Sound Transit just launched an “online rider panel” to get user-level perspectives on their service development plans. The forum is called SoundWaves and you can sign up online. It sounds like a more cost-efficient way to gather public comment.

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This week has been a miserable one for trains in the Seattle area.  After two Monday mudslides, one near Nisqually and one near Everett, on Tuesday not a single Amtrak train arrived or departed King Street Station. Another mudslide yesterday has put North Sounder and Amtrak off until at least Friday. Mudslide prevention projects are still on the way thanks to stimulus dollars, but at this point these efforts seem meager compared to the enormity of the problem. At least 30 mudslides have occurred just since Thanksgiving.

From YouTube user John Hill, here’s up close video of Monday afternoon’s mudslide and 7-car derailment just south of Everett. The slide begins at the 1’00” mark. The 48-hour passenger moratorium may be frustrating — and moving to a case-by-case assessment would be superior to an arbitrary time period —  but let’s not forget that mudslides are serious business. Video like this shows just how dangerous they can be.

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• Sound Transit narrows down potential Link rail yards to three candidates: two in Bellevue, one in Lynnwood.
• Mike Lindblom on bus bulbs.
• Pierce Transit draconian cuts coming as early as September 2013.
• Issaquah looking at major upzones, though doubts persist.
• Greyhound Bus Terminal moving to Stadium Station, catching grief over obstructing artwork. Mayor McGinn reportedly taking the side of transportation, so good for him.
• New Edmonds Station parking spaces not all that full, but it’s super early in a holiday- and mudslide-filled month.
• Report on the Aloha streetcar extension. Source material is online as well.
• 520 Bridge will be six months late.
• Train vs. pedestrian on MLK.
• Supreme Court chips away at gas tax restrictions some more.
• King County sets up an advisory council to manage the BNSF Eastside Rail corridor.
• For restaurants and bars, walk/bike/riding patrons spend more than drivers.
• Politico gives the rundown on the transportation agenda  in the 113th Congress.
• Peer-to-peer bikesharing?

This is an open thread. See you at the meetup tonight!

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This afternoon we deleted a number of comments in a way that isn’t compliant with the way we usually moderate comments. We’re sorry about that and we’re tightening up our moderation procedures.

There are better ways to keep conversation focused on the topic at hand, and we’ll do better to use them.

This is as good a time as any to link to our comment policy. It’s good to check on it periodically if you comment here.

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Tomorrow, we get a big win. Sound Transit doesn’t want to see Issaquah, Redmond, or Everett left behind by Seattle going it alone, so they’re responding to the threat of our ballot measure by doing a lot of our work for us! Their board is expected to unanimously pass a budget amendment (PDF) to spend $9.76 million in 2013 to get them on track for more. I met with staff, and they explained what this will fund:

First, it will combine a bunch of study work into likely three major contracts for corridor studies. This likely means one from downtown to West Seattle, Burien and Renton; one from Ballard to UW, Kirkland and Redmond combined with options for connecting Issaquah; and finally, one from the currently funded Lynnwood terminus of light rail all the way to Everett.

From each study, different alternatives will be evaluated for cost, ridership, and other factors. Then Sound Transit will use this data, along with extensive public outreach, to identify the best projects to be added by the board to their Long Range Plan. Law requires that the Board choose projects from their long range plan for any ballot measure – so a mixture of these will become the light rail backbone of Sound Transit 3.

With this budget amendment, the board puts the pedal to the metal, keeping their pipeline full for about the next two years, and helps open up the option of a regional vote as early as 2016, rather than 2020 or even later. It’s a big win for transit advocates; grassroots organizing gets results!

To get to a vote, though, there’s much more work to do. Voters have already approved all the revenue that the legislature provided for Sound Transit, so before they can develop Sound Transit 3 and send it to voters, they need the authority to ask. This week’s vote will help us show legislators that we have the support of our local elected officials – we want more transit, and we want it yesterday.

Want to help us get there? Sign up and say you want to help out, or talk to me at tomorrow’s meetup, where we’ll discuss what the board action means and what we can do to get more.

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by ALEX BRONER

After reading Martin’s excellent analysis (and follow-up) on why the restrictions on the use of Gas Tax money don’t really matter, I thought it was worth bringing up another salient fact. Often in discussions regarding the gas tax, people bring up the 18th Amendment to the Washington State Constitution. People summarize this amendment as stating that gas tax money can only be used for “highway purposes” and leave it at that. While the words “highway purposes” are indeed used by the amendment, it’s interesting to look at how it defines highway purposes. Below I quote the 18th amendment as found here.

“SECTION 40 HIGHWAY FUNDS. All fees collected by the State of Washington as license fees for motor vehicles and all excise taxes collected by the State of Washington on the sale, distribution or use of motor vehicle fuel and all other state revenue intended to be used for highway purposes, shall be paid into the state treasury and placed in a special fund to be used exclusively for highway purposes. Such highway purposes shall be construed to include the following:
(a) The necessary operating, engineering and legal expenses connected with the administration of public highways, county roads and city streets;
(b) The construction, reconstruction, maintenance, repair, and betterment of public highways, county roads, bridges and city streets [emphasis added]; including the cost and expense of (1) acquisition of rights-of-way, (2) installing, maintaining and operating traffic signs and signal lights, (3) policing by the state of public highways, (4) operation of movable span bridges, (5) operation of ferries which are a part of any public highway, county road, or city street;

Continue reading “Just Read It: The 18th Amendment”

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WSDOT has uploaded a number of photos of the SR-99 TBM machine onto flickr. However you feel about this tunnel project – I for one, have hated it from the get-go – this is an impressive piece of machinery.

Here are some previous TBM links on STB, including some of TBMs breaking through.

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Right next to a charming story of NIMBYism harnessed in service of the environment, in Friday’s Times there was a more typical tale going on in South Lake Union.

[John Pehrson] said he lives on Mirabella’s third floor and views aren’t an issue for him…

Their concerns, according to Pehrson, are housing diversity, transportation and urban form. The council meeting Thursday focused on urban form, so Pehrson stuck mostly to that topic…

Pehrson argued that 400 feet is out of character for the neighborhood and would dwarf nearby buildings. He called for a 240-foot limit along the north side of Denny Way…

The towers would be surrounded by 65-foot buildings and out of scale, he said. They would also damage the neighborhood’s connection to the lake, he said, and cause “downwind turbulence” for floatplanes taking off and landing on Lake Union.

As always, “out of character” is a nebulous complaint, and if anything a plea for absolute conformity that sounds stifling to me. “Out of scale” at least means something. To which I’d say: the Seattle Space Needle is out of scale with its surroundings. The Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower and Chartres Cathedral and the Everett Boeing Plant and the Burj Khalifa dwarf everything around them.* In other words, I’m not sure why “out of scale” is even a criticism. Now Vulcan’s towers probably won’t become a world heritage site. Perhaps many will find the buildings quite ugly. That would at least register as an actual downside, as opposed to “bigger than everything around it.”

As for the views that no one in the article cops to worrying about, everyone is entitled to their own conception of beauty, but it’s not exactly bizarre in the real estate market to think that tall buildings are views. Manhattan isn’t exactly spilling over with spectacular natural vistas, but one will pay a substantial premium to live in a place that can see its skyline.

I don’t know what it is that the vacant lots that are mostly occupying these parcels are doing for “housing diversity”, nor what Pehrson knows about floatplane turbulence that the FAA doesn’t. But based on the arguments that are fleshed out here, I don’t think I want to find out.

*I’m pretty sure Yglesias made this point before, with similar phrasing. I can’t find the link.

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For our year-end meetup, we’ll be at the Tap House Grill in Downtown Seattle on 6th and Pike starting at 5:30pm on Thursday December 20. The location is all ages and, of course, quite well-served by public transit. There will be a surprise guest and lots to discuss.

If you’re planning on attending, let us know in the comments so we can get a rough headcount.

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This is Part 1 of a series.

Just as we each have a carbon footprint, we each have a land footprint. A three person household in a home on 6,000 sf of land (including half the street in front of their home and half the alley) takes up 2,000 sf each person. As the average land footprint decreases, the square footage each person lives in might even remain the same as one story houses go to two or as two story apartments go to six, but the distance they have to walk to the store is lower. In addition to being more walkable, areas with smaller average land footprints can have better transit, pave over fewer forests and farmland, require less roads, sidewalks, sewer lines, electricity distribution, etc.

Using US Census data, we can see what kind of land footprint distribution an area has. This can tell us the most common living conditions in an area, and allows us to see how far apart people live in that area. This can also be helpful in comparing land footprints of different cities. Simply dividing the land area of a city by the number of people doesn’t work, since city boundaries are different and politically defined.

Below is what I’m naming a residential land footprint curve. The smallest geographical elements the US Census publishes data for is called a “block”. In cities these are often physical blocks bounded by streets, and outside of cities geographical boundaries are generally used. The Census Bureau has divided the US into 8.2 million blocks. All I’ve done is taken data from Seattle’s metropolitan area (the census definition is: King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties) and sorted the number of square foot per person in each block into “bins” of 100, then plotted the number of blocks in each bin. For example, there are 2 blocks in Metropolitan Seattle that have a density of between 0 and 100 square feet per person, 15 blocks between 100 and 200, 29 between 200 and 300, etc.

This curve allows us to easily identify the land footprint characteristics of a metropolitan area. For Seattle we can see that the most common living condition is around 3,800 square foot per person. Below that there’s a fairly linear distribution down to the densest blocks. This is mirrored above 3,800 until we reach around 7,000, where we start seeing a more gentle decrease. Few “blocks” (however they’re defined in rural areas) have 40,000 or more square foot per person inside our metropolitan area, but they do exist (I’ve truncated the chart to keep it readable).

In the chart below I’ve added pictures of actual blocks, to help visualize what these land footprints look like. The picture on the bottom left is a block on Capitol Hill, one of the 81 blocks with a density between 400 and 500 sf per person. At the top of the curve is a block in Magnolia, one of the 654 blocks with a density between 3,700 and 3,800 sf per person. On the right is an area in Renton, one of 47 blocks that have between 14,900 and 15,000 sf per person.

In my next post in this series I’ll compare Seattle’s land footprint curve to curves from other cities.

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