• Ferry ridership dropped over 15% from its 1999 peak, while regional population grew. “An expanding pool of customers ride the system less frequently”
• Fare revenue from multi-ride fare media declined more than $5M between 2006 and 2010, from $48.5M to $43.1M.
• According to the 2014 FROG summer survey, which targeted regular riders, including commuters, “The percentage of riders saying WSF is a ‘good’ or ‘very good’ value in the summer period has decreased significantly compared to 2012 (68% vs. 80%).” But 91% of respondents to the 2014 summer on-board recreational survey (target: out of state riders) felt WSF was a good or very good value.
• In Kitsap County, where more than half of all ferry trips start or end, Census data shows “[t]he share of households with children dropped 17.7% between 2000 and 2010, while the share with persons 65 and over jumped 25.5%.” King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties had much smaller shifts in household composition.

Which customers have reached the tipping point? Research points to high volume households – those that purchase multi-ride tickets, especially commuters. While single trip passengers and drivers (including seniors) are buying more tickets than they did in 2002, multi-ride ticket sales fell dramatically.

Continue reading “WSF Reaches the Fare Tipping Point”

by BRIAN FERRIS and CAITLIN BONNAR

When I have friends visiting for the holidays, I like to take them on a “Best of Seattle” transit tour.  We could ride the route 98 to Lake Union Park or maybe catch Link to “St Light Rail & S Edmunds St” station for lunch.  Even though it’s the holidays, I’m sure I can trust all these scheduled arrivals I see in my favorite transit app.

What’s that?  You’ve never heard of the 98?  Did Sound Transit secretly add a new in-fill station when you weren’t paying attention?  Or maybe you spent the holidays like me, waiting for buses that were actually running late or not at all.

If you are using any one of the apps most Seattle riders use to navigate our transit system on a daily basis, I’ll forgive your confusion.  Apps like OneBusAway, Transit App, Google Maps, and others are all powered by transit data from local agencies and increasingly, that data is just plain wrong.

Route 98?  Better known as the SLU Streetcar.  “St Light Rail & S Edmunds St” Station?  Try Columbia City Station instead.  Yet these are the names King County Metro publishes in the official schedule data they release to developers.  Issues with holiday schedules and real-time data have been a problem for years and this season was no exception [Ed. note; Sound Transit says it has now resolved the holiday schedule issue.].  Even worse, there have been persistent issues with Metro real-time data, especially near the start of routes, since the upgrade to GPS years ago.

A transit agency might be tempted to dismiss these issues as minor, especially compared to the challenges of keeping buses running under perennial budget pressures.  However, at a time when service is in flux and traffic snarls even the most frequent routes, timely and accurate rider information is critical.  Given a choice between accurate real-time info and a slight reduction in headway on their favorite routes, I think many riders would actually pick real-time.

Continue reading “Rider Info: Small Details Make a Big Difference”

by TIM MCCALL

The updated Final Environmental Impact Statement for the N 185^th Street Station was released on 26 December 2014, in addition to the 185^th Street Station Subarea Plan.

One of the goals of the Subarea Plan is to rezone the area surrounding the station. This includes a significant amount of MUR-85’ (Mixed Use Residential – 85’ Tall) in the vicinity of the new station. Those familiar with area recognize the area is currently occupied by Shoreline Center and single family homes under R-6 (6 residences per acre).

The N 185^th Street Station FEIS and Subarea Plan will be subject of a public hearing before the City of Shoreline Planning Commission on January 15, 2015. Comments can be submitted email to Miranda Redinger (mredinger@shorelinewa.gov).

Additional Shoreline City Council discussion will take place on 9 and 23 February with public comment available. Council adoption of the Subarea Plan is tentatively scheduled for 23 February. Be advised, residents in the North City, Meridian Park and Echo Lake Communities are none too pleased with the FEIS and Subarea Plan. As Zach posted on Christmas, neighborhoods are setting up Facebook groups and websites to take on City Council and the Planning Commission.

Tim McCall is a resident of Shoreline.

On December 18, the Sound Transit Board approved updates to the Long Range Plan, last revised in 2005. The corridor map saw 13 additions. There were also several text amendments. Most were uncontroversial, particularly those that were bringing the LRP up to date with other policies adopted since the last LRP update in 2005. Some, particularly those that seemed to have implications for ST3, were more challenging for the board.

I’ll describe the text amendments first, and then the map changes.

Continue reading “Sound Transit Updates the Long Range Plan”

An afternoon peak toll on certain streets leading to Interstate 5 entrances (Mercer, Yale, Olive and James) would reduce chronic congestion at key chokepoints and allow the street grid to work better for all users. Luckily, this approach is both legally and technically feasible for the City of Seattle.

