Search Results for: free transit

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

There’s a 6-part feature in Crosscut today on tolling, based on a leaked report from Ron Sims’ office. Lots to digest here, but it builds on previous talk of electronic tolling in the area.

As we’ve argued before, tolling should have wide bipartisan support: it’s a market-based system at its core. Unfortunately, because it comes from Sims’ office, it will no doubt be dismissed as some sort of weird commie plot to hijack our highways.

Here’s the kicker:

Indeed, data from the Puget Sound Regional Council, as well as from just about every other major urban region in the country, show that traffic congestion increases relentlessly each year. Arizona planners are proposing a 24-lane freeway near Phoenix — yet, according to officials there, it won’t reduce congestion. As the Sims tolling report says, simply building more roads is no longer a solution by itself.

24 lanes!! We keep building more roads, and yet congestion gets worse. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The Seattle Times sheds more light on the emerging opposition to RTID/ST2 that we noted yesterday.

As the campaign season approaches on a transportation ballot measure, an advocacy group called the Washington Traffic Institute has formed to oppose Sound Transit’s plans to expand light rail.

The group is led by Bill Eager, an engineer; Bruce Nurse, vice president of Bellevue mall developer Kemper Freeman’s organization; and Kathryn Serkes, a public-affairs consultant. At its Web site, truthabouttraffic.org, the group argues that rail won’t solve congestion.

Again, the group is hard to take seriously right now, since they’re chock full of out-of-towners and folks interested in resurrecting non-starter solutions like cutting a new freeway (I-605) through the Cascade Foothills. That said, Kemper Freeman has a lot of money and Eastside property, so don’t count them out.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

One, two, and now three makes a trend.

This one comes from Ted Van Dyk, a former P-I columnist. Here Van Dyk rehashes anti-rail arguments he’s been making for years. The thrust of his column is one we’ve heard before: rail just won’t work here.

Moreover, light rail is a technology appropriate to flat areas where commuters move from high-density residential areas to workplaces concentrated along the rail line. Commuting patterns here are far more diffuse. The southern leg of the approved line did not have stations at the airport, The Boeing Co. or Southcenter.

One can always come up with reasons why Seattle is uniquely unsuited for this or that solution. As Dan Savage is fond of saying, “just like rapid transit can’t work here and taking out an elevated freeway can’t work here and bike commuting can’t work here and urban density can’t work here. Seattle is exceptional in each and every respect.”

But Seattle’s geography is as much asset as liability. “Flat areas” also lend themselves to sprawl, whereas Seattle’s hilly, water-logged geography makes it naturally more dense and transit-friendly. Rail systems have been built in far less hostpitible environments.

Van Dyk concludes with a facile comparison to the Big Dig, giving us pause by insulting our intelligence relative to our friends on the opposite side of I-90:

Light rail’s projected costs dwarf the Big Dig’s. It is not too late to change the regional package in favor of valid transportation investments. There is one important difference between the Big Dig in Boston and Sound Transit light rail here. In street-smart Boston, folks recognize more quickly when they’ve been had.

Sorry Mr. Van Dyk — buses ain’t gonna cut it. Rail’s going to be messy and expensive, but we don’t have a choice. In 50 years, when we’re looking at a post-carbon economy, our kids will thank us for the investment. It’s time to stop taling and start building.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The Washington Policy Center’s Michael Ennis is cited by the P-I as a critic of the upcoming RTID package.

Isn’t it strange that the P-I would have someone write an op-ed dissing transit, and then, just days later, cite him as the only source in an article complaining about the cost of the package? I’m all but certain the P-I will end up endorsing the RTID, so I don’t want to accuse them of an anti-RTID agenda, but what’s up with the all-Ennis-all-the-time thing?

Anyway, Ennis complains about the “burden” on families of a $286 tax. To put that in perspective, the Iraq War (which Ennis’ comrades at the Heritage Foundation strongly advocated for) is costing families somewhere between $4,100 and $20,000 per household.

P.S.: Carless in Seattle has more on Ennis’ op-ed and the real cost of freeway expansion.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Sadly, the powers that be did not solve the viaduct issue while our backs were turned.

The current plan, you’ll recall, calls for strengthening some of the most vulnerable sections of the current viaduct, rebuilding the viaduct south of Qwest Field, and then punting on what to do with the downtown core. But as the plan moves forward, the various factions — the rebuilders, the surface-transit folks, the retrofit crew — are scrutinizing every decision to see if it’s secretly helping advance another factions’ case. I made the argument recently that the timeline seems to be designed to prevent the viaduct from ever closing before a decision is reached, thus depriving us of the opportunity to experience a viaduct-free Seattle.

Some concerns seem valid: a new interchange that pours more traffic onto the viaduct would certainly be a step towards a new elevated freeway. But others seem to show a lack of understanding:

“It seems to me that we ought to wait and see what’s going on in between (the two ends) before we spend all that money ensuring there’ll be an elevated freeway in my neighborhood in perpetuity,” said John Pehrson, head of a Belltown Housing and Land Use Committee. “It’s just as noisy, it’s just as dirty, it’s just as isolating as it (would be) in the central waterfront.”

Even the tunnel and the surface-transit alternatives maintained the section of viaduct through Belltown. There’s simply no other way to deal with the cars coming out of the Battery Street tunnel than to route them on to a viaduct, except for perhaps leveling most of downtown Seattle.

As this process progresses, it will be interesting to watch each side try and work the refs in favor of their proposed solution.

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.

Following up on Matt’s post about NextBus, it looks like the burgeoning transit-planning space is getting a new entrant, HopStop, which covers NY, SF, and DC, among others (but not Seattle, alas).

The cool thing about HopStop is that they’re providing a free API, which will let transit-geek sites like ours provide a custom interface and feature set. Come to Seattle, HopStop!

The logical evolution for these sites is toward mobile phones, of course. That’s where the action’s going to be in a few years.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

In addition to all the wonderful freedom they provide, cars have two major negative effects on society: pollution and traffic (three if you count the health problems related to auto-centric lifestyles, but that’s still pretty new and second-order compared to the first two). We often conflate the two, but they’re really separate problems.

In fact, one could easily see solving one of them while exacerbating the other. That’s the impression I get reading this article on plug-in hybrids. The more energy efficient our cars become, the cheaper they are to drive. Common sense tells us that people will then drive more, thereby making traffic worse.

This is not to say that energy-efficient cars shouldn’t be welcomed with open arms. It’s just that a good deal of public support for mass transit comes from a combination of the two. If operating a car gets cheaper, there goes one half of the coalition. Thus, it may reduce the demand for transit, while, perversely, making congestion even worse.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Snohomish County is adding double-decker buses to its fleet. Apparently they’re better than the articulated buses because they hold more passengers and can be used in inclement weather.

One of the knocks on rapid transit by bus is that, while the initial costs of building a system are low, the operating costs are higher, since a bus can hold up to 60 or 80 people per driver, but a train can hold several hundred people per driver. Double-decks would help make buses more cost effective to operate.

Apparently they fit easily under the freeway overpasses, which is, of course, a good thing.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

One thing I’ve noticed in the past year or so is that it’s gotten much more difficult to park downtown. Through a combination of factors — more electronic meters, fewer free parking areas — the city has really changed my personