Today, King 5 did an interesting story regarding how fuel prices are improving ridership on Amtrak Cascades. Check out the crowd getting off Sounder!
On another note.. King Street Station needs to hurry up and get remodeled.. the brief video clips they showed were terrible….
12 commentsAlong with Sound Transit, Metro has rider alerts for their service changes. It’s basically a bunch of shuffling of routes around the new Issaquah Transit Center, shifts of stops for the 5X, 358, 230, 914, and 916.
There’s one more trip each for the 212, 221, and 271, a nice bonus for the Eastgate area.
The 74 local will be renumbered as the 30.
Also, in July they’re raising Off-peak Senior, Disabled and Youth Fares by a quarter. I suppose that’s in line with the recent adult fare increases.
8 commentsThis post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
(inspired by [daimajin]’s post)
I know I’m preaching to the converted here, but I’d like to list another reason for building rail-based transit that has nothing to do with the gasoline that cars burn. It’s the roads that they drive on.
Let’s start with peak oil. Some say we hit it years ago and OPEC has been hiding this fact*, others say we are hitting it now (hence the price spikes), while some say it’s a decade or two away. But nobody says it’s much further than that. When we hit peak oil the price will rise at an exponential rate and never come down.
The road supporters either ignore this fact or tell us that we’ll find an alternative fuel for our cars. Although I mostly disagree (battery power has some potential – the others are dead ends), I won’t debate that here. What I will bring up is the roads themselves.
Roads, at least the top level, are made of asphalt concrete: asphalt mixed with rocks. Asphalt is an oil product. This layer of asphalt concrete breaks down over time and use, and needs to either be patched using more asphalt concrete or regenerated by removing it, grinding it up, and adding more asphalt.
So what happens to our miles and miles of roads when the price of oil goes up? Road maintenance requires a lot of oil. We either spend much more on roads (not new roads here – the same old roads) increasing cost with time, or we abandon roads over time.
Of course, this is an amazing waste of money, time, and resources. Steel rail is expensive, but we won’t run out of steel any time soon. Electric power lines are expensive, but we’ll be glad we have them once the rest of our transportation system starts breaking down.
So this is one of the reasons that building new roads seems ridiculous to me. Any new roads can only expect a few decades before we will have to consider abandoning them.
* Apparently OPEC members benefit from exaggerating their oil reserves. The amount of oil they are allowed to sell is proportional to how much reserves they report that they have.
update It looks like some predictions of peak oil say there will be no peak oil, notably OPEC and our EIA. Of course, OPEC’s model predicted in 2007 that “oil resource base is sufficient to satisfy demand increases until 2030 at a price of $50-60 per barrel, increasing afterwards to account for inflation.” Oops. What’s a barrel of oil at now, $132?
4 commentsIt’s that time of year again: in a little more than a week, we have new bus and train schedules. Sound Transit’s changes, effective June 1, are already online. Highlights:
The post points to this article in the Fresno Bee about the cost of doing nothing. This bit is particularly interesting:
Opponents of the high-speed system often sound as if this is a choice between spending the $40 billion or spending nothing. That notion is just dead wrong.
Take just one instance. Expanding existing highways and airports to meet the transportation needs projected to come with growth in the state’s population would cost two or there times as much — and would make air quality and congestion even worse. In some cases — San Francisco, Los Angeles — existing airports can’t be expanded. Bigger and better freeways? Expanding Highway 99 in the Valley to an eight-lane interstate would cost as much as $25 billion alone — and that’s just to serve the Valley, not the entire state.
We have a similar effect here, replace “high speed rail” with “transit” and “airports and highways” with just plan old “highways”. Adding one lane each direction to I-5 was projected in the late 90s to cost $25 billion, just within the city limits. The I-405 widening is an $11 billion project, and increasing capacity on I-90 would cost more than SR 520, and just that will cost about $4 billion.
We can’t hope to pave our way out of congestion, and if we tried, we might end up worse off, with a sicker economy and a less healthy region. Transit in general, and light rail specifically, is the cheapest way to move people around this region. We can’t afford to do nothing.
12 commentsThis post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
How should new service hours be allocated and how should that apply to BRT and LRT investment? King county’s 40-40-20 is killing Seattle, and ST is a rail agency no question about that. So what about better bus service in Seattle?
I know this is somewhat of a circular argument but I think one reason everyone wants rail, myself included (besides all of the other ones) is because our bus system is so bad here we have no concept of what a good bus system is like. Metro has just recently gotten onboard with feux to semi BRT (depending on how you look at it) and ST doesn’t even pretend to have BRT. I want ST to build LINK but I think that we need to build it where demand is, not where politics or sub-area equity take it.
