Just when you thought it was safe to travel again, the Seafair Torchlight Parade has arrived. Yes, 4th Ave will be closed all evening from 3:30 pm to 10 pm, and 38 34 bus routes will be re-routed. These include routes C, D, E, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 21, 24, 26, 28, 33, 36, 40, 43, 47, 49, 66, 70, 99, 120, 125, 131, 132, and ST Express routes 512, 522, 545, and 554, 577, 578, and 594.

Metro will also be operating a shuttle every 20 minutes between Nob Hill on Queen Anne, and Queen Anne Ave and Mercer St, by the Seattle Center, from 3:30 pm to midnight, with frequent stops between the termini.

For those wishing to get across the parade route, use this nifty little map of all the accessible tunnel corridors throughout downtown. Westlake Station is my favorite shortcut under 4th Ave street closures. You can grab the fold-out version of this map at Westlake Station.

For the unaware, the Torchlight Parade is a big deal. Thousands of spectators claim spots along the street with fold-up chairs hours before the parade. Over 150,000 apectators are expected to show up. Sounders fans, whose game against the LA Galaxy got moved to Monday night, will be showing up in force as World Cup heroes Clint Dempsey and DeAndre Yedlin serve as Grand Marshalls. Mariners fans will also get to show up this time, as their game today is at 1 pm, instead of the usual 7 pm.

Downtown Seattle isn’t the only location where Seafair will be stressing the public transit system. Renton River Days will impact 10 bus routes serving downtown Renton, including routes F, 101, 105, 106, 107, 148, 169, 240, 908, and 909.

Metro and Sound Transit each have alert services to which you can subscribe.

Addendum: Sound Transit Express routes 512, 577, 578, and 594 are also on re-route until 10:00 pm downtown.

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Until its peak year in 2011, Amtrak Cascades had been an unqualified success story, with strong and growing ridership and ever-higher farebox recovery ratios. It seemed like exceeding 1 million annual passengers and achieving near-profitability was right around the corner.  Well, new challenges have arisen and Cascades has begun to struggle modestly, resulting in a small but growing funding problem.

Despite being showered with nearly $800m in capital money by the 2009 stimulus package, the federal contribution to operational funding was cut in 2013 as mandated by the Passenger Rail Improvement and Investment Act of 2008 (PRIIA). In a feat of brilliantly backwards federal thinking, PRIIA committed the feds to divest from the most successful Amtrak lines (corridors under 750 miles) while continuing to fund the least successful (those over 750 miles). Such a mandate placed operational funding primarily in the hands of an even more recalcitrant body, the Washington State Legislature, which has shown little interest in achieving anything beyond what is mandated by the stimulus funding (two more Seattle-Portland trains), much less the Long Range Plan.

Over the past two years, farebox recovery has fallen from 66% to 59%, with the squeeze coming both from stagnating revenue and operating costs that continue to rise by $1m per year despite no added service. Ridership has declined in each of the past 3 years, albeit modestly, from an all-time high of 848,000 in 2011 to 807,000 last year. The lost ridership can likely be attributed to competition from Bolt Bus in the Seattle, Portland, Bellingham, Vancouver, and Eugene markets, and also from worsened speed and reliability from construction that is intended to address both issues. Continue reading “The Case for Express Cascades Trains”

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The Sound Transit Board voted yesterday to recommend building a 25-acre rail yard in Bellevue near the Spring District real estate development in the Bel-Red Corridor.

Sound Transit looks to triple their current light rail fleet from 62 to 180, as well as expanding their light-rail system from 16 to 50 miles. Because of the projected growth, a new maintenance facility is needed to go along with the current facility in the Sodo neighborhood, as the latter is expected to reach its full capacity by 2020.

The BNSF site in Bellevue’s Bel-Red corridor west of 120^th Avenue NE was among the four sites that Sound Transit narrowed down in the draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) completed in May. The other sites considered were in Lynnwood and two other Bellevue locations, with one being adjacent to the SR-520 and the other being a modified version of the BNSF site. Detailed version of the site map for the original BNSF site can be found here.

The EIS considered a number of factors to measure the impact that would be left by the new light rail operations base including: noise and vibration; land use; visual and economic impacts; social, neighborhood, and social service impacts; and, impacts to parklands, open spaces, and other natural resources.

Continue reading “Sound Transit Selects BNSF site in Bellevue as Preferred Alternative for Rail Yard”

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• Pronto Bike Share applies for its station locations.
• TOD is taking over locally.
• Will the Spring District have any affordable housing?
• The numbers are small, but King County may cap its contribution to the SLUT.
• Nick Licata defends his no vote on the Downtown Streetcar.
• But Chinatown businesses definitely want it.
• Sloppy drill procedures cause a bus bomb scare ($).
• Puyallup can’t agree on merits of a Sounder garage vs. a second station.
• America’s just not putting in the money for fast transit.
• Mysterious black Car2Go membership cards.
• A taxonomy of subway station signs.
• Amtrak is slower and courts are to blame.
• Atlanta’s MARTA turning park-and-rides into buildings.
• Yet another attempt to improve the New York City subway map.

