The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) meeting started in Seattle yesterday. For coverage, you can see the liveblog here. For those visiting the city this week, our guide to urbanist sightseeing in Seattle, written for Rail~Volution in 2013, has been kept up to date.
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This is an open thread.
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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.
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Per the New York Times, the end of retail is nigh:
E-commerce players, led by the industry giant Amazon, have made it so easy and fast for people to shop online that traditional retailers, shackled by fading real estate and a culture of selling in stores, are struggling to compete. This shift has been building gradually for years. But economists, retail workers and real estate investors say it appears that it has sped up in recent months.
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This transformation is hollowing out suburban shopping malls, bankrupting longtime brands and leading to staggering job losses.
More workers in general merchandise stores have been laid off since October, about 89,000 Americans. That is more than all of the people employed in the United States coal industry, which President Trump championed during the campaign as a prime example of the workers who have been left behind in the economic recovery.
We’ve been reading about the death of retail and shopping malls for years now, but the trend does seem to be accelerating. The trend is especially pronounced in the suburbs, where some are projecting a retail apocalypse as consumers shift their shopping spend to Amazon and other e-commerce outfits.
If there’s a silver lining (other than to Amazon’s bottom line), it’s that suburban malls present great opportunities for infill development. For a region like ours with an acute housing shortage, the end of the shopping mall era could be a blessing in disguise. It’s politically easier to raze a mall and build dense housing than it is to displace a whole bunch of single-family houses.
Whatever the flaws of the Puget Sound’s suburban-oriented light rail, it will go past a fair number of malls: Northgate and Alderwood Malls will have adjacent stations, as will Federal Way, Factoria, Bellevue, and Redmond. Everett Mall is somewhat close to a future station. Tacoma Mall, Southcenter and Totem Lake could be candidates for extensions in ST4. That’s 10 transit-adjacent malls with a combined 619 acres of land (only counting the malls and their parking lots and ignoring the surrounding properties, which are also potentially ripe for redevelopment). Combined, that’s roughly the size of Downtown Seattle (bounded by Jackson, Denny, and I-5).
Of course, some regional malls seem rather unlikely to collapse in the immediate future. Bellevue in particular has smartly followed the trends and added upscale dining and entertainment to stay viable. But the trend is clear. The days of a few “anchor” department stores sustaining a forgettable collection of small, interchangeable chain stores are ending. These spaces could – and should! – be redeveloped into dense, transit-oriented housing over the coming decades.
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Among advanced industrial nations, Canada is the worst in passenger rail. At least in the U.S. we already have faster trains and are building a new high speed train in California.
(h/t Michael Hoffman)
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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)
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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”
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This is an open thread.
79 commentsOver 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.
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