This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

…to Disneyland:

The ride started in 1959 as part of Disneyland’s first expansion and the current cars have carted visitors around the Disney area since 1987. For three years, Disney Imagineers have been working on the upgrades that will roll out through the summer.
“I think we’re always looking for ways to update and refresh classic attractions,” said Scot Drake, the monorail lead designer. “This is definitely an iconic attraction.”
The biggest change is the look of the train: The first electric cars have blue glass and red stripes that change color in the sunlight. The next two cars will be blue with purple glass and orange with blue glass.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The Seattle Times is making sense:

Those pesky rails. Do they stay or go? Did the defeat of Proposition 1, the mondo transportation plan, stir a pulse in Sound Transit to look at the corridor for high-speed transit? All the dismissed questions are in play again.

One element must be unchanged: dual use. Save a rare, north-south route to move people in the future. Protecting transit options does not preclude recreational options.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Ugh. Here come the governor and the legislature to take Sound Transit out behind the barn and shoot it.

This is why I supported Prop. 1.

Anyway, getting rid of sub-area equity it not the worst idea. Either we’re one region or we’re not. We can’t have it both ways.

(via STB)

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Ted Van Dyk “reports” that regional leaders are coalescing around a post-Prop-1 transit plan that looks — surprise! — mirrors Van Dyk’s personal wishes and desires almost to a tee. It’s hard to know where the reporting ends and the navel-gazing begins:

In all of this, a new consensus is emerging about a post-Prop 1 agenda. It centers on moving aside turf-oriented, self-serving agencies such as Sound Transit and transferring power to a more objective, more responsive regional body. It would stress immediate priorities such as addressing the urgent Alaskan Way Viaduct and Evergreen Point Bridge, which are aging and structurally vulnerable. It would not stop light rail construction in place, but it would limit construction to a line running from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to either Convention Place, Husky Stadium, or Northgate. Future funding would be focused more greatly on express bus, bus rapid transit, and normal bus service; dedicated transit lanes; HOV lanes; tolling; and selective repair and expansion of long neglected local roads and lifeline highways. Citywide trolleys definitely would not be part of the scheme.

You’ve got to love the use of the passive voice here (“a consensus is emerging”), implying that the whole thing is just coming together as God and nature intended. It’s a miracle!!

But I really have to take this opportunity to rant against this idea of a regional “superagency” that’s getting so much press these days. The Puget Sound Regional Transportation Commission (PSRTC) — which would combine RTID, Sound Transit, and the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) — was the subject of the Rice-Stanton report (.pdf) that forms the basis of Van Dyk’s article. It is an idea that is intuitively appealing, but fall apart spectacularly upon deeper examination.

Let’s not mince words here: the PSRTC is not just a silly idea, it’s a dangerous distraction from the real transportation problems facing our region. Like the Department of Homeland Security at the federal level, the PSRTC’s main purpose will be to make us feel like we’ve accomplished something, while formerly effective independent agencies (e.g. FEMA) are gutted and politicized as part of the new, unwieldy mega-bureaucracy.

For example, the PSRC, Rice and Stanton argue, “is charged with planning regionally, but has limited authority. Although it articulates a regional vision and attempts to plan for the region, the PSRC lacks the power to prioritize needed projects due to its governance structure.” But this is a feature, not a bug! The PSRC’s insulation from politics and taxing is exactly what makes it so valuable and objective as a planning agency.

Also, the proposed PSRTC would have “life cycle responsibility” for construction and maintenance of “regional projects.” I assume this means it would have its own construction crews and maintenance facilities, or at least be responsible for subcontracting them. But why? Ostensibly, the PSRTC is being created for regional priority road projects like the ones specified in the RTID: I-405 widening, the “Mercer mess,” the 520 bridge, and others. But design and maintenance for those already rests with specific agencies. Unless you’re going to abolish KCDOT, SDOT, and all the other local DOTs, you’re adding bureaucracy, not removing it.

