Category: Orphan Road

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I was having a drink with a friend and co-worker who’s a heavy business traveller, and I mentioned that I often take Link when I’m going to SeaTac.  He expressed disbelief, and then asked me, “where is the airport station? It’s a ridiculous distance from the terminal, isn’t it?”

I told him no, it’s on the other side of the parking garage, and not too much further of a walk than if you park your car at the airport.  He wasn’t buying it.  To him, the distance between the airport link station and the terminal made it a non-starter (for the record, it’s about 1,000 feet).  I was quite surprised.

This conversation came back to me yesterday as I read Yonah Freemark discussing a potential new route for the train connecting Dulles airport to the DC Metro.  Instead of having the Metro take a detour to Dulles, the plan would have a people mover connect airport passengers, getting them closer to the airport, but requiring a transfer:

What would Tukwila have looked like if Sound Transit had decided to route Link to Southcenter, and provide (or get the Port of Seattle to provide) a connecting tram directly to the SeaTac terminal, let’s say via an above-ground AirTrain-like station that would have dropped you off directly on top of the check-in desks.  The overall ride would surely have been longer.  But the perception might have been very different.

As a bonus, you’d have light rail service directly to Southcenter, which, as Sherwin Lee at STB noted recently, is where Tukwila wants to concentrate urban development.

Clearly it’s too late to re-litigate all of this, and I know the pros and cons were hashed out back in the 90s when the alignment was being decided upon. I bring it up both as a thought experiment and to echo Yonah’s general statement: sometimes it’s better for an Airport line to not go directly to the airport.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road. 

I’ve just returned from an Indonesian vacation.  My trip started and ended in Jakarta, and I had a chance to try out their transit system.  I love big cities.  I’ve visited many of them, and I had yet to find one I didn’t have some love for.  I hated Jakarta.

Jakarta is a city of 10 million people, with another 18 million in the metro area.  It’s an old city, but one that has grown very quickly in the past six decades.  Its transit system consists of buses, “bemos” (small private buses), taxis, tuk-tuks, and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT).

First, a word about Jakarta in general.  In Jakarta, the car is king.  As a pedestrian you will find yourself walking on narrow (~3′, sometimes less), poorly maintained sidewalks.  These sidewalks have a dual function of being mostly-closed sewers, and the sidewalk forms the cover of these sewers.  Every curb cut the sidewalk abruptly drops half a foot, and rises again at the other end of the curb cut.  Many times per block you’ll come across a concrete manhole, which is often broken or missing.  As cars are king, crossing the street is a very dangerous activity – cars will not stop for you, even if you find one of the few crosswalks.  They may slow down slightly or swerve if you’re directly in front of them, but it’s best wait for an opening and run across the street.  Of course, there are far too many cars on the roads and a trip 1/3 of the way across town to dinner took over an hour.  The trip back also took over an hour.  If you need to go anywhere, bring a good book.

Now BRT.  Unlike Seattle’s new BRT system, Jakarta has real BRT – tall buses with multiple doors and few seats that dock at pre-paid fare stations, ride in exclusive lanes (often with concrete barriers, usually in the center of the road), have signal priority, and even have two operators – one to drive the bus and one to operate the doors.  BRT is often considered a cheap way of doing mass transit.  Whenever a light or heavy rail system appears on a ballot, expect to hear a call from the tax-averse to put in BRT instead.  They will tell you it’s just as good as rail, but cheaper.  They are wrong.

Notes about Jakarta’s BRT:

1. Being a car city, every road in Jakarta that can fit more than a lane or two of cars has become a highway.  BRT added exclusive lanes in the middle of some of these highways, complete with concrete barriers to keep the cars out.  This has also had the effect of taking pedestrian crossings from difficult to impossible.

2. Since the stations are in the center of the road, it is difficult as a pedestrian to enter and leave.  Some stations have pedestrian bridges, but these add two sets of stairs to your walk.  Others just have crosswalks.  This adds time and danger to your trip.

3. In order to keep buses moving fast, the stations are never really where they need to be.  They’re limited to where the big roads are, which aren’t always close to the interesting sights.

4. They are all over capacity.  This might not be true for a city of Seattle’s size.  But a city of 10M people needs real mass transit.  The stations were completely packed when I visited – in the late morning of a weekday.  The buses came every few seconds, but the ones going anywhere interesting were like sardine cans.  At one point our bus was so full that all of the handholds were taken and people relied on the squeezing force of their neighbors to remain upright.

