Kansas City is on the MOVE with the KC Streetcar from KC Streetcar on Vimeo.

Kansas City seems pretty excited for its first streetcar, opening on May 6.

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On Friday the The Transport Politic’s Yonah Freemark had a meditation on Sound Transit 3 and the values inherent in prioritizing projects. After a piece two weeks earlier in which he took a standard performance-first approach while arguing for the priority of Ballard over other regional projects, he then stepped back a bit and used his most recent post to ask, “Which riders matter?”

At face value, the idea that we should treat each transit rider equivalently in a comparative analysis may not seem particularly controversial. Doesn’t it make intuitive sense to prioritize transit projects that serve the most people for the lowest cost?

In truth, though, riders are different. Some are taking long trips, some short ones. Some are wealthy, some are poor. Some have no choice but to ride transit, others are picking it instead of driving.

If the Ballard light rail project I noted above was filled with people already using buses to get to work and who would save just a few minutes traveling by train versus bus, while the Tacoma project was to be used by people who otherwise would be driving and who would be saving a lot of time, can we still be confident that the Ballard project is the better one? What if the Ballard project was serving all wealthy people, while the Tacoma one was designed for the poor?

How do we differentiate between riders? Who matters most? These are essential questions that we must answer when we’re picking investments. After all, given the fact that resources are limited, we must have some way to determine how to use them—whether that is through a process of reviewing quantitative statistics or through political debate.

When it comes to urban transit systems in the U.S., determining what riders matter most has a direct impact on what types of services are provided. Many large regions, for instance, have chosen to subsidize commuter rail at a higher rate per rider than other modes of transportation. Essentially that means that suburban, longer-distance travelers are being prioritized over urban travelers.

It’s a great piece and I’d encourage you to read the whole thing, but echoing my earlier piece on values, I’d add that this preference for the qualitative over the quantitative applies equally to process as it does to outcomes, or as much to means as to ends. That is to say that politics is the art (not science) of managing human relationships to produce outcomes. We do studies and calculate metrics, but at the end of the day this is a political business, and we have to ask, “Which riders politicians matter?”

Consider this from a theoretical ethics perspective. Wonky blogs like ours tend to take utilitarian viewpoints; we’re systems people who see inherent value in optimizing transit for the greatest good of the greatest number of people. To our minds it’s self evident that ridership-maximizing rail options are superior, or that frequent service with transfers should be preferred over infrequent one-seat rides.

But when analyzing the politics of these things, it’s helpful to remember that political systems think more like Kant than John Stuart Mill. Their ethical frameworks are based not on quantitative outcomes, but on perceived duties to one another. It’s about who is owed what and when. It’s an economy of debts, and transit just so happens to be the currency in which these transactions are settled. When cities mostly lack projects in a proposed measure, such as Renton, they get angry not because that the agency failed to appropriately rank objective criteria, but because they feel left out and devalued.

Uncomfortable with the nakedness of this reality, we attempt to buttress our intended actions with studies and metrics and numbers, but it’s remarkable how little weight these numbers usually end up carrying; no one will prioritize a project because it carries a couple thousand more riders for the same money, but the issue will be decided on much more personal and qualitative grounds.

So identity matters; it matters who is asking for what, and for whom they’re asking it. And governance structures matter too, because they frame the range of acceptable outcomes, decide who gets seats at the table, and determine who is entitled to a share of projects.

This may be a cynical frame, but it’s also one less likely to lead to unnecessary disillusionment (it’s a pre-emptive disillusionment, if you will). In such a case a premium should be placed on the importance of organizing over argument, for superior arguments only win the day if accompanied by a much more basic emotional weight for the agencies involved: the threat of embarrassment, the possibility of electoral defeat, or the fear of conflict. That’s why agencies live and die by their ability to put out fires. What emerges from the ashes of our competing concerns is what we get to vote on. If that sounds dark, consider the autocratic alternatives.

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[UPDATE: PLEASE do not overreact to the original alliterative title. As the the text makes clear, I am agnostic as to whether this is a spur or a wye.]

The fundamental ST3 tension in Snohomish County is between extending to Everett via I-5 or via I-5/Paine Field/SR99 (see map above). I-5 offers the cheapest construction and fastest trip between Everett, Lynnwood, and points south. Paine Field is a major, if sprawling, jobs center and the most obvious destination in the area. It also contains Snohomish County’s hopes for broadening its economic base beyond Boeing,* and has a chance to be the region’s second commercial airport. The SR99 option, superior in many ways, is dead due to perceived impacts on existing businesses.

