When ST first announced that they would run one-car trains on some evenings and weekends to save money, it was said that this would be done based on expected demand due to special events.

Indeed, this kind of thing, if done right, can be very low-impact. But then there’s how this is actually being implemented. On a day with a Mariners game, Sounders game, and, uh, RapidRide opening, we got lots of anecdotal reports that trains were too full. Descriptions like “at capacity” and “full” are often thrown around way before trains are actually full, but people were left behind by one-car trains.

We’re at capacity NB at Beacon Hill. @soundtransit one-car trains are forcing people to wait for the next one. – Sherwin’s tweet

On a NB Link train, standing room only already at Tukwila. One car trains are not enough! – Sherwin’s tweet

Even with no major sports events… the car was at crush capacity. – PubliCola, accompanied by a photo nowhere near crush capacity

A lot of people had to stand on the 1-car trains, and some really didn’t have space for more to get on, even after the people who resist moving to the back moved to the back. (Well, more could have gotten on, but it would have been down to violating our American norms of personal space.)… I saw dozens wait for a next train. – Brent

It was bad. For one train, no one was able to board at Beacon Hill. The next train left half the people still standing, but we crushed in. Both were more crowded than the publicola photo. – psf

Not a good start.

By the end of the Sounders game, ST had started mixing in some 2-car trains, and indeed on Sunday it seemed that 2 cars were once again the norm.

ST did not return my questions over the weekend.

As a side note, in the past we’ve had really pointless comment wars over whether “capacity” should mean “how many people can fit in a car” or “the planning factor Sound Transit should use for how many people fit in a car.” The answer ultimately depends on what you’re trying to argue. Aside from that, the source for the former definition is this data sheet, which says 200. People use the word “full” to mean a lot of different things, but if a car was really leaving people behind I hope someone was out there counting, because that’s a practical limit that would be interesting to know.

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From photo of the week:

Sound Transit this week tested the use of goats as an efficient and environmentally sustainable approach to clearing vegetation near its rail lines. Rent-a-Ruminant, a woman-owned business from Vashon Island, provided 120 goats, a herder, and herding dog to clear blackberry bushes and other shrubs from a strip of Sound Transit property along Lakeview Avenue in Lakewood.

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Today marks the first day of service for RapidRide’s A Line.  Fares are free for this weekend until Monday when revenue service begins.  A small contingent of STB bloggers and readers were able to make it out this morning for a short roundtrip ride on the new line.  Though there were only roughly 10-15 of us, our coach had already reached seated capacity on its way out of SeaTac, indicating a fairly smooth transition for 174 riders.  Nonetheless, there were still a few passengers who tried to request old 174 stops that have been eliminated by the service change.

Our southbound trip took roughly 47 minutes, considerably longer than the 37 minute long return trip northbound.  A number of RapidRide’s special features have not yet been fully activated, particularly the TSP (transit signal priority).  Several stations are also not finished, with some lacking ORCA readers, maps, and the real-time variable signs.  Inaugural day was not free from operational kinks as well, as there were some instances of bunching and late departures this morning.

One very refreshing feature, however, is RapidRide’s automated stop announcements, something Metro is planning to install in other coaches with its new GPS system.  Not all stops were announced, however, and those that mysteriously disappeared were manually overridden by the driver.

We’ll be adding opening day media to the Flickr pool soon.  Otherwise, you have until Monday to poach a fare-free ride.

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Recently there’s been an upswing in guest post submissions. We don’t have a very formal process for handling these, but we’ve accepted dozens of pieces over the years and I think they’ve added some useful perspectives to our conversations. Still other contributions have been appropriated as “comment of the week” and awarded their own post.

Anyway, the most painful situation is when someone obviously puts a lot of work into an essay, and for one reason or another, we don’t feel able to use it. To avoid that in the future, we’ve assembled these Guest Post Guidelines to offer tips for writing something that we can use.

Thanks to everyone who cares enough to write.

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Traffic has gone from bad to worse near Joint Base Lewis-McChord.  Over the past five months 14,000 soldiers have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the base is set to expand by 50% more soldiers by 2016 (from 23,000 to 36,000), bringing the total number of soldiers, civilians, and dependents at JBLM to well over 50,000 people.  This Redmond-sized contingent of people mostly reside off-base along a narrowed stretch of I-5 (SR 512 to Nisqually)with no HOV lanes and only skeletal (at best) transit service.  Travel demand has increased markedly and tempers are short, prompting nervous press releases from WSDOT announcing “immediate actions” that amount to little more than signal timing improvements.  Everyone knew this storm was coming, but the scale of the backups seems to have caught base officials as well as WSDOT off-guard.  This may now be the single worst traffic area in Washington State.

Yet soldiers and civilians alike haven’t had many other options, and what is a ‘last mile’ problem elsewhere is a ‘last 5 miles’ problem on base, ringed by mandatory security checks.  In short, transit currently has little chance to compete for mode share. (Tacoma Tomorrow blogger Evan Siroky had an excellent post series earlier this year covering many of these same issues.)  Over the years, Pierce Transit has worked diligently with base officials to design useful routes with limited resources, yet results have been continually disappointing.  Three local routes currently enter the base, #206 (Lakewood-Tillicum-Madigan Hospital), #207 (Madigan Hospital-Ft. Lewis), and #300 (Tacoma Mall-SR512 P&R-McChord Commissary).  While #206 and #300 both exceed 1,000 riders per day and meet PT service standards, PT’s planners tell me that very few of those riders actually enter the base.  The only intra-base route (#207) is PT’s least-ridden route, averaging only 36 boardings daily for an hourly service.

