[UPDATE: We’re all fixed. Thanks to John for his work on a holiday.]

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Last month weekday, Saturday, and Sunday ridership were 23,720 / 18,736 / 14,196, respectively. That’s about even with October and a bit off the summer peaks. Somewhat more significantly, it’s up about 8% from the same point in 2010.

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In the spirit of the holidays, I think it’s perfectly appropriate to think about the sentimental value transit often offers us.  To do this, a little digging is required, exercising our past memories to elicit those experiences we often had aboard, or sometimes off-board, transit.  While I’m not that old and didn’t have the fortune of developing a nostalgia for things like the Interurban and the early streetcar trolleys, many of you, our readers, have had such experiences far and wide.

Many of my nostalgic memories around transit occurred in the early to mid-90s– the DSTT was new, Metro ridership was on the rise, the RTA was preparing to go to the ballot, and many questions were being asked about the future of rapid transit for the Puget Sound region.  But what I remember most were the daytime trips my grandmother would take me on from her apartment in the International District to Seattle Center: a ride on a dual-mode Breda trolley through the bus tunnel, and a transfer to the Monorail at Westlake, with a chocolate ice cream cone on the 4th floor food court to boot.

Over time, it’s been the little things that have stuck out at me as I ponder my old perceptions (and misconceptions) of transit.  Like many of you, I was particularly fond of being the one to pull the stop request cord; to hear a real ‘ding’ aboard a bus today is considered a novelty.  And since I never continued beyond Westlake in the DSTT, I somehow wound up with the belief that the tunnel continued onto Vancouver B.C. with a station underneath the Seattle Center House.

I blinded myself with some other self-concocted myths over the years– when I was in middle school and didn’t care particularly for transit, I thought that Sound Transit bus drivers were far meaner than Metro drivers, only to discover a number of years later that they were all the same.  And for the longest time, I would never board a Seattle-bound commuter bus at Eastgate because the long queue gave me the impression that riders had to have a special pass or eligibility to board.

What are your special memories of transit?  Did you ever fabricate naive falsehoods that turned out to be wrong?

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We’re having an informal get-together at 5pm till whenever on Wednesday, December 28th at the Elysian Fields, 542 1st Avenue South. No speakers, but word is a platoon of Sound Transit staff will drop by after work. I’m told it’s a single tab, so if you can bring cash that’s a plus.

Sorry, 21 and over only.

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In one of the first sentences in the Governor’s policy brief on transportation revenue is the primary reason Olympia stays in a perpetual funding crisis:

Because no maintenance or preservation funds were provided for new lane miles created through these projects, deterioration will set in.

For every administration and for every legislator, the easiest way to pass a package that looks good to their constituents is to partially fund as many new projects as possible, and make them appear as cheap as possible. For a given dollar, it’s more politically viable to spend it on a new project – and be able to say to constituents that their needs are being met – than to spend it just to maintain an old project.

This is simply a reality of psychology, not meant to be an indictment of anyone, but it’s a real problem for legislators who only have so much power or political capital. King Street Station is a great example. The Amtrak Cascades station with the most use in the state is in disrepair, partially restored, and partially funded, after years of work. In the meantime, a barely used Stanwood station has been constructed from scratch – in the district of the chair of Senate Transportation.

Today, many of our highways are in the same boat. In 2003 and 2005, Olympia passed gas tax increases that finished some projects, but largely started new ones. A list of “Unfinished mega projects” in the brief speaks to these partial packages – full of new highway lanes, they were crafted to win public support through big-splash projects on I-405, I-90 and SR-99, largely ignoring the state’s maintenance needs – projects that aren’t exciting to voters.

Now, at the top of the priority list is a sudden need to do maintenance. We have roads and bridges crumbling! Only at the end of a road’s life, when it can be portrayed as a danger, can public opinion turn to new revenue to maintain it. But right below is a list of new highway expansions, with words like “economic development improvements”, “improved mobility” and “congestion relief”. But we know new lanes don’t improve congestion. More roads equal more traffic.

So the state’s task force has proposed “guiding principles” for a package. The middle of the three options (clearly the target, as it’s the only one anyone’s talked about), is $21 billion. Of that, after all that talk about how our maintenance needs are going through the roof, maintenance adds up to less than $6 billion – with $11 billion in “improvements in economic corridors”, also known as wider highways. $2 billion – less than a tenth! – is offered for transit, but given the state’s history of ‘transit funding’, that sounds a lot like vanpools.

