At noon today, at the South Lake Union Discovery Center, Puget Sound Bike Share will hold a press event to formally announce their choice of operating partner for the Seattle-area bike share, whose roll-out is expected to begin next year. Two other local transportation agency heads will be on-hand, including Peter Hahn from SDOT, and Metro’s Kevin Desmond. From the PR:

Puget Sound Bike Share, a nonprofit partnership of public and private organizations, announced today that it has selected Portland-based Alta Bicycle Share as its operator/vendor. Alta will work with PSBS to plan, launch and sustain a regional bike share network beginning with approximately 500 bikes and 50 stations in Seattle and eventually expanding into other areas of the Puget Sound region. One of the most experienced bike share companies in North America, Alta is the vendor/operator behind the highly successful Capital Bike Share in Washington D.C. and Boston’s Hubway. In the coming months, Alta will launch Citibike in New York City, the largest bike share network in the nation, as well as systems in Chicago, Vancouver, B.C., Portland and San Francisco.

The selection of Alta isn’t a great surprise to those of us who’ve watched the bikeshare movement expand in this country. The US market is dominated by two players: Alta and B-Cycle, and most larger or coastal cities seem to end up choosing Alta. The difference to users is primarily in the details of the bikes and docking stations: Alta’s equipment is designed by Bixi of Montreal, whose eponymous original system has served that city since 2009, while B-Cycle is partnership of bike manufacturer Trek with other companies, most well known for the successful Denver B-Cycle program. Both systems work well, although (completely anecdotally) most people I know who’ve ridden both found Bixi slightly more polished.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of talking to Holly Houser, executive director of PSBS, and I relayed some of your questions from yesterday. After the jump, a summary of our conversation. Continue reading “Puget Sound Bike Share Partners with Alta Planning”

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[Note: Moved up due to the all time-sensitive stuff this morning.]

On Wednesday April 10th Metro met with planners and staff from the cities of King County to go over progress on the Strategic Plan Update and to better explain the recently released 2012 Service Guidelines Report and its implications.  Considering the 17% cut illustration Metro released with the Service Guidelines Report, that part of the agenda understandably dominated the meeting.  Metro also announced that starting this fall the publication of its Service Guidelines will move forward half a year.  Spring data will be released the following fall.

The majority of the meeting was spent on how to read the Service Guidelines Report.  It’s important to note that the route tables in the report look at two separate but related sets of factors:

Corridor Analysis: 1. Productivity  2. Social Equity  3. Geographic Value  4. Ridership  5. Peak Route Evaluation;

and

Route Performance Analysis  1. Rides/Platform Hour  2. Passenger Miles/Platform Miles  3. Overcrowding  4. On-time Performance

More after the jump.

Continue reading “Context of the 2012 Metro Service Guidelines Report”

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As we reported two weeks ago, the principal stated reason for the Seattle Council’s rejection of 240′ heights right along Lake Union were the shadows they would cast on Lake Union Park.

The images above are from Via Architecture director Matt Roewe’s presentation to the City Council prior to the vote. There are lots of interesting renderings in this presentation of various visual impacts of these buildings, but you can see the estimated shadows of 240′ towers throughout the year, and judge for yourself if this was worth forgoing more residents in the city, and more revenue through both developer height bonuses and additional economic activity.

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I suspect most readers know what bike share is by now, but if you don’t, go read the wiki page or take a gander at the websites for Denver B-Cycle or Capital Bikeshare. Tomorrow, Puget Sound Bike Share is holding a press event to announce the selection of an operator for the system they plan to roll out in Seattle starting next year, and they’ve kindly offered to answer my questions today.

So, what questions do you have for Puget Sound Bike Share? Keep in mind that there’s no point asking low-level or operational questions, like the location of specific bikeshare stations, as those things will not have been decided yet.

I need the questions by 1 PM.

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Today’s Times has a helpful reminder ($) that the fate of the Downtown Bellevue Link station will likely be decided this week. Bellevue’s Council will decide on its favored alternative tomorrow (Monday), which influences the Sound Transit Board’s decision on Thursday.

The process has placed a lot of weight on short-term construction impacts and noise issues to a few homes along the line, and little to the impact on thousands of future riders, every day, over the decades (centuries?) that may find that transit doesn’t work well for them due to a station design that doesn’t care about effective transfers and moves the station away from most of the activity centers in Bellevue.

Now is the time, especially if you’re a Bellevue resident, to let your Council know that the latter set of issues is the important one – particularly when the savings will be no more than $33m,or just over 1% of the cost of an East Link project whose primary purpose is to serve Downtown Bellevue. Do it today.

If you don’t live in Bellevue but have a stake in what’s going on there, your best bet is to contact the Sound Transit board members that happen to represent you. Everyone in King County votes for Dow Constantine, and if you’re in Seattle, Mike McGinn, Richard Conlin, and perhaps Joe McDermott or Larry Phillips represent you as well.

Commenting below on this is all well and good, but nothing works like constituent mail or phone calls. Even if you think that East Link is not the best use of resources out there, it’s in almost everyone’s interest that the line be as effective in moving people as possible.