I don’t want this to become LRT vs BRT I just think we need to think outside the box and really decided what our end goal is. LINK will help a lot but what if we want to get to 10% or even 15% market share? How could this even be done? With gas prices it doesn’t seam to outrageous to ask these questions. I know one thing and that is unless the federal government helps out there is no way we can afford that much LINK.
So this is what I think needs to happen. Metro need to dramatically improve service frequency and hours according to demand, not subarea. Also it should take it’s 10 highest ridership routes (besides the current rapidride routes) and give them all BRT treatment. I also think they need to come every 10 minutes during the day not every 10 or 15 like rapidride. As I have said before the system should be design to get people to their destination but it needs to encourage transfers, just like rail. And for god sake please fix E/W access in this city. Metro has underinvested in quality bus transit, rather just focusing on trying to get as much service out the door. This is understandable but they need to get beyond that. Things are changing and I really think that we need visionary and bold leadership form ST and especially metro.
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The Daily Journal of Commerce (subscription required) ran a very positive article on Kent Station (built around the Sounder station) and how it is effecting their downtown.
When Kent Mayor Suzette Cooke talked to city residents in 2005, she was shocked to hear some people say they hadn’t been to downtown Kent in 15 years. Kent Station, the 18-acre mixed-use development that is about to break ground on its fourth phase, has changed that.
“Downtown was sort of becoming forgotten,” Cooke said. “Clearly the reality of Kent Station has helped residents see what’s possible for Kent… It was a wake up call to residents that they actually deserved such services.”
Kent Station, owned by Seattle-based Tarragon, is the public-private centerpiece of Kent’s effort to revitalize downtown. Before it was built, the site was home to a functioning glue factory. Today, it’s a 240,000-square-foot hub of retail, education and entertainment with a Sound Transit commuter rail station nearby. When complete, the project will stretch across 470,000 square feet.
…
Looking back, Kent Station’s success can seem like a well placed bet. “I’d like to say it has been fun,” Hanson said. “All of us were kind of at the edge of our seats thinking when Kent Station was built… where are the people going to come from?”
Wolters said he’s always looking to learn from other cities’ experiences. Overall, he said it is important to attract a variety of uses to create the needed dynamic. He said Kent chose to pursue retail and entertainment, then housing. Other communities, like Burien and Federal Way, are doing both at the same time. Working with Sound Transit to develop a commuter station nearby, was also crucial to the project.
I think losing a glue factory is kind of sad, but it’s cool to see how transit orient development can take root even in low-density suburbs.
8 comments
Paul Krugman, Economist and New York Times columnist, has been writing a number of blog posts about rising fuel prices and what they mean to the average American. The opinion piece is great, and has nice tidbits like this:
Any serious reduction in American driving will require more than this — it will mean changing how and where many of us live.
To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.
It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.
And in the face of rising oil prices, which have left many Americans stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas — it’s starting to look as if Berlin had the better idea.
Changing the geography of American metropolitan areas will be hard. For one thing, houses last a lot longer than cars. Long after today’s S.U.V.’s have become antique collectors’ items, millions of people will still be living in subdivisions built when gas was $1.50 or less a gallon.
Infrastructure is another problem. Public transit, in particular, faces a chicken-and-egg problem: it’s hard to justify transit systems unless there’s sufficient population density, yet it’s hard to persuade people to live in denser neighborhoods unless they come with the advantage of transit access.
As they say, read the whole thing. This picture is from a post on his blog (via the Sydney Morning Herald).
It’s the percentage of income residents of Sydney spend on gas. As you can tell, those in the city’s center spend far less on gas than those in the city do. In Sydney, the lack of public transport has left families in the Western suburbs struggling to pay for their commutes.
Pretty scary, I imagine a map for our region would look similar, though the numbers would likely be a lot higher (6% is probably pretty typical here). Metro has a calculator that can help show whether you’d save on your commute by taking transit. If you’re not taking transit, at $4 a gallon I bet it’s worth taking a second look.
6 commentsGot this in a e-mail not that long ago, regarding Portland’s TriMet MAX Light-Rail system:
During a bridge lift on the Steel Bridge this morning, a Union Pacific bridge tender raised the bridge too high, damaging TriMet’s overhead electrical system that powers MAX. Three trains traveled through the span section and were damaged. Repair efforts are ongoing, with TriMet staff and contractors working to expedite the repairs.
There is no MAX service along the Yellow Line or the Blue/Red lines between Rose Quarter Transit Center and PGE Park stations.
Buses are serving riders in these areas and riders should expect minor delays.
The shuttles will continue through rush hour this evening and possibly through the rest of the service today. There is also the potential that Tuesday’s morning rush hour will be affected.
A friend of mine said it was one hell of a light show on the second train that crossed the bridge.
15 comments