Longer term, a series of infrastructure investments have been planned for some time, and WSDOT recently released a Transportation Alternatives Analysis that proposes spending over $1B on widening and new ramps for I-5.  Transit receives only a cursory mention, and the planners seem to assume that nothing cost-effective can be done to get JBLM to lower its SOV/VMT levels.  Given the dismal fiscal situation government faces at all levels, it is clear that capital-intensive projects will be difficult to fund and complete, however badly they are needed.  Yet the sheer scale of this problem — cultural, structural, fiscal — prohibits thinking small.  What should be done? What should transit advocates push for?  To get the conversation going, my initial suggestions are after the jump…  Continue reading “The Lewis-McChord Conundrum”

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Jeff Welch at the Puget Sound Transit Operators blog has some interesting observations on how ORCA is being used, misused, and purchased. For example:

Technical Realities – Feel Like Bugs

Buses connect to the master database via wireless connection when they are at the base.  There is no ongoing connection to the database.  This means that when a passenger loads their card online before they leave for work – the bus that they are boarding most likely hasn’t received the database update that includes the information that their card now has a new pass or added cash amount.  As a result, Operators have been instructed (via memo anyway) to accept ORCA cards as “flash passes”, and to let the passenger know that it can take 24-48 hours for an added pass or balance to reflect.  The end result is that the passenger gets a free ride (if they pay by e-purse) or are just confused/annoyed by the error, the delay, and the ensuing (public) explanation at the bus door.

This is also becoming a growing new form of fare evasion, as unrepentant fare evaders catch on to the “I just loaded it this morning” meme.   An empty card can be used for unlimited rides – all over the system (except Link and Sounder) with that brief explanation.

There have also been reports from customers (and questions directed at drivers) about issues with autoload, as well as multiple problems with employers purchasing the wrong passes (off-peak vs. peak; one-zone vs. two-zone, etc.) for their employees.

I wonder it it’s time to add something to the ORCA website that puts in very noticeable type on the payment screen that your purchase will not take effect for 48 hours.

According to ST spokesman Geoff Patrick, the ORCA vendor, Vix-ERG, has not yet been granted Full System Acceptance (FSA) due to persistent bugs in some of the equipment. Nevertheless “the ORCA agencies are looking at options to improve the user-friendliness of the website, with the goal of making improvements by the end of the year.”

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• In case you missed it, we’ll be meeting up Saturday morning for the RapidRide A Line opening.
• Seattle gets its first bike box. Slog notes the conspiracy at work.
• McGinn wants street parking to be more reflective of the market price.
• He also wants to fund some bike/ped projects.
• The PI covers one man’s eight year battle to add the Capitol Hill stop to ST’s 545.
• City releases new walking maps.
• Anti-tunnel referendum will come after the contracts are signed, further impeding it legally.
• I-5 ATMS still working out the kinks.
• Scrambling to save the second Vancouver train.
• As Republican midterm gains threaten high-speed rail, Amtrak rolls out a proper HSR plan for the Northeast Corridor.
• Coast Starlight now on Google Transit. (H/T: Alan Whitney)
• New Tacoma Link stop apparently a go.
• More bikes means slower bikes. That would be me clogging up your bike lane.

This is an open thread.

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After recently working on a transit mapping project, a lot of which was inspired by transit maps worldwide, I realized that much of the nomenclature we use for transit in North American cities tends to be either misleading or downright inappropriate.  Though most of the implications are pretty subtle, the terminology we use can reveal a lot about the sadder limitations of our transit system.  Jarrett Walker, author of Human Transit, often rails against a lot of the transit vocabulary we use in North America and even has an entire category dedicated to unhelpful words.

One term I’m not crazy about is ‘transfer station’.  I know Jarrett has a bone to pick with this kind of nomenclature as well, mostly because of its grammatical connotations.  I won’t get into the nitty-gritty like he does, but I will highlight some of the basic implications that our transit literature has on rider behavior.  Instead of using “transfer stations,” many transit agencies outside of the US, like Transport for London (PDF), refer to these kinds of stations as “interchange stations.”  More below the jump.

Continue reading “Misleading Transit Nomenclature”

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[UPDATE: In one of my more egregious posting errors, I failed to properly read the blockquote, which includes the feds, therefore defeating the whole thesis of the post. I suppose it didn’t really matter, because you all just wanted an excuse to argue more about this issue anyway.]

It’s odd to be arguing on behalf of the Canadian Federal Government, and I suppose I’m editorializing about the use of taxes I don’t pay, but I don’t think this factoid makes the point the writer thinks it makes:

The economic benefit to British Columbia in its first year of operation is estimated at $11.8 million…

Is Ottawa so short-sighted that it cannot see the idiocy of putting this service in jeopardy in order to collect $550,000 a year? A recent study by the Border Policy Research Institute of Western Washington University in Bellingham determined that Canada’s federal, provincial and municipal governments collect an extra $1.9 million in sales taxes and hotel room taxes from the additional tourists the second train delivers.

If the study is correct, then funding the border inspection is absolutely a positive-sum enterprise for the public sector. The issue, though, is that the governments that benefit are not the ones that are laying out the cash.

[update: the editorial is right.]

To me, it seems straightforward enough that “provincial and municipal governments” should turn a 300% profit by coughing up the money themselves. That’s not to say the federal government shouldn’t be subsidizing passenger rail more than it is, but in the absence of that subsidy replacing it with a local one should be a no-brainer.

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Update: All clear.

According to Sound Transit:

Due to an accident south of Mount Baker station, passengers sholud board Metro bus Route 97, which will operate between Mount Baker Station and Othello Station. Regular service between Westlake Station & Mount Baker Station & between Othello Station & SeaTac Station.

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