5. Signal priority isn’t enough.  With buses being so frequent, at some point the signals need to cycle the cars through and make the buses wait.  This means in 90 degree weather with no air conditioning and far-beyond-capacity passengers, we waited at many intersections for several minutes, queued up behind other buses.  We certainly made it through the intersections faster than the cars, but grade separation would have made our trip much faster.

Our 5 mile, one transfer trip from our hotel to the long-distance bus station took well over an hour.  It was uncomfortable, slow, and difficult.  Although our hotel was in a tourist area we needed to take a taxi to get to the bus station.

Simalarly sized Delhi was just as much a 3rd world city in 1998 when they built their subway system. Now it’s easy to get around there and tickets start at $0.15. Jakarta backed the wrong technology.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The map above is striking.  There’s clearly a core of Seattle — including Fremont, the University District, and Capitol Hill — that supported Prop 1, and for good reason.

I wonder: what would a Transportation Benefit District look like for one or more of the neighborhoods above.  Prop. 1 would have raised on the order of $200M over 10 years.  The South Lake Union Local Improvement District raised $25M to fund the Streetcar.  Could the residents of the Hill & the Central District come together to raise, say, $30M over 10 years for transit, pedestrian, and bicycle improvements in the neighborhood?  What would that buy us?

Financing such a thing would be tricky.  A LID would be an option, but it could be a big tax on local businesses and residents.  Without a single landowner like Vulcan to muscle it through, it might not pass.  Car tabs would seem to be unwieldy given the small geographic area and the low car ownership rate in the neighborhood.

Potluck, anyone?

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The intersection at 23rd & Union has a storied past, but also a troubled one.  In 2008, after Degene Barecha was killed while working at the Philly Cheese Steak restaurant on the corner, Robert Jamieson wrote a piece in the Seattle P-I recounting the corner’s history in which he referred to it as “Seattle’s intersection of woe.”  Two years ago, Seattle PD made a high-profile effort to clear the drug dealers from the corner. More recently, the corner’s neighborhood outreach center was vandalized.

Given all of that, you’d think the City of Seattle would be bending over backwards to revitalize the intersection, on the theory that more “eyes on the street” make for a safer neighborhood.

Alas, just a couple of months after the Beehive Bakery opened its doors in the old Philly Cheese Steak building, it had to close.  One reason: the owners were hoping to utilize the building’s built-in drive-through, but ran afoul of zoning codes.  As reported in the CD News:

They had hoped to use the drive-through window when they started plans for the bakery, but the old permits had lapsed and new city rules designate the corner as a pedestrian area. After a lengthy re-permitting process, which delayed the bakery’s opening, Jane and Ken found out that drive-through windows are no longer allowed. So they had to go forward without it.

It’s a shame that the Seattle PD couldn’t convince the Seattle DPD that the benefits of having a business in that space far, far outweighed the zoning laws that prevented a drive-through restaurant from operating on the corner.  I’m all for limiting car-dependent development, but when you have tiny green shoots popping up on a corner like this, you need to dump as much fertilizer on them as you can find, instead of letting them whither and die.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Back in September I wrote about the demise of First Hill’s M Street Grocery, speculating that it had been done in (indirectly) by parking requirements.  I can’t help but wonder if Belltown’s Local 360 Mercantile suffered the same fate. The Mercantile, attached to the restaurant by the same name, was a neat little shop and I liked everything we bought there.  The store was a great little European-style grocer.  All the basics, all top-quality.

Now, getting into the grocery business is hard and the margins are minimal.  But is it such a stretch to think that the massive Whole Foods just 7 blocks away, with its huge, government-mandated parking garage, made it impossible for the Mercantile to survive?

Update: Joshua in the comments points out that the garage is not, in fact, government mandated. I think the point still stands.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

This is a great point from Ben:

A more diffuse package raises negatives – which are much more powerful than positives. If a measure has roads and transit, people who hate roads will vote against it as well as people who hate transit. People who hate bike lanes voted against Prop 1, people who hate streetcars, and people who hate buses. The more complex your package, the more likely you are to trigger someone angry about another project.

The most useful initiatives are the ones that boil down to simple polls of the plebiscite.  Think of an emperor querying the people:

“Do the people want a monorail from Ballard to West Seattle? Yea or Nay?”

“Yea!!!”

“Then it shall be so.”

Anything more complex than that, and initiatives break down.  Because citizens, unlike legislators, don’t horse trade.  Legislators love “Christmas Tree bills,” the kind that can be loaded up with amendments in exchange for enough votes to guarantee passage.  Legislators scratch each others’ backs.  Citizens don’t.  The backers of last year’s income tax bill, I-1098, added a provision that exempted small business owners from B&O tax.  This was good policy, and shielded the bill from some intellectual criticism, but did it earn them a single extra vote?

Prop. 1 attempted to bring together different constituencies — drivers, walkers, bikers, transit riders — into a coalition, thinking that together they would make for a majority.  But citizens don’t think like legislators, or even interest groups.  Instead, they fixate on the one part they don’t like, and then scuttle the whole thing because of it.

I’m not sure what could have been done differently.  Separating out the various pieces might have worked. A $20 car tab for faster buses? Maybe. $40 for road repairs? probably.  Focusing on one big project and not a bunch of little ones? Almost certainly.  But this is all conjecture.  Policy-wise, Prop. 1 got it exactly right.  But an initiative may not have been the best venue for such a policy.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Seattle is covered in broken, dangerous sidewalks.  I always assumed our sidewalks were terrible for the same reason that our roads are terrible – because WA is too anti-tax to fund anything properly.  But today I found out that homeowners and businesses are actually required to maintain their own sidewalks.  Not just rake and shovel our sidewalks, but if there’s a sidewalk outside your house and it’s cracked or a section is raised more than 1/2″, you are required to repair that sidewalk.  There’s even language that allows the city to fix it for you, then bill you and put a lien on your home until you pay.

So with the death of the $60 car tab, how do we fix Seattle’s sidewalks?  Simply have city workers wander our sidewalks looking for any cracks, roots, or damage, and require the adjacent homeowner to fix it.  It may not be a popular move, but it would certainly be effective.  All without raising taxes.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The Occupy Seattle protesters get it.  I love that in yesterday’s Bank Transfer Day protests where they blocked traffic at a downtown intersection, they let buses pass through.  Sure, almost everyone affected by the backup are in the 99%.  But likely nobody in the 1% were on those buses.

 the police (who were cool as cucumbers) and protesters figured out a way to let buses through without leaving the intersection.

Story here.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

This Thursday, JCFO is giving a design update on the Waterfront.  With the Viaduct closing for a week, it seems like an appropriate time to think about a post-viaduct waterfront.

DESIGN UPDATE AND IDEA SHARING

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

There’s an idea going around (read the comments here) that a logical extension of Link in Seattle would be to just make a turn West at Brooklyn Station, and serve Wallingford, Phinney or Fremont, and Ballard.  This is a great idea, and a way of serving some high-demand routes with our new rail infrastructure.  However, there are some significant barriers to implementing this plan:  we’re out of planned train capacity in the downtown tunnel, it’s claimed Northgate needs all of this capacity, branching a major trunk is rarely a good idea, and there would be two deep (expensive) stations.  Conventional wisdom is to save our pennies and someday serve Ballard with its own light rail line coming up from downtown.  There are benefits and disbenefits to both strategies, and I don’t plan on settling the debate here.

But consider for a moment running a gondola spur line.  We can have high capacity, very high frequency transit without giving up train capacity in the downtown tunnel.  We provide future connectivity between the current and future light rail lines, if one is built.  We give at least 18,500 riders (the 44, 15, 18) a faster way around each day.  And we do it all for much less money than a light rail line.

Let’s run the numbers for converting this spur to a gondola line:

At 3.2 miles, if we use a single cable gondola (14mph)  that’s about a 15 minute journey.  That’s probably too slow.  So let’s pull out the big guns and go with a 3S system (two support cables, one drive cable, 24mph).  Now we’re looking at 8 minutes, plus time at stops, so about 10 minutes end to end.  That’s more like it.

Looking at capacity, a 3S system will have plenty.  We can get between 4,000 and 6,000 passengers per hour per direction (and possibly more).  That’s the equivallent to between 40 and 60 buses in each direction each hour.