This is an open thread.

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Mike Lindblom reports ($) that after a short delay the Seattle Council approved the Downtown Streetcar’s locally preferred alternative in an 8-1 vote, with only Nick Licata voting against. I summarized the salient points in coverage of the previous meeting. Now SDOT will pursue federal grants and leaders will attempt to identify a good funding source for the city’s contribution.

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On Monday, the King County Council unanimously passed an ordinance enacting Metro bus service cuts for September 2014. There are press releases from Transportation, Economy, and Environment (TrEE) Committee Chair Rod Dembowski, the four other Democrats on the county council, and King County Executive Dow Constantine:

“This agreement adheres to the principles I insisted on many weeks ago: Don’t rely on money we don’t have; don’t spend one-time money for on-going service; and use objective criteria to make decisions on saving or cutting service,” said Executive Constantine. “I want to thank members for arriving at legislation that balances Metro’s budget, and that is sustainable.” 

The TrEE Committee passed the ordinance unanimously last Tuesday. In a sign of continued tension, Councilmember Dave Upthegrove had some interesting things to say about the process:

“I want to thank the Executive and Chair Phillips for working on a proposal that I could at least hold my nose and vote for,” said Councilmember Dave Upthegrove. “It took a little longer than everyone hoped, but I am pleased that the current ‘Majority Coalition’ decided to vote for the same proposal today that they rejected yesterday. I’m not sure what caused them to change their minds, but I am grateful that the Executive and Council Chair brought this proposal to us yesterday and that it is finally moving forward.”

The just-approved ordinance allows Metro to move forward with 161,000 hours of specified cuts in annual bus service hours in September. The council also approved, in principle, allowing Metro to cut another 188,000 annual hours in February of 2015. However, those cuts, including the specific routes, will need further council action.

The prior dispute involved several issues, including using one-time funding sources to temporarily shore up the operating budget and various deviations from Metro’s service guidelines. A main argument was whether to approve the February cuts now or wait for the next budget forecast. The compromise is that the Council agreed to the overall level of February cuts, but not the specific route adjustments, at this time.

Metro is still planning for another 200,000 hours of cuts in June and September of 2015, based on current revenue projections, but the Council will handle that in a later budget process.

Other than the 161,000 hours of cuts in September, these numbers do not take into account the impact if Seattle voters pass the proposal for a Seattle-only revenue package to avoid bus service cuts in Seattle.

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The idea that tolling is some insidious stealth tax, or a fundamental violation of the inalienable right to drive anywhere, for free, with unlimited subsidy is a well-established cancer on the Puget Sound’s discourse. Nevertheless, I was astonished at the boundaries of the 520 tolling debate, as presented by Ellis Conklin in the Seattle Weekly last week and Alexa Vaughn in The Seattle Times ($) yesterday:

Had [they been notified], then perhaps there may have been a possibility of allowing motorists to drive for free across the 520 floating bridge – at least the idea would have been broached in a meeting of the seven commissioners.

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PCC Logistics, for example, relies on westbound truckers to deliver goods on time to its Port of Seattle facility. The company handles import, export, refrigerated and general cargo for customers.

Even though its trucks will be rerouting, Beth Sanchez, the company’s customer-service manager, says that the company is still warning customers that there could be long and unpredictable delivery delays….

Companies and workers will also have to deal with the costs of extra gas and, if using the westbound 520 bridge, the tolls. The state has no plans to waive or reduce tolls for crossing 520 and will be allowing intermittent openings for boats.

The decision to not reduce tolls for those traveling westbound has angered some daily bridge-crossers.

Why, if only there was some way to make sure 520 would be uncongested, so that freight and other businesses that depend on reliable travel could do so!

The debate as presented in these two reporters — and, to be fair, as framed by Washington State officials who are either unimaginative or muzzled — is basically that it would be great if we could grind 520 to a halt too by lifting the toll, but shucks, we still have to pay for the bridge.

This is absurd. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to expand our highway capacity and “ease congestion” does massive damage to the environment and ends up inducing the same congestion. But in that debate, the establishment wrings its hands about the economy and the need to move freight around, because time is money. When maintenance dramatically reduces highway capacity, however, no one cares enough about businesses to do the one thing that might help.

I agree that freight operators, the handyman with his tools, and so on need uncongested highways. And because shorter trips on the highway feed directly into their bottom line, tolls are but a fraction of the cost of sitting in traffic because there’s no alternative. The answer, if policymakers really care about businesses like PCC Logistics, is not to suspend the toll but raise the toll to whatever level keeps 520 free-flowing this week.

As an added bonus, the really poor people — that would be the ones on the bus — also benefit from normal operating speeds. In fact, anyone interested in a fast and inexpensive option would naturally gravitate to the choices that consume the least scarce road space, which benefits everyone.

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