Go write that email, then come back and read some additional thoughts after the jump.

Continue reading “ACTION ALERT: Downtown Bellevue”

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In the time since my post on Tuesday – where I asked how Olympia decided which projects to fund – I believe I have come to understand WSDOT’s funding guidelines:

This is an open thread.

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Sometime last week, Seattle chalked up another tiny victory in the endless war against slow, unreliable transit. Yesterday evening, I noticed that SDOT had finally replaced the unnecessary crossbucks for the long abandoned and disconnected Bardahl industrial spur on 14th Ave NW at Leary. No longer will Route 40 drivers risk severe punishment if they fail to stop and look for a train that will never appear, sometimes missing the light as they do. I’m told that railroad bureaucracy is the worst kind of bureaucracy, so to the staff who worked to made this happen — thank you very much.

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In the blogosphere we’re sometimes accused of hyperbole but this is not one of those cases. Many of the same people who turned out to try to kill Capitol Hill TOD and were outvoted by a margin of 2:1 because of broad and unusually representative community turnout at the TOD meeting, turned out unchecked to yesterday’s midday Apodment brownbag.

You can watch the full video here. Key excerpts of Erica Barnett’s coverage of the meeting are below:

The city council’s transportation committee just held a group therapy session for opponents of micro-housing, or “aPodments,” who showed up in overwhelming numbers, rhetorical pitchforks in hand, to a “brown bag” discussion this afternoon to express their opposition to the affordable developments, which consist of small units arranged around shared kitchens. (We toured Capitol Hill’s Alturra aPodments last month.)

…

The battle lines on the council itself were clear in today’s meeting, where council transportation chair Tom Rasmussen—the council’s resident microhousing skeptic—spent much of the time before public comment asking representatives from the city’s Department of Planning and Development and Office of Housing rhetorical questions that had the effect of making aPodments look bad.

For instance: Rasmussen, who is almost certainly well-versed in the design guidelines that govern aPodments, asked DPD’s Mike Podowski whether an aPodment with 56 bedrooms would be subject to design review. Podowski responded that in most cases, it would not, but that of 48 microhousing developments the city has approved, “about half a dozen did go through design review.”

…

Rasmussen likened the new micro-apartment buildings to the single-room occupancy hotels of the 1970s, two of which burned down, killing dozens of residents. “Is our code up to date” to handle micro-apartments?, Rasmussen asked.

Podowski noted that the fire code has been updated since the 1970s (largely in response to the SRO fires), that the buildings have all the required sprinklers, and that the fire marshall has signed off on the floor plans. Incidentally. by Rasmussen’s logic, the city should ban all dorms and hotels.

…

And one woman testified that aPodments would quickly be overrun by mold, “meth addicts,” “wild parties,” people with “mental illness,” and men who will terrorize “our daughters.” (Then, in a classic case of concern trolling, she worried that microhousing residents wouldn’t be able to cook decent food, because they’d have filthy shared kitchens and in-unit microwaves that wouldn’t “even be big enough for a Hungry Man dinner.”)

Full coverage here.

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by B NOURISH

We’ve written before about SDOT’s long-running efforts to improve transit speed and reliability, and the rider experience, at heavily-used stops on key corridors, by constructing sidewalk extensions (or transit islands) to improve bus speed and reliability, reconstructing the sidewalks at and around the stops to improve pavement quality and accessibility, and installing or upgrading shelters. For maximum efficiency and effect, these small projects have often been combined with Metro stop consolidations (e.g. Market, Rainier) or SDOT repaving projects (e.g. Dexter, 85th, Northgate).

Soon, riders will reap further rewards from this low-profile but important work: 25 new real-time arrival signs on the Jackson/Rainier and Market/45th corridors. SDOT is currently working on the 13 signs on Jackson/Rainier, and will install the Market/45th signs as funding permits.

The stop locations slated for real-time signs are as follows:

• On Jackson, serving Routes 7, 14 and 36, eastbound at 12th and Maynard.
• On Rainier, serving Routes 7 and others, at the following cross-streets, northbound only except where noted: Walker (also southbound), Forest (also southbound; transfer point for Mount Baker Station), Walden, Andover, Genessee, Orcas, Graham, Rose, Henderson.
• On Market/45th, serving Route 44 and others at the following cross-streets, in both directions except where noted: Ballard Ave, 15th Ave NW, Phinney Ave (eastbound only), Roosevelt/11th Ave, University Ave.
• On 15th Ave NE in the U-District, at all stops in both directions between Pacific and 45th.

To give a sense of what these things (and public works generally) cost, from the numbers SDOT gave me, a three-line realtime sign and a pole to mount it on costs just over $6,500 — not including installation or setup. These signs require a fiber drop to be in place to deliver data, so their installation must almost always be preceded by a complete rebuild of the stop. A stop reconstruction, including a fiber drop but minus the cost of poles, shelter and furniture, is roughly $100,000 (if it’s not included in a larger paving project, in which case it’s effectively free).

More after the jump. Continue reading “SDOT Getting Crazy with the RTIS”

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