At the Atlantic Cities, Gabriel Metcalf has a thought-provoking article about affordable housing in the Bay Area. The whole thing is really interesting and highly recommended reading, but I want to highlight one particular section of the article, particularly how affordability interplays with walkability.

Whether the gentrification process is good or bad for neighborhoods, and for the lower-income people who live there, is something that can be debated endlessly. But what is strikingly different about the Bay Area in contrast to a place like New York is the fact that New York has so many more walkable, pre-war neighborhoods located on rail transit, within easy commuting distance of Manhattan. When New York neighborhoods like Soho and the Village got too expensive, for example, the Lower East Side became a major center for artists and other members of the cultural avant-garde. When the Lower East Side got too expensive, people went across the East River to Williamsburg. Next came Fort Green, Dumbo, Red Hook and other neighborhoods in Brooklyn that were still cheap. But as every spot in Brooklyn with a good rail connection to the city gets more expensive, there still is Queens, the Bronx, Newark, the towns up the Hudson — walkable neighborhoods in every direction.

As expensive as Manhattan is, and as far along into the gentrification process as the many surrounding communities are, there are still many places to go within the New York orbit to have an affordable, urban way of life.

We can’t solve affordable housing or transit access within the limits of any one city.

In the Bay Area, there are far fewer options that fit the criteria of walkable, transit-proximate and affordable. For many of my friends, there is just one: Oakland. This is what people mean when they say Oakland is the Brooklyn of the Bay Area. It’s the next stop on the train, it’s cool, it’s where young people go now.

The affordability issue isn’t as acute in Seattle as it is in San Francisco or Manhattan, but the lack of a “safety valve” like Brooklyn or Oakland is even worse. Really, outside of a few neighborhoods in Seattle and possibly some small parts of other cities, there are no walkable neighborhoods. As people who want an urban lifestyle get priced out of those neighborhoods, there’s really no where else to go.

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In case you somehow missed the news, Rail~volution is coming to Seattle next week. I will be participating in a panel on social media and blogging hosted by Jeff Wood of Reconnecting America (aka The Overhead Wire). We’ll be joined by Dominic Holden of The Stranger and Geoff Patrick, media relations manager for Sound Transit. Frank is listed as a participant, but he won’t be able to come.

The panel starts at 10am, Tuesday, at the Westin. The conference runs from 20-23 October. Registration is available online.

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• Cascades ridership down slightly this year ($). Is it due to BoltBus?
• Governor Inslee trying to find a policy to limit carbon emissions.
• No one is completely happy with the Lynnwood Link alignments ($).
• C-Tran’s contract with TriMet to operate MAX trains stands in an action-packed session. Now all they need is a bridge.
• Ugh. Seattle DPD looking at requiring parking at aPodments.
• Kevin Wallace taking heat for his past actions relating to East Link.
• You can’t fix high rents without more housing. The alternative is San Francisco.
• City Council challenger Albert Shen wants to build a Link station at Graham St. ($)
• Federal Way mayoral candidate Jim Ferrell rips incumbent Skip Priest for trying to dismantle Sound Transit in a tantrum about Link not getting there by 2023.
• Community Transit will administer in-person rider surveys.
• CT now on Twitter.
• Obstacles to the Oregon-only CRC still abound.
• U-Link construction update.
• 18 businesses recognized for transit-friendly policies. Unfortunately, choosing to locate in a transit-accessible place apparently isn’t one of the criteria.
• Broadway cycletrack nearing completion.
• A report from the legislature’s “listening tour” ($).
• Unsurprisingly, I-90 users would love it if the whole state bore the cost of their bridge via the gas tax, rather than tolls. WSDOT is still collecting public comment on tolling.
• West Seattle Transportation Coalition agrees on a manifesto.
• Bus stop robberies bunch together.
• I argue for streetcars in the Transit Riders’ Union’s Reader.
• A new taxi app is launching in Seattle.
• Why LA’s rail network is better than Portland’s.

This is an open thread.

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As a follow-up to my post about driverless cars, here are a more links on the topic:

• The ethics of driverless cars.
• Should driverless cars have to obey speed limits?
• Google exec: driverless cars coming ‘even faster than I imagined’.
• GM says almost-driverless car coming by 2020.
• People say would rather buy a driverless car from Google than GM.
• This guy says a Google driverless car is nonsense.

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Do *you* want to expand rail in the city? I know I do, and so does the City of Seattle. Please come join Mayor McGinn and Council member Conlin at Spitfire next Monday night from 7-8 to talk to them about their vision for expanding transit. Now that all four of the high capacity transit corridors in the Transit Master Plan are in progress, and Sound Transit is expanding their Long Range Plan in preparation for ST3, this is an exciting time for both rail and BRT.

I think readers have a lot of questions about how we’re going to fund these corridors and what timeline they’re on, and this is a great opportunity to ask!

This City of Seattle event is immediately followed by Cascade Bicycle Club’s “Evening with Earl” from 8-9pm, hosting Earl Blumenauer, Congressmember for Portland, a fantastic urbanist and founder of the Railvolution conference. If you’re going to stay for that, please RSVP to Brock Howell.

These are two great opportunities to hang out with a lot of great transit advocates – don’t miss them!

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The STB Editorial Board is preparing its General Election Endorsements. As always, if there are any candidates in non-obvious races that we should be aware of, please mention them in the comments. Supporting links are most welcome.