Finally, we don’t need yet another elected board overseeing something. Our ballots are far too large already. As it is, we must elect a couple of Port Commissioners, a few city councilmembers, a school board, some county councilmembers, federal judges, state reps and legislators, and maybe soon an elections chair. We need fewer of what Knute Berger wisely derided as “designer governments.”

What might — might — make sense is to combine the various regional transit agencies (Everett Transit, King County Metro, Community Transit and Sound Transit) into one transit agency, like Portland’s Tri-Met or New York’s MTA. But that would have the effect of giving Sound Transit even more clout, and that must be avoided at all costs, according to Van Dyk and his ilk (despite the fact that the people of the region view ST more favorably than, say, WSDOT).

To be sure, there is a real funding problem in the region. With round after round of anti-tax initiatives crippling the state’s budget (which must also fund important things like education and health care), it’s getting harder to fund transportation projects. But creating another agency doesn’t solve this problem, it just redirects it. If the state, cities, and counties can’t come up with the revenue, they need to raise taxes, or elect leaders who will. Redrawing lines on the map doesn’t magically make money appear.

In other words, creating the PSRTC does not restore these funds. It simply proposes to acquire them from a smaller bloc of voters, including Tim Eyman (who lives within the PSRTC’s proposed boundaries, let’s remember). Does anyone think that he’s just going to sit on his hands while we try to raise $70B or so in new revenue?

I encourage everyone to download the Rice-Stanton report and skip to Page 114, where Commissioner Dan McDonald writes a highly intelligent and accurate “minority report,” that calls into question the logic of the whole thing. A monster bureaucracy like the PSRTC will face stiff political opposition that will be every bit as difficult as simply trying to raise the revenue through existing agencies.

All of which makes you wonder why we’d even do it in the first place.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

King County has approved the deal to let the Port of Seattle buy the eastside rail corridor. The County’s approval was important, since they were the ones who had the first rights to buy it.

While there’s nothing final on Boeing Field, the memorandum does say that the Port and the County “shall develop a consultative process for considering major capital improvements at King County International Airport that would substantially affect the Airport’s regional impact.”

The County’s going to move to buy two segments of the trail, but I’m not clear on which segments those are. The P-I’s (and the Times‘) description would seem to correspond roughly with segments A and D of the PSRC’s study (above). But the memo istelf seems to imply that the “Southern Portion” (A+B) will be converted to a trail, while the “Northern Portion” (C+D) will be retained for freight use.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

As we mourn the failed Monorail project on what would have been it’s opening weekend, photographer Eliza Truitt has a beautiful collection of black-and-white photos of the proposed Green Line stations, all 19 of ’em. Check it out.

(Via Seattlest)

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

I’m late in acknolwedging Greg Nickels’ ascention to the head of the Sound Transit board of directors. It’s notable for a couple of reasons. First, it was Snohomish county’s “turn,” as Josh Feit noted. Second, it’s unusual that the board would give so much power to Seattle. It’s sort of like electing an American as President of the United Nations.

Still, if anyone knows how to run an election, it’s Nickels. If Sound Transit does push for a vote in 2008 (as Feit suggests) or 2010 (as David Brewster seems to think), I can’t imagine anyone else I’d rather have at the helm. In fact, it may be Nickels’ reputation in that regard that got him the job.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The Seattle Times warms to a surface-street replacement for the viaduct:

If the goal is reasonable replacement of traffic capacity on the waterfront — and elsewhere in Seattle’s north-south corridor — this may prove the only politically viable way to move forward. Literally. A narrow boulevard that accommodates very little traffic is not a good idea, but neither is an Indiana speedway with no traffic lights. Remember, one goal is to reconnect downtown and the waterfront.

…

One promising feature of the group’s new approach is a pledge to take a holistic look at the north-south traffic in Seattle. Instead of merely promising to replace daily capacity for 110,000 cars, instead of dumping all those cars onto the waterfront roadway, traffic planners are studying the broader notion of transporting people and products from North 85th Street to South Spokane Street.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The recent problems with the WSF’s Steel Electric ferries has focused some much-needed attention on the nation’s largest passenger ferry system. When former WSDOT chief Doug MacDonald resigned back in April, I wrote that the lack of focus on the ferry system “suggests a fundamental myopia at WSDOT. The ferry system is essentially a very large mass transit system, and the fact that the road-centric WSDOT sees it almost as an annoyance is troubling.”

As I acknolwedged at the time, there wasn’t much evidence to back up that assertion, but it seems to grow more and more correct as this saga unfolds. The ferry system appears to operate in its own little black box, off the radar of both WSDOT and the legislature, who are both trying to claim ignorance and blame one another for the lack of attention, as the News-Tribune reports in a whopper of an article on the state of things. Money quote:

State lawmakers approved the Steel Electrics’ retirement in 2001 and provided money for replacements two years later. But ferry officials opted to build boats too large to work as replacements. They wanted vessels that could serve routes anywhere in the ferry system. To make that work, however, they needed to replace narrow, shallow Keystone Harbor, a place where only the Steel Electrics could operate safely.

The state spent six years and $5.5 million studying a new Keystone terminal before abandoning the idea this spring. They blamed community opposition.

The new terminal was estimated to cost $1 billion over 30 years. It would have served about 3 percent of ferry system passengers.

While the authors are trying to make the point that it’s silly to spend so much money on a ferry terminal that serves so few people, surely there would be some big advantages to standardizing on a single ship design that could be used at all terminals. But, unfortunately, the cash-strapped system, still reeling from budget cuts due to I-695, can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The State clearly had to make drastic changes after the 1999 initiative decimated ferry funding, and, as one sailor in The Hunt for Red October says to his new trainee, “a boat this big doesn’t exactly stop on a dime.”

Read the whole piece to get a sense of just how hard it is to change direction, and give credit to new WSDOT chief Paula Hammond for trying to make it happen.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The northern terminus for the University Link, the station at Husky Stadium is nearing design completion. I saw some of the renderings at the UW open house on Wednesday, but I didn’t stay for the full talk.

The stadium will be mostly underground, as riders will descend 100 feet via several escalators to the station platform. Though there will be a large pedestrian bridge connecting the campus with the entrance near Husky Stadium, to a driver heading down Montlake Blvd. it will be almost invisible.

However, between 2008 and 2014 (or thereabouts), there will be a giant pit in the Husky Stadium parking lot as the station is excavated and built. It will not be a pretty sight. Sound Transit and its contractors are going to do all they can to minimize the mess, but there’s only so much you can do with giant hole in the ground.

On the plus side, ST will use two tunnel boring machines to dig the Northbound and Southbound tunnels between UW and Capitol Hill (the Beacon Hill tunnels were bored one at a time using a single TBM). This will speed up the process considerably.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Theodore Lane and Bill Mundy take to the Times’ op-ed page to argue in favor of routing the East Link via a new 520 bridge, rather than over the I-90 bridge. It’s an interesting thought experiment. After all, one could build the new bridge with light rail in mind, rather than retrofitting it and scraping off concrete to get the weight down, which is the current plan, I believe, for the I-90 alignment. They further argue that the real employment growth is along the 520 corridor, from UW to Redmond.

But that’s about where the interestingness ends and reality kicks in. The idea that you could save money by to Overlake directly loses weight when you consider how many fewer people you’d serve by going that route. Lane and Mundy try to account for this by advocating a “Bellevue spur.” But once you’ve built a two or three-mile spur into downtown Bellevue, you’ve removed much of the cost savings that was the basis for the route in the first place. Further, such a spur would abandon Seattle’s Central District and Mercer Island completely. Not so for the I-90 alignment.

It should be said that Ron Sims, in his now infamous op-ed, also pooh-poohed the I-90 alignment as “slow and cumbersome.” But Sims was arguing against Eastside rail altogether. And it’s hard to see how a grade-separated light rail would be any slower or more cumbersome than the expanded bus service he was advocating as an alternative.

Bottom line: if we’re going to do light rail across the lake, I-90 is still the best bet.