Our economic centers don’t have room for wider highways. The task force is trying to do two things – frame low density, low productivity places as “economic corridors” (and say they’d be more productive with bigger highways!), and totally ignore the strong voter message they received when we shot down Roads and Transit in 2007.

If the state wants a transportation package to pass, they’ll have to work with us, not propose doing more of the same. We’re in a maintenance funding hole because of this kind of planning, and we need to get out.

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• Mudslides and passenger rail.
• Regional construction trends moving decisively in favor of multifamily housing.
• Not much happened to transportation in the Olympia special session.
• I think this is the first documented example of someone robbed on a Link train.
• New Seattle City Council committee appointments.
• Water Taxi ridership shooting up.
• Kitsap Transit has a new executive director.
• A breakdown of precincts that supported C-Tran’s (Clark County) successful ballot measure to preserve service.
• The gas tax is pathetically low.
• There’s a save-the-27 petition circulating. (I personally have no opinion.)
• Yet another SkyTrain line starts construction next month.
• TriMet looks at budget-cutting options.
• Density is good.
• Empirical evidence for induced demand from highway construction.
• What bus driver behaviors are unacceptable?
• Chicago is the next attempt to do a decent job of BRT. Good luck to them.

This is an open thread.

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Every now and then, a big story revolving around transit comes up and captures the special attention of the local news media, either good or bad.  Whether it was Prop. 1, King County’s $20 car-tab fee, Metro’s ad fiasco, or last year’s bus driver assault, big issues always manage to find their way to the front page, with some attention-grabbing headline to boot. Media portrayal of  transit or any other hot-button topic is never completely unbiased– there’s always a tinge of opinionated framing at the discretion of the author or headline writer.

So it’s not terribly surprising when headline writers cook up a juicy title when they can, especially if it means eliciting strong reader reaction.  Take this KING 5 headline, for example: Neighbors survey Light Rail neighborhood for robbery risk – a great example of correlation conflated with causation.  While this strategy– making some connection with recent notable cases of crime occurring around a relatively new light rail line– might help sell views, it only reflects a mark of poor journalism.

More after the jump.

Continue reading “Crime on Transit and the Media Myth”

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Last week the Sound Transit board took action on a bunch of major items:

• Pierce County Executive Pat McCarthy replaced Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon as ST Board Chair.
• The board approved the 2012 ST Budget: $733m for capital, $199m for operations.
• As expected, ST settled on an I-5 alignment beyond Northgate.
• $2m for Ballard-Downtown planning in 2012 passed. But…

In related news to the last point, I think it’s now fairly clear that the Seattle City Council doesn’t think rail to Ballard is a very urgent priority. Or, they’d rather stymie the Mayor than have a good policy outcome. Either way, shame on them.

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In my last post on North Link, discussing the 30% open house, I alluded to the possibility that Sound Transit might construct a parking garage at Northgate, to offset the loss of park and ride capacity during and after construction of the Northgate Station and associated guideway. The Northgate P&R (which is actually a collection of different lots owned or leased by different agencies) has a total of a about 1500 spaces, and is currently close to maximum capacity. During the construction process, ST will displace about 450 spaces, and upon completion of the project, about 120 spaces will be gone permanently.

Last week, Seattle DPD hosted a community open house to present and discuss various urban design concepts for Northgate. Also present were Metro representatives, soliciting input on preferred parking mitigation strategies during construction, including (among other ideas) improved connecting service and parking shuttles to satellite lots. Before that meeting, Metro had conducted a very useful survey of weekday Northgate P&R users, interviewing a sample of riders to find their destination, and looking up home address records of a sample of license places, to find those drivers were coming from. The map above summarizes these results, with census tracts color-coded and labeled by number of origin drivers.

This map suggests a raft of excellent parking alternatives, based on our bus network. The areas of highest P&R demand are exactly those served by the 5, whose frequent service alignment should be extended to Shoreline as part of the Fall 2012 restructure; the 358, for which RapidRide E will bring improved policing (and thus improved passenger behavior — a serious problem on this route) as well as speed, frequency and reliability improvements in 2013; the 316, a commuter express with a limited span of service; the 345/346, local routes running from Shoreline into Northgate; and the local-service segment of the 41 to Lake City. ST could, at a relatively low cost, mitigate transient parking issues and create lasting value for transit by purchasing operating and capital improvements for those services.

Continue reading “More on Northgate Parking”

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