The downsides of Paine Field are the construction expense (which would push arrival in Everett to 2041) and the added distance (with a trip that is 10 minutes longer and a fare $.50 higher) for Everett-Seattle trips. Together these make it less competitive with other modes and cancel out the ridership gains from Paine Field itself. So the choice is: wait 25 years to serve relatively speculative development, or build faster via I-5 and forego much of that chance. Local leaders recently floated an idea to speed things up a bit (make it cheaper) by avoiding travel on SR 99 altogether. This might save a few years, but both exacerbates the lost development opportunities and likely increases travel time even further.

It seems straightforward, however, to get to Everett faster while also avoiding difficult travel time tradeoffs. A rail spur or wye junction allows Everett-Lynnwood travel to follow I-5. Moreover, ST could build that segment on essentially the same timeline as a pure I-5 alignment,  delivering real progress faster. The Paine field branch would follow later as development necessitates, probably around 2041.

Continue reading “Win-Win With a Wye Junction (or Spur)”

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• City of Seattle quickly breaking its promises to the bike community before the Move Seattle vote.
• Forget about whether it’s “affordable” or not — we’re just not building enough housing, period.
• Apple Maps finally adds transit directions in Seattle.
• A puff piece on Metro drivers ($) – and one in particular.
• Bus etiquette tips ($).
• Snohomish County leaders float an alternative that serves Paine Field while avoiding SR99 entirely, possibly saving a few hundred million dollars and a few years.
• Debora Juarez offers a convincing, technically literate case ($) for 130th Street Station.
• Tim Eyman rolls out another initiative to kneecap ST3 funding.
• Everett Herald floats the idea of a BRT connection to Paine Field to connect to Link along I-5.
• Kemper Freeman has a transportation plan too.
• C-TRAN debunks Washington Policy Center attack on their cost structure.
• MAX track maintenance will severely disrupt service for two weeks in May.

This is an open thread.

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After a couple weeks of staff nonchalantly dropping ULink ridership numbers in meetings, this afternoon Sound Transit released its first official tally. And ULink is already breaking records. Opening day saw just shy of 70,000 boardings, and was eclipsed only 3 weeks later. April 8 saw a record 72,000 riders, with an assist from ComicCon, Mariners opening day, and our insanely unseasonable spring. That edges past the previous one-day record of 71,500 for the Seahawks Super Bowl parade.

Average weekday ridership is up a whopping 61%, from 36,000 in the weeks before ULink to 58,000 today. Saturday ridership has nearly doubled and is approaching weekday levels, with Opening Day (March 19) and the 520 Bridge Opening ceremonies (April 2) leading the way, but with the other two Saturdays near 50,000 as well. Sunday ridership looks to be settling near 30,000, growth of nearly 50%.

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The Sound Transit 3 Draft Plan includes a lot of parking. Just how much? The agency plans to build 9,700 new stalls (8,300 net) in 16 new parking garages and two new surface lots. The total cost is $661m in 2014 dollars, or a staggering $80,000 per space. Taken in aggregate, each commuter using these new stalls could park every day for 50 years, and Sound Transit would pay them $4.38 for the privilege (and that’s on top of the capital costs of their bus or train ride, of course). If 2041 ridership attains its expected 500,000 per day and each of those 8,300 new stalls were filled daily, that’s just 1.6% of the system’s users.

We’ve been fairly hostile to Park & Rides on these pages over the years, and mostly with good reason. Parking adjacent to transit directly reduces all other means of access, reduces affordable housing potential, necessitates hostile adjacent land uses, increases transit operating costs, reinforces residential auto dependency, and (when unpriced) represents an exorbitant subsidy that the relatively wealthy enjoy at the expense of others’ access.

To my mind, there are two good rebuttals in favor of Park & Rides. The first is on social justice grounds, namely that the suburbanization of poverty displaces persons to locations with anemic local transit, forcing vehicle ownership upon them and necessitating that they access high capacity transit by car. Pricing parking can help lessen the subsidy for wealthy parkers –and it’s reassuring that the ST Board and CEO Rogoff seem comfortable with the idea – but it also competitively prices out those who have no other options. The second argument stipulates that as a transitional land use easily torn down later, Park & Rides facilitate lifestyle change while car-dependent locales await the retrofits necessary to make them succeed without cars. Whether you think that’s true largely depends on your time horizon, and on the relative value you place on access for a few today versus access for far more people later.

But not all Park & Rides are alike. Some of Sound Transit’s ST3 parking plans are reasonable investments in overcrowded facilities, others seem like pure political pork, and most are somewhere in between. Let’s break them down one by one.  Continue reading “ST3 Parking: $661M at $80k Per Space”

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King County Metro is running a survey on late night service from now until May 4.

Metro bus service nearly universally evaporates after 2 am. Even the routes that continue to run do so less than hourly, making them nearly unusable.

Routes that shadow Link Light Rail trips (not including the dozens within the downtown core) include the A Line, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 36, 38, 43, 48, 49, 50, 60, 106, 124, and the First Hill Streetcar. Of these, the A Line, 7, 36, 43, 49, 106, and 124 have a trip between 2 am and 4 am, but all have a gap of over an hour before their morning schedule starts up.

Other routes with trips between 2 am and 4 am are the C Line, D Line, E Line, 4, 11, 40, 44, 120, 150, and 180. All have that hour gap between their last night-owl run and their first regular morning run.

The last survivors of the dreaded 80-series routes — 82, 83, and 84 — also come more than an hour apart, with only six trips total between the three routes. Even Stephen Fesler over at the Urbanist admits it is time for those routes to go away.

Which routes would you like to see run overnight, and how often would you like to see them run? Where do you hope the funding comes from?

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[Clarification: the post states that carsharing vehicles have “the right to park…in any legal parking spot at no charge”. While users do not pay for street parking at the point of use, the city does charge a flat annual fee of $1,730 per vehicle, amounts are adjusted annually based upon actual usage, and such fees are built into member pricing. – Zach]

Back in 2013, when Daimler launched its Car2Go carsharing service in Seattle, I lamented the fact that the Car2Go service area (the boundaries where cars can be parked and left for the next customer) stopped short of serving West and Southeast Seattle—two areas with diverse populations and, tellingly, more lower-income people than the Central and North Seattle neighborhoods Car2Go did serve first. At the time, I expressed some incredulity that Car2Go considered neighborhoods like Mount Baker and Columbia City “new and developing areas,” which struck (and strikes) me as code for “places that aren’t mostly white yet.”

Car2Go eventually expanded its service, and in 2015, the city adopted legislation that increased the number of “free-floating car share” permits that also required all new carsharing services to expand their service areas to include the entire city within two years. The implication was clear: If the city is going to give your members the right to park your cars in any legal parking spot at no charge [see note above], you have to serve the entire city, even the parts that may be less white—and less lucrative.

BMW’s new ReachNow service launch shows the wisdom of that rule. ReachNow, which costs 49 cents a minute (to Car2Go’s $0.41), has an initial service area virtually identical to Car2Go’s, excluding all of West Seattle and Southeast Seattle and stopping just a couple of blocks south of I-90, at S Lander St.  ReachNow has two years to expand its service area to include the whole city.

Continue reading “ReachNow’s Launch Falls Short”

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In order to protect the life and property of those who travel on the fragile and decrepit Alaskan Way Viaduct, the structure will close early in the morning of April 29th to allow Bertha to attempt to tunnel 378′ underneath it. The machine will dive under a steel and carbon reinforced structure ($) in the vicinity of Yesler Way, and if all goes well the Viaduct will reopen as the machine approaches Western/Columbia.

For all of Bertha’s many woes, it remains underappreciated that each of its breakdowns have occurred in the best possible places: west of the Viaduct and adjacent to industrial land. With its Viaduct dive and its subsequent attempt to tunnel underneath Downtown, the stakes grow much higher and the cost and complexity of repair much greater.

But the immediate concern for the 90,000 cars and 30,000 transit riders is successfully getting about the business of their daily lives, and to that end there are a number of reroutes and additional services in place:

• Metro routes 21E, 37, 55, 56, 57, 120, 125, and RapidRide C will use 4th Ave S and 3rd Avenue northbound and will use 3rd/Yesler/Terrace/Airport Way/Lander/1st when traveling southbound
• Metro routes 113, 121, 122, and 123 will use Spokane Street and the Sodo Busway northbound and will use 3rd/Yesler/Terrace/Airport Way/Spokane Street southbound
• The Vashon Water Taxi will add 5 round trips (though at press time their website had not published the schedule)
• The West Seattle Water Taxi will add 360 extra park and ride spots along Harbor Ave SW, though no extra service will be offered. A free and continuous shuttle will take passengers to Seacrest Park for Water Taxi service.
• Bus-only lanes will be added on Blanchard and Lenora in Belltown, and SPD will be enforcing bus lanes throughout the Center City
• Parking will be restricted on 4th Avenue downtown.
• Unlike previous closures, vehicle access to/from the Battery Street Tunnel will be maintained from the Western Avenue ramps.

Though this is already being dubbed “Viadoom 2” – after the original 9-day Viadoom in 2011 – my suspicion is that these closures will be a bit anticlimactic, painful but not apocalyptic. Friday the 29th will be light as people overreact and avoid Downtown, then volumes will steadily build as the closure progresses. This urbanist’s fondest hope is that we hardly miss the Viaduct and would entertain never reopening it, but that’s likely too much to dream. Good luck out there everyone.

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