President Obama has listed Eugene-Portland-Seattle-Vancouver (aka Amtrak Cascades) as one of the corridors for his high speed rail plan. That’s great news, and means that Cascades will likely get some of the $8 billion in HSR stimulus money, and maybe some of the $1 billion in the annual high speed rail the feds are going to give out. I’m pretty happy about the choice of lines in general, though I think Dallas-Houston would be a better route than San Antonio-Dallas-Tulsa. Expect more news on this to come, in the mean time the Transport Politic is on top of it.
Matt Yglesias points to a bus rapid transit (BRT) plan for Washington DC, which looks pretty awesome. Ygelsias says he hopes that these one day become streetcars, but I don’t know. While I don’t know DC that well, I’m not so sure that streetcars are necessarily suited to replace BRT in all cases.
Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, a very libertarian economics blog, asks why people like streetcars. I don’t agree with much of what he says, I’ve found streetcars to be at least as if not more comfortable than buses, and I don’t like to “affiliate myself with the past”. The comments are quite good, though.
We’re more than a little bit late on this, but the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog has great coverage of a recent city council meeting that covered moving the opening of the First Hill Streetcar up by up to four years earlier than the planned 2016 opening date. The city says it can build the line for cheaper than expected if built earlier, which may encourage the Sound Transit Board to approve funding. The First Hill Streetcar will be funded by Sound Transit, but constructed and operated by the Seattle Department of Transportation.
The First Hill Streetcar was approved by voted last November in the ST2 plan. Once built, it will connect Capitol Hill, First Hill, and the International District via Broadway and Jackson. It would terminate near the International District Link light rail station, extending the reach of Link into the jobs-heavy First Hill neighborhood and the dense Capitol Hill area.
In an interview with Seattle Transit Blog, the city said that even though ST isn’t planning to fund operating costs before 2016, efficiencies learned from operating the South Lake Union Streetcar could allow ST to pay for the operations earlier than budgeted.
And why do we want a streetcar linking Capitol Hill, First Hill, and the International District? Check out 10 Reasons to Love a Streetcar in the Austin Chronicle.
No, I’m not drunk blogging or April Fool’s day blogging or anything. I have a point! Stick with me.
Many people say the way to solve congestion is to build more roads. I assure you this is not the case, and I can try to illustrate it by comparing roads to p-patches. If you aren’t familiar with them, p-patches are little neighborhood community gardens, where gardeners can rent a plot of land on an annual basis for a small fee and grow crops or flowers or whatever they like. There are dozens of sites spread across the city currently, and the fees for the gardens are fairly low, between $34 and $67 per year for between 100 and 400 square feet of gardening space.
A lot of people want to use P-Patches, but the supply is fairly low. The fee is far below the “market clearing” price for that amount of gardening space: the price would need to be much higher for the number of people willing to pay the fee to be equal to the amount of p-patch places available. Because of this, the wait for p-patches can be several years, especially in dense neighborhoods like Belltown or Capitol Hill. If a private business or individual were running p-patches, the price of a plot of land might be several hundred or even thousand dollars per year (rent for a 400 sq ft apartment is several hundred dollars a month), or there might be strict restrictions on what sort of gardening can be done by whom. A quick glance at the community gardens available in San Francisco shows that private gardens have often short waiting lists but very high fees ($3000 a year), have strict residency requirements (you must live in Alice Griffith Housing Development), or other restrictions. San Francisco’s public gardens generally have extraordinary wait times (2-3 years) or are located far away from population centers (Fort Mason). Basically, if something’s price is much lower than the demand, there are still ways to make you pay, in the case of Seattle’s p-patches you pay with your time.
Roads work much the same way. The SR 520 bridge is free to drive across, but a lot of people would like to drive across it at 8 in the morning. Because the supply of road capacity is lower than the demand for the road capacity, commuters are made to pay with their time to drive across the bridge. Now, you could decide to add more bridge-lanes, much like you’d want to add more P-Patches. But often if you add a new p-patch, new people might decide they want one. There are no patches at all on First Hill; if you put a p-patch there, some people living in that neighborhood would likely decide they want to use it. If you put a new patch next to an existing one in another neighborhood, new people would want to use it, possibly because they think the new waits are shorter or because they are shorter (‘I might not live here in three years, but I will live here next year’) and possibly just because it’s there. This is called “induced demand”. If you built a new bridge across Lake Washington, new people would drive across it in addition to the people driving cross the existing 520 bridge. Partly because wait times seem or are in fact lower, and partly because now you can’t live where you want to or work where you want to (‘I’d never have taken that job at the UW but now there’s an easy way to get there from Juanita so…’). You’d really need a lot of p-patches before wait times went away, maybe several times what is currently available. Similarly you’d need a lot of highway capacity before you’d have no congestion on the bridge, at least several times what is currently there.
