This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

When I saw the headline for Knute Berger’s piece in Crosscut on the Las Vegas Monorail and what it tells us about our own fated elevated system, I was afraid he’d uncovered some serious reliability or other substantive issues with the Vegas line that would serve as a cautionary tale for would-be monorail resurrectionists like myself.

Fortunately, the article contains no such warnings. Instead, Berger focuses on the low ridership of the Vegas line and its out-of-the way location. Neither of those would have been an issue with the Seattle line, which would have been a commuter transportation system along a well-trafficked corridor, not a tourist-trap overpriced joyride like the Las Vegas line. Plus, Seattle’s pedestrian friendly, unlike the Strip, where sidewalks disappear into casinos with little or no warning or simply stop.

Berger does support the idea of extending the line all the way to the airport, which I heartily agree with. Waiting for a cab at McCarran Airport is a daunting task. The circuitous four-mile ride from the airport via taxi reeks of a powerful taxi driver lobby. As a bonus, having a monorail connection directly from the Airport to the Strip would make Vegas seem even more like a Lunar resort colony than it already does.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Richard Morrill has an article in Crosscut on density:

Studies of the costs of infrastructure and public services show only slight variation with density, with moderately higher costs at very low densities (under 1,500 people per square mile) and at very high densities (over 100,000 per square mile). Lower utilization drives up costs at the low density end, while high costs of construction and maintenance affect highly dense areas. The most effective densities are in the middle range, 5,000 to 15,000 people per square mile, which happens to be where probably more than 90 percent of urban dwellers live.

Compare this with our previous post on density, in which an urban planning firm argued that 50 residents/acre is optimal, at least with respect to per capita energy use. 50 residents/acre translates to about 32,000/sq. mile, which is double the high-end of Morrill’s numbers. Per capita energy use is not the same as “costs of infrastructure and public services,” so it’s not surprising that the numbers should be different.

The thrust of the article is about housing prices, which Morrill says may be inflated due to urban growth restrictions. His proposed alternatives are unclear, though. He wants to get rid of urban growth boundaries in favor of higher density subdivisions, but doesn’t provide any links to the studies, so I can’t really comment one way or another.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Cascadia Prospectus reports that there’s a new study underway to change the way real-time bus info is captured. The current system involves having the bus pas a series of mileposts, which doesn’t work too well in crowded areas or when the bus has to divert its route due to construction or snow. The new method would involve GPS and/or Wi-Fi, which “would vastly improve the tracking in the urban area.”

Another part of the study would involve counting passengers. Perhaps the algorithm somehow uses the number of boardings to determine how many stops the bus will have to make, and uses that to calculate the arrival time.

This makes it clear just how tricky real-time bus information actually is to implement. With a train, it’s relatively straightforward: trains don’t get stuck in traffic and make regular, predictable stops. But even the most sophisticated GPS bus system can only tell where the bus is right now and then make a guess about how long it will take to close the distance between the bus’s current location and yours.

In most urban areas, though, that’s probably enough if you’re a regular commuter. If the system can tell me that the bus is still a half-mile away, I can make a reasonable guess about when it will get to my stop. Also, if I have the option of taking the local or waiting for the express, all I need to know is how far behind the express is relative to the local. Exact times don’t really matter.

CP also points to this 2003 P-I article on the Mybus pilot program in North Seattle, which goes deeper into the local v. express dilemma.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The Times is reporting that assaults, both passenger-on-passenger, and passenger-on-driver, all out of proportion to the increase in ridership, which is also at an all-time high. The article offers a smorgasbord of possible answers, from increased incident reporting to more crowding.

Speaking from personal experience, though I’ve never, ever come close to assaulting anyone, I myself get a lot more edgy on a bus than I do on a train. The bus tends to be a more stressful experience. On the bus, I’m still stuck in traffic. Plus, the lurching as it starts and stops is more likely to make me sick.

But also there’s something more intimate in a bus, and not in a good way. Subways and trains are more anonymous. On a bus you can see the driver. You can second-guess his decision to wait to pick up a passenger, etc. Everything in a train is calmer and more regular. There are rarely unexpected stops, the conductor is anonymous and distant. Everything seems out of your control, so it’s harder to get angry about it.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Discussing a potential Boeing Field site for the Sonics arena, David Brewster notes:

Sound Transit’s new line passes right by, and there is a transit station planned (though currently deferred) just south of the Boeing Access Road, right by I-5, including a 350-car park-and-ride lot. The Sounder commuter rail line also passes right by, and the Sound Transit station plan is to enable transfers between light rail and commuter rail on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks. Throw in the proximity of Highway 99 just to the west and you have about as ideal a situation for getting people to and from the site as you could imagine.

The light rail stop we know about, but this is the first I’ve heard mention of the Sounder making a stop there. No Boeing Field-area stops are proposed in ST2. Still, I’m sure Brewster has better sources than I do, so chalk this up as an interesting new development.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Daimajin does a good job of dispensing with the Op-Ed in yesterday’s Seattle Times by George Kargianis and Phil Talmadge on the “hidden costs” of light rail, so I won’t duplicate efforts.

However, the reason the piece was truly infuriating — to me, anyway — is that it claims that there are hidden costs of light rail (which are speculative at best), while ignoring the hidden costs of highways, which are well-documented but little-understood.

Talmadge and Kargianis repeat the oft-told canard that transit funding is is disproportionate to the number of riders:

Transit ridership in Central Puget Sound amounts to less than 3 percent of the total daily travel. Yet, the Puget Sound Regional Council’s Metropolitan Transportation Plan for 2030 allocates half of total transportation expenditures to transit and hopes that transit’s market share will increase to 4.5 percent of daily travel. Meanwhile, our roadway system, with the other half of funding, would serve the other 95 percent of travel. The disparity between ridership being served and proposed dollars should be apparent.

But this fails to take into account two things. First, transit takes millions of cars off the highways, which frees up the road for people who do drive. This saves gas and increases productivity for the millions of people who’ve never seen the inside of a Metro bus.

Second, and more importantly, we’re not comparing apples to apples here. Sound Transit is providing the whole enchilada: the rails, the trains, the buses, the drivers, the repair guys, the fuel. Everything. All you need to do is buy a (very cheap) ticket. The road money just gives us concrete and asphalt. What we don’t see in the RTID are things like:

• the cost of buying a car
• hiring a mechanic to maintain it
• car insurance
• fuel
• parking

And that’s just off the top of my head. But these are real costs of highways, borne by all of us, but rarely recognized. Sometime soon I’ll try, to the best of my ability, to calculate this. But when it’s all said an done, I’m quite sure that we’ll find that transit is quite a bit more cost competitive than Talmadge and Kargianis claim.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Metro is ordering a whole slew of new hybrid buses to help deliver the Transit Now service improvements.

You’ll recall the first batch of hybrids was rolled out in 2004. However, the P-I reported in December of that year that those buses failed to show significant fuel savings. They were, however, more reliable and helped to lower maintenance costs.

Still, Metro is a little more cautious in touting the energy savings this time around:

Metro currently owns 214 articulated hybrid buses, the largest such fleet in the nation. A National Renewable Energy Lab study found articulated hybrids provide a 30 percent reduction in greenhouse gases and are 40 percent more reliable than diesel fueled articulated buses.

Notice there’s no direct mention of fuel savings. The reduction in greenhouse gases could simply be that the new buses use a cleaner diesel blend than the older ones.