Seattle was the fastest growing large city in the US in 2013, and South Lake Union has rapidly transformed from a low-rise warehouse district to a serious job center rivaling downtown.  Transportation capacity has not kept up.  Mercer Street has been a mess for decades, but now the Dexter disaster, the Westlake wrangle and the Amazon crush also snarl peak hour traffic and delay bus trips for dozens of minutes.  And construction in SLU isn’t finished yet: more buildings, workers and parking spots (!) are on the way.

Transportation planning usually focuses on the capacity of a single road, but the auto transport system is actually a complex network of linked components:

• Parking capacity
• Local street and intersection capacity
• Freeway onramp capacity
• Freeway capacity

The conventional American traffic engineering solution is to increase the capacity of the limiting component.  In downtown Seattle and SLU, freeway capacity and particularly freeway onramp capacity are the bottlenecks in the network.  Downtown streets become gridlocked, not due to massive traffic volumes, but due to cars queuing to enter I-5.  The gridlock delays all road users in the area, including transit riders on routes unrelated to I-5, such as Metro Transit routes 26, 28, 40, 70, 8, 3 and 4 and the SLU streetcar.  But there will be no new I-5 onramps or traffic lanes on downtown streets: there is physically no room.  So is this congestion solvable?  Yes, but only through a different mindset.

A constrained traffic planning approach is to reduce the number of cars accessing I-5 from downtown, to match the capacity of the onramps and feeder streets.  Marginally reducing the number of cars queuing for I-5 access via a toll, at the right price, would allow the street network to work for everyone.

Technically Feasible

Continue reading “Decongestion Tolling for Downtown Seattle”

Most people think of Seattle as a world class, major city. Major cities have 24-hour transit service, as should Seattle. There is limited overnight service, with the Owl routes (82, 83, 84) being understandably derided because they are the most confusing. With the new hours from Proposition 1—approximately 230,000 annual service hours are left after the June improvements are implemented—we have a chance to accomplish this for the people who keep odd hours. My bias for evening and night trips is showing because I’m one of those people; this post is actually being submitted at around 4am.

Why do this?

As Mike Orr points out, transit use increases when it can cover more trips and more types of trips. Right now, our transit system is pretty good at covering regular commuting hours and trips taken while the sun is usually up. Service drops dramatically in most corridors after 7pm and especially late night. This is also the first type of service to take a hit when cuts are proposed since the “bang for the buck” in the reclaimed service hours is quite high when shifted to daytime service.

However, if we are to have “the best bus service we’ve ever had in Seattle,” ($) night service should be one of the first things to come back and be enhanced. Lots of workers are employed during these odd hours and we can accomplish a lot of trip diversions by giving them the tools to get to and from work. Other trips for activities in the evening and night periods can be made attractive to do via transit and without having to rely on an overpriced taxi or a potentially-surcharged rideshare company.

What to do?

In considering which routes to extend to 24-hour service, I looked at routes that meet these criteria:

• Their span of service ends, at a minimum, around midnight. This is to avoid having to extend service beyond a few trips and because the routes with later service already tend to serve denser areas.
• The route can simply have more trips added without having to divert in the middle of the night. By doing this, the confusing mess that are the existing Owls is avoided. (There are two exceptions below.)
• Cover as much of the city as possible, with special emphasis on getting more service north of 85th Street, which is where the current Owls (except D line) end, and cross-town routes to avoid everybody having to go downtown.
• Look solely at routes that can be paid for by Prop 1. This means no overnight service on routes like 255, 545, or 550 is discussed here.

Half-hourly service would be much better, but given that service hours are difficult to calculate, this proposal is cautious. If we have the hours, half-hourly trips would be much more convenient.

What routes?

Continue reading “Transit: Up All Night”

What would Sound Transit do in East King County if it were trying to maximize the effectiveness of the ST3 package? How many transit riders could be served within the constraints of a likely ST3 package?

I’ve borrowed Martin Duke’s calculation of a $2.6 billion “budget” for East King. Martin estimates this from the $15 billion request to the Legislature, converted to $10 billion in 2014 dollars (to align with the corridor study cost methodology). With $800 million committed to completing East Link to Redmond, that leaves $1.8 billion for other projects.

The approach is to calculate cost per rider (using the mid-range of estimates from the corridor studies). The options are ranked and the best are selected, unless they duplicate an already selected option. Many of the options are close substitutes, so it makes sense to select only one. For instance, 405 BRT occupies three of the top six slots, but only the highest ranked of these is selected. I ignore other options which were not reviewed in the corridor studies (such as the bridge to Sand Point).

Continue reading “Cost-Effective ST3 Options on the Eastside”