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North Line

Sept. 14:  326

Sept. 21:  200

Total North Line:  526

South Line

Sept. 14:  1,356

Sept. 21:  1,354

Total South Line:  2,710

Total boardings, all trains both days:  3,236

For comparison, an average August full weekday of Sounder draws over 11,000 boardings. You can find the schedule for the special service here. It consisted of six round trips to Lakewood and three to Seattle, one of which extended to Everett. Some of this service was not particularly useful for the fair, instead maintaining Sounder’s quite rider-friendly practice of making almost all runs revenue runs just in case someone needs to make a trip. I won’t claim to really understand attendance patterns at the fair, but I’d estimate that five Lakewood round trips and 1.5 Seattle round trips were actually useful to people attending the fair.

ST spokesperson Kimberly Reason says no ST funds were used to provide this service. It instead came from the Washington State Fair and Events Center, so it’s ultimately up to them if this is value for the money and whether they increase, maintain, or reduce service next year. The Center didn’t respond to my inquiry about their plans.

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The Guardian’s bike blog has an interesting post about driver-less cars and what they might mean for cyclists and pedestrians. It’s an interesting thought experiment:

A more dystopian [vision of the future] involves platoons of speeding robocars making roads even more deeply unpleasant and motor-centric than they are today. Pedestrians and cyclists may have to be restricted “for their own safety.” After all, if you knew that the truck barrelling towards you would automatically brake if you wobbled out in front of it, you’d have little incentive to stay in the gutter and every incentive to play one-sided chicken. Claiming the lane would take on a whole new meaning as cyclists blithely blocked robovehicles. The authorities would be under immense pressure to stamp out jaywalking – and jaycycling. With cars able to speed through junctions, electronically interacting with each other, and with no need for traffic lights, it would be harder for humans outside of driverless cars to use the roads.

This is fun stuff, read the whole thing.

So while we’re on the subject, what will driver-less cars do for buses? To start, I believe that once robocars become truly viable, part of the sales pitch of the robo-system’s makers will be that they will share in some (all?) of the liability for accidents caused using their systems. This will make car insurance extremely expensive for someone who wants to drive themselves. Eventually, it’ll get to the point where no cars but high-performance vehicles such as Maseratis, Porsches and Aston Martins will be sold for manual driving.

This will put a lot of pressure on bus systems operators (Metro, Sound Transit, etc.) to replace bus fleets with robo-buses. Even though it would probably save a huge amount of money to the bus systems, I suspect that buses will be some of the last vehicles robotised because of the power of transit operators unions. Transit operators would insist that robobuses will ignore you while you’re waiting at your stop, and that you’ll miss the human touch. Robotised-bus proponents would insist that costs savings and the promise of on-time buses 99.9% of the time make the trade-off worth it. An argument about public safety will occur; who would want to get on a nearly empty Rapid Ride E late at night by themselves with no operator? Over time, too many human-operated LRT and buses would cause accidents – statistics would show some huge percentage of remaining traffic accidents were caused by buses, and eventually bus drivers will be morphed into neutered security guards, who will cost the same as the old drivers did and the cost savings will never materialise.

For cyclists, at least in Seattle, the move to robocars will be mostly very positive. Car-sharing would become nearly ubiquitous as your car would be able to drive other people around when you are out of it, so shoulder-parking spots would give way to bike lanes throughout the city. Cycling would become more popular as it becomes safer and nearly every traffic signal will be retrofitted with a cyclist period as they have in Copenhagen and Amsterdam. Maybe entire streets, mainly side streets, would become cyclist-only or nearly so; robocars would only be allowed on if they were stopping there and even then, they would only be allowed to go 10 mph. Bike sharing would thrive as well, as people would use robocars and robobuses to get close to their destination and ride bikes the last mile.

Pedestrians would have a rougher go of it. Crossing major streets would be difficult with the exquisitely timed signals, and the new driver-cum-passenger majority/plurality would become even extremely anti-pedestrian. Pedestrians will go from people you see looking out the window to faceless obstacles that are never seen as you look at your smartphone or tablet from the self-driving car. Eventually, as a small consolation to pedestrians, we’ll see a few elevated crossings installed in major corridors, the sort that are common in big cities in East Asia, and lots of people taking robocars for what had previously been short walks because of the real or perceived anti-pedestrian bias.

Ok, that’s enough of futurist imaginings from me. What do you think driver-less cars will do to the transportation experiences of those who don’t drive for every trip?

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On Thursday, I wrote about the State Senate listening tour’s Seattle stop on Monday (Bartolome Day), and why we’re in a much better position than they think. I want to add more detail about what the Senate is trying to do, and how we can do an end run around them.

The Problem

The Republicans (and the two turncoat Democrats) have outlined a “ten point” scheme (PDF) they want implemented as part of any transportation package.

Most of these are designed to privatize operations, or cut pay and benefits for workers. The last one is the worst for transit: it “would make changes streamlining the state’s existing regional transit authority boards.” Hmm… where have we heard that before? It’s yet another attempt to make the Sound Transit board directly elected, and susceptible to attacks from moneyed interests. Given the political pressures that exist today, suburban ST board members could even direct ST money for road projects, as has been a desire of some legislators in the past.

The State House would surely reject legislation like this, but the concessions necessary to get the current Senate to vote for a package would be disastrous. As Mike Lindblom pointed out on twitter yesterday, I even missed how bad it got this year:

Continue reading “A Special Session Would Be a Disaster: What We Can Do Instead”

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