It’s safe to say that Seattle transit advocates are uncertain about Mayor Jenny Durkan’s commitment to transit.  The fate of the Center City Connector continues to grow murkier. The Mayor told a large, powerful coalition of CCC advocates to talk to the hand.  Several transit and safe streets projects throughout Seattle have been delayed or canceled (although others have proceeded on schedule).  Funding shortfalls shrank and delayed RapidRide projects, while leaving expensive auto-centered projects like the Lander bridge unaffected.  One Center City lost many of its transit priority ideas in becoming Imagine Downtown.  Throughout all of this, the mayor’s office has not said much about transit, except occasionally to point out its numerical necessity in the most general terms.

The mayor, though, has continued to talk up one transportation proposal: congestion pricing.  Often called “decongestion pricing” by advocates who want to clarify its goal, the policy charges car drivers to enter central city areas, with higher charges during the most crowded hours. (Other policies such as HOT lanes and variable bridge/tunnel tolls are also forms of congestion pricing, but aren’t what the mayor is proposing.)  Central city congestion pricing has been implemented in London, Singapore, and Stockholm, but nowhere in the United States to date.  Among U.S. cities, only New York has seriously considered it, so far without action. Continue reading “Hearing About Congestion Pricing? Ask About Transit Investment.”

Entur_English from Endre Sundsdal on Vimeo.

Uniting public transport in Norway.

The Seattle Department of Transportation and King County Metro recently announced several useful measures they will take to improve bus priority on 3rd Ave.

3rd Ave has the densest collection of bus routes in the state, and is pretty much totally packed with buses maneuvering around each other during peak hours. Every measure taken to speed up this armada pays for itself many times over in savings for Metro and the ability to redeploy the saved service hours. Indeed, saving service hours on 3rd Ave is about the only way Metro can add more service while waiting for an eighth base to open. Metro had to turn down some service-hour funding from the City in part because of this practical ceiling on deployable service.

The clearest solution for 3rd Ave remains red paint, designating a ban on non-permitted vehicles 24/7/365. However, various downtown blocks still have parking garage entrances, loading dock entrances, two-spot parking cutouts, or a whole lane of parking. Nevertheless, many blocks have little reason for cars to be there beyond driving straight through without stopping. These blocks ought to be able to be painted red, without political pushback:

Northbound blocks without parking/loading: Continue reading “Easy Fixes Not Deployed for 3rd Ave”

Mike Rosenberg has another excellent piece in the Seattle Times, examining why housing construction in suburban King County has slowed while Seattle remains red-hot.

Overall, Seattle housing construction has grown 130 percent this decade compared to the average over the prior three decades, while housing development in the suburbs has dropped 43 percent from its historical average.

Add it all up and the county as a whole is actually on pace for a slight decline in the overall number of homes going up here this decade, despite Seattle’s building frenzy.

King County doesn’t have many large developable tracts of land left for single-family development, so developers have pushed into Snohomish and Pierce. But there’s plenty of opportunity for multifamily infill development.

As we’ve noted, some suburban cities are enacting development moratoria as they rewrite their zoning codes in the face of renewed growth. On the other end of the spectrum, Kenmore and Bothell are growing along the future 522 BRT corridor. Redmond is adding tons of new apartments in anticipation of light rail.

Despite all that growth, King County’s suburban cities still aren’t building nearly as much multifamily housing as they were in the 1980s and 1990s, according to the article.  As we’ve covered, growth is centralizing in Seattle and Bellevue, despite the PSRC’s plans to put more people and jobs in farther-flung suburbs.

With greenfield land running out, the next step – short of expanding the urban growth boundary – is to figure out how to do missing middle-style infill in the inner-ring suburbs.  That’s no small challenge given the preponderance of cul-de-sacs, lack of sidewalks, and infrequent transit service.  Fortunately light rail is coming, along with improved bus service, and there is no shortage of ideas on how to retrofit suburbia.

Suburban retrofits, however, require political will and currently there’s no political appetite for increasing density in single-family neighborhoods among Eastside electeds (there’s barely appetite for it in Seattle!). Nonetheless, more infill in the suburbs would be a huge win for regional equity. Adding housing capacity in these amenity-rich single-family neighborhoods (where zoning typically maxes out at just 3-5 units per acre) will make them more attractive to a new generation that wants more transportation options than the Eastside’s strip mall-centric built environment can currently provide, while relieving development pressures on lower-income neighborhoods in places like Seattle.

• WSDOT funding the waterfront shuttle.
• 2nd Avenue bike ridership up 16% since 2015.
• Subsidized Uber/Lyft rides on Mercer Island now more expensive, still subsidized.
• Dungeness Line buses from Port Angeles to Seatac considering adjustments to route, schedule, fares. The old operator had separate buses to Port Angeles and Port Townsend. The new operator (Greyhound) makes Port Angeles riders sit through an hour-long detour to serve both.
• Lots of ST outreach in West Seattle this month.
• Pony gives up some patio for Madison BRT.
• Everett Transit is reeling, cutting back service.
• David Cole connects the dots on Mayor Durkan’s passive-aggressive way of undermining transit.
• Spin noncommittal on remaining in Seattle. It would be a shame if SDOT had a great thing with competing bikeshare companies and screwed it up with too many fees.
• ST demolishing Mountlake Terrace homes to build temporary parking.
• Community Transit’s Fall service change is coming.
• It’s legal for a bike to run a red light ($) under some circumstances.
• An update on converting to electric buses.
• Joe Mangan argues for streetcars in Seattle.
• Demolition starts ($) around the future Lynnwood Station.
• We have way too much parking.
• Willamette Week asks readers for dirt on e-scooter riders, readers respond with horror stories about cars.
• Vancouver City Council asks Washington to build the Columbia River Crossing.
• Many of our readers, as teens, would have loved RailCamp ($).

This is an open thread.

In any major city, a popular hobby is to bash the local transit agency. Think of a city you envy, and its residents despise a system that you can scarcely dream of. King County Metro is no exception. We all have our gripes.

As a reality check, the American Public Transit Association named our very own bus operator the best North American transit agency of 2018, based on its performance over the past three years. Ridership has shot up in a national context of stagnant or declining ridership, which one can explain by a booming and densifying city. But Metro’s electric bus, ORCA Lift, and Commute Reduction programs have also served as national examples.

Although Metro hasn’t done every route restructure nerds like us would like, the Northeast Seattle restructure inspired by U-Link follows all the main principles that optimize for all-day ridership. Metro must have an operational culture, that does the same thing the same way every day, but has managed to cross that with innovation.

Regrettably, for all its virtues, Metro isn’t in a position to solve the most pressing problems of urban dwellers. While it can make the rider experience better at the margins, the biggest problem is that transit vehicles are stuck in traffic. To solve that problem, riders are reliant on Sound Transit, which serves many stakeholders besides its riders, and Seattle DOT, which is having trouble executing on big capital projects at all.

The big news from the July 26 Sound Transit Board meeting was that the Federal Way Link extension will cost about $460m more than originally planned. It may not be the last project to cost more than expected: at the meeting, CEO Peter Rogoff briefed the board about mounting challenges in delivering capital projects on time and on cost.

“Sound Transit has the financial strength,” Rogoff said, “to withstand increased project costs, or lower than anticipated federal funding or tax revenues, or a recession, but a combination of any two or more of these factors would put considerable stress on the agency’s ability to deliver projects on schedule.”

Sound Transit can’t make any difference in a competitive labor market, or the increasing cost of real estate, or prevent a recession, but it is able to exercise control over design, alignment, and the like:

“We have already discussed that, first and foremost, controlling our work to reduce project costs will be critical for delivering our projects,” Rogoff said. “This includes the discipline to not expand the scope of projects.”

Notably, agency-perceived expanded scope is one of the reasons First Hill station didn’t make it through the ongoing ST3 planning process, although cost-increasing alternatives in West Seattle and Ballard did advance.

Meanwhile, the federal funding picture is completely opaque. The Trump administration, like most Republican administrations, is hostile to transit projects. Trump transportation officials are doing their best to kill off projects that were thought to have the go ahead. In Albuquerque, for example, local officials constructed a BRT line under the assumption that they had $75 million in Federal Transit Authority (FTA) funds on the way. As of July 18, the administration hadn’t ponied up.

Continue reading “Rogoff: Sound Transit faces headwinds for on time and on cost project delivery”