There are, of course, obvious differences between p-patches and roads. You need transportation of some sort to get to work and make money. You don’t need p-patches at all, really. Few people move to be near p-patches, but a lot of people might move to be near transportation options. But ultimately, the two are alike in the fact that neither has a price that matches what people are actually willing to pay, and so users are charged with their time. Also, there’s no money to expand either enough to make wait times go away by increasing supply. And so we wait.
Boarding 2nd and Washington in Phoenix, photo by simax105
As you may have heard, a Link train in testing collided with a car today or yesterday (the car was making an illegal turn, of course). The media might treat this as a huge deal – I won’t know, I’m still in Japan – but new light rail lines having accidents with cars isn’t just common, it’s absolutely universal: every single rail system with grade crossings has had an accident with a car at least once. In this, the third post in my series about Phoenix’s Light Rail opening (you can read the first here, and the second here), I discuss the things that went wrong with their opening (like collisions with cars) and how Phoenix has dealt with them. From this we should be able to guess what we can expect to go wrong with Link, and how Sound Transit and Seattle can deal with those. I’m going to divide the problems into three groups: trouble with cars, trouble with people and trouble with the system.
This recent paper from the Brookings Institute’s Elizabeth Kneebone on so-called “Jobs Sprawl” is both interesting and slightly maddening. The “Jobs Sprawl” analysis is an attempt to measure the percentage of jobs in an employment area located near downtown (within three miles of the “center city”, defined arbirtrarily), sort of near downtown (three to ten miles away) and not at all near downtown (ten or more miles away). The paper notes that since the last study, in 2001, more jobs are being located outside of downtowns nationwide.
Seattle ranks as the tenth most “decentralized” major employment center, that is, the major employment with the tenth highest percentage of jobs located ten miles or more from the city center. In 2006, the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area had approximately 1,461,291 jobs, and 19.1% were within three miles of the center of the city, 24.8% were between three and ten miles away, and 56.0% were more than ten miles away. Seattle is also “rapidly decentralizing”, since the number of jobs being created more than ten miles away from the “center city” has grown much faster than the number of jobs within three miles of the heart of the city.
While that’s interesting, I have a serious problem with this analysis in that the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area has more than one downtown. Any job downtown Tacoma or Downtown Bellevue, since both are more than ten miles away from Third and Seneca or whatever is the center of Downtown Seattle, are “decentralized”, which means “job sprawl” according to Kneebone. And similarly any job in the University District is more than miles away from that point and is thus not centralized or decentralized. Having many centers may mean Seattle is “decentralized” – in fact that may be the very definition of “decentralized” – but that’s a pretty crummy definition of “jobs sprawl”. A job in North Bend is sprawled-out, a job in Downtown Tacoma or Downtown Bellevue certainly is not.
The Austin Contrarian has some other problems with the study, including a problem with the three and ten mile ‘polls’ used.
Sometimes we hear about Seattle and King County getting all of the transportation money from the rest of the state. Of course this sort of politics of resentment we might expect from the rest of the state, but is it a fair criticism? No:
By the most comprehensive measure, for every $1 King County residents contribute in taxes they’ll get a buck back through investments by the state, county and cities in the county between 2004-2017.
Pew, that’s a relief! I’m sure Rep. Roach is over it by now.
In most normal, semi-sane democracies, politicians see something popular and trip over themselves to get behind it. “There go my people, I must find out where they are going so I can lead them,” goes the old saying.
Indeed, as one examines recent light rail successes in the American West (Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Denver), a pattern emerges: the state governments in all these cities saw their role as a willing partner to the urban transit agency. They chose to help it, to foster it, not to thwart it at every possible turn.
But as Andrew documents in great detail, this is simply not the case when it comes to our state representatives and Sound Transit. You’d think they would have got the message by now that their constituents love Sound Transit (“North Korea-style margins” is one of the funniest phrases I’ve read in a while) and want more of it. Bizarrely, this has not been the case.
When East Link is finally built out, and the ST2 map is complete, the resulting constellation of connected stations will resemble nothing so much as an extended middle finger, pointed South toward the capitol building that tried endlessly — and failed — to strangle it in the crib.
The Associated Press reports that Amtrak is spending $50 million on projects in the Pacific Northwest. The majority, $35 million, will go to a new maintenance facility and a new storage and employee building near King Street Station. You can see the full list nationwide list, totaling $1.3 billion here at Amtrak’s website.
The bulk of the money nationwide, 57%, is going to the Northeast Corridor Acela line. The most expensive project on the list is a $100 million bridge over the Niantac river in Connecticut. The current bridge is not aging well, and replacing it is the only way Amtrak can maintain its current 100 mph speed there. $40 million is going to a new commuter rail tunnel between New Jersey and New York.
Later this month, the Federal Railroad Administration will release a plan documenting how they plan to spend the $8 billion in high speed rail cash from the stimulus package. A couple preview videos below the fold:
