• A bonanza of ST hearing coverage in the media: King5, Seattle Times ($), Tacoma News Tribune, KIRO, Q13 Fox, KOMO.
• ST head Rogoff op-ed in the Tribune.
• More on the history and revitalization of Spokane’s East Sprague neighborhood.
• Old streetcar maps of Spokane.
• Boise downtown keeps growing, could get a 5,000 seat soccer and baseball stadium.
• It’s not just Seattle, Wenachee has a housing crisis ($) and a group advocating to address it.
• Brier Dudley is shocked — shocked! ($) — to discover that advocacy has been going on at TCC, proposes new rules ($) to deal with this threat. The editorial board eats it up ($).
• By way of contrast, David Gutman has an excellent watchdog piece on the ridership and revenue projections of the Central City Connector ($).
• Dow, T4W endorse Durkan, SeaSub doesn’t.
• Seattle recently revised its default speed limits and it’s apparently causing confusion.
• Some in Nashville concerned that light rail will exacerbate gentrification.
• Sonoma-Marin commuters discover their new train.
• CM Juarez wants less heavy commercial, more walkable neighborhood commercial in Licton Springs.
• An architect and rancher from eastern Washington visits Seattle, takes an offhand swipe at Link.
• From the “expensive ways to move small numbers of people” department, Tacoma may study a foot ferry to Seattle.
• NBBJ to design 24-story tower with 229 units in the U District ($).
• Bellingham locomotive to get restored at the Northwest Railway Museum in Snoqualmie.
• Boston officials imagine a “super card” that could get you on the T, a Hubway bike, a Zipcar and possibly even an Uber or Lyft ride. The goal of seamless any-mode transit payment is laudable, but inventing yet another city-specific card is not the path forward, given that contactless credit cards and mobile wallets are already in service.
• What happens when you turn off the traffic lights at a busy Amsterdam intersection?
• If you bike for exercise, consider biking to your ride.
• Lake Forest Park wants to make SR 522 and SR 104 safer, more accommodating to transit, and more walkable and bikeable. There open houses coming up.
• Pioneer Arthur Denny’s Capitol Hill hotel.
• Metro Megazine surveys America’s scattershot HSR efforts.
• I-405 toll lanes are revenue positive but get overcrowded in the peaks, so of course our legislature is not debating whether to raise the peak price cap, but whether to scrap tolling.
• The Stranger tells newcomers how to avoid driving your car in Seattle.

This is an open thread.

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Peter Rogoff, CEO of Sound Transit, promised better outreach after residents voiced complaints about the agency’s property acquisition process for the Lynnwood Link Extension during Thursday’s board meeting.

Half a dozen impacted residents from Shoreline urged the board to think about the human cost when displacing residents for the expansion of light rail. Many felt they were being left in the dark and attended the board meeting looking for more information after receiving a letter from Sound Transit indicating their properties were being considered for acquisition.

“We need a lot of information, like when, how soon we can get paid and try to find another place,” said Nancy Treibel, a Shoreline resident. “This came as a terrible shock for us.”

Others worried they would not be able to stay in Shoreline if they are forced to sell their homes to Sound Transit.

“We really need to be made whole again and we not quite sure how that is going to happen,” said Carol Ortiz, a Shoreline resident.

Continue reading “Sound Transit Offers Olive Branch to Homeowners in Shoreline”

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For many people, Ed Murray’s time as mayor will forever recall the horrific allegations against him, and his arguably tone-deaf response to those allegations — and rightfully so. While acknowledging the significance of that story, I feel fully unqualified to address it in any detail. So I’ll set the ominous cloud to one side, and summarize the state of transit as Ed Murray resigns from office.

With the exception of Sound Transit 2, Ed Murray inherited a transit landscape in disarray. The west half of the city was stuck in traffic with no end in sight. Metro’s years of budget shell games were finally running out, and big bus service cuts threatened.

In response, the Murray administration led two successful ballot measures, and had a part in a third:

• After a county effort to raise funds for Metro failed, a 2014 city-level vehicle license fee funded bus service increases (as the originally-threatened cuts disappeared in economic growth).
• The 2015 9-year, $930m Move Seattle levy built on the McGinn-era transit master plan to fund a revision of most major corridors to better serve transit, bikes, and pedestrians, and bring RapidRide to every corner of the city.
• Although most of the praise for 2016’s Sound Transit 3 lies elsewhere, the Murray administration did produce an intriguing concept for a rail line that addressed needs in the Denny corridor instead of just rehashing the monorail. It also fought for infill stations at N. 130th St. and Graham St., and Seattle voted for the measure convincingly.

On top of these signature achievements, Murray’s SDOT, under appointee Scott Kubly, continued the shift away from prioritizing car throughput toward safety and considering needs of all modes. It also secured funding to build the Center City Connector between our two streetcar line. Thanks to dedicated right-of-way along 1st Avenue, this will be more of a low-grade light rail than a mixed-traffic streetcar.

Although Kubly was hired largely thanks to his bikeshare experience, the city’s Pronto bikeshare opened and then collapsed due to a constellation of problems. Luckily for Seattle, three private bikeshare companies soon followed with service that was in most respects vastly superior. SDOT deserves credit for creating a favorable regulatory framework for these companies.

Continue reading “Seattle Mayor Ed Murray”

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A Senate committee questioned several Sound Transit employees, a law professor and anti-tax advocate Tim Eyman during the first of two “investigatory work sessions” looking into Sound Transit’s conduct leading up to the vote on Sound Transit 3.

Union members packed Kent’s City Council chambers, listening to testimony before the Senate Law and Justice Committee on whether the bill language for ST3 was unconstitutionally drafted and if Sound Transit misled the legislature on the size of the final ST3 package.

State Senators Steve O’Ban, R-University Place, and Dino Rossi, R-Sammamish, requested the work sessions after accusing Sound Transit of deceiving legislators and the public. Peter Rogoff, CEO of Sound Transit, issued a statement Tuesday, calling the assertions “baseless.”

Trying to sum up the first issue, Mike Padden, R-Spokane Valley, said the bill that authorized the ST3 taxes, SB 5987, adopted a motor vehicle excise tax schedule that had been repealed back in 1996, rather than setting a new schedule.

David DeWolf, Professor of Law at Gonzaga University, told the committee he found SB 5987 to be noncompliant with the state code because it “didn’t set forth in full what the existing statute is that would be affected and how it would be affected.”

“The only way you could figure out what the new rule would be would be to hunt down the provision 82.44 (RCW), which isn’t even cited to the specific section, and find it in the older, now repealed statutes,” DeWolf said.

Continue reading “Senate Committee Grills Sound Transit”

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This afternoon the Senate Law and Justice Committee will hold the first of two hearings for an “investigation” of Sound Transit.

Longtime opponents of light rail, State Senators Steve O’Ban, R-University Place, and Dino Rossi, R-Sammamish, requested the hearings, claiming the transit agency “may have engaged in a systematic effort to confuse and misrepresent the impact and cost of the Sound Transit 3 authorization to legislators and the public.”

After many residents reacted to an increase in car tab fees, O’Ban and Rossi accused Sound Transit of using “unconstitutional MVET” valuations. The Senators also claim Sound Transit misrepresented the total length of the ST3 package, which they say grew to $28 billion in total taxes from the proposed $15 billion.

In response to the Senators, Sound Transit released a memo and corresponding chronology.

According to the memo, “the ST3 authorizing legislation adopted in 2015 clearly and explicitly directed that the increased Sound Transit MVET use the older vehicle depreciation schedule from the 1990s.”

Sound Transit has used this same depreciation schedule for car tab fees since 1999, according to Sound Transit spokesperson Geoff Patrick. A revised MVET valuation was created in 2006 by the legislature, but the new schedule has never been applied to any vehicles in Washington. Prior to the 2016 election where voters approved the ST3 package, Sound Transit provided a cost-calculator on their website for voters to estimate the additional taxes ST3 would bring.

O’Ban previously voted to approve the 2015 bill which authorized the ST3 ballot measure, including the current MVET valuations. Rossi was not in the state legislature at the time of the 2015 vote.

Last legislative session, O’Ban sponsored Senate Bill 5893 to cut car tab fees. The bill passed the Senate but languished in the House. In a letter published in The Seattle Times, O’Ban asserts the transit agency could afford to cut car tab fees, estimating that SB 5893 would leave Sound Transit with “93 percent of the funds approved by ST3.”

However, Patrick said the passage of SB 5893 would result in a much larger loss of revenue which would then also reduce bonding capacity for ST3.

Patrick said the fiscal impact of the bill would have “left a $12 billion hole” in ST3’s financial plan, which could delay projects, pushing out completion dates.

Continue reading “Sound Transit Rebuffs Claims Agency Misled Voters, Senate Investigation Begins Tuesday”

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Update: The bus lane won’t happen until spring 2018.

Good news is coming for riders of heavily-traffic-impacted Metro route 8. This week SDOT is installing a bus lane on Denny Way, between Fairview Ave and Stewart St, and painting it red.

The eastbound bus lane will be sandwiched in between a left lane for traffic headed further east on Denny, and a right lane for traffic turning onto Yale Ln and I-5. The bus lane is projected to save 1-2 minutes on each eastbound PM peak trip, but that may be a conservative estimate, given the bus stops that get backed up by the I-5 queue.

A westbound lane will be lost, but SDOT expects any impacts to westbound AM peak trips to be brief.

Road work will start after 7 pm Monday, and is expected to be complete by Thursday.

The new lane is part of a slew of improvements announced last December.  The Route 8 corridor improvement project is funded from $1.4 million in federal grants, and slated to be complete in early 2018.

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Angle Lake Station opened one year ago today, adding about 3,500 riders to Link every weekday. Only seven more years until trains head even further south to Kent/Des Moines, Star Lake, and Federal Way.

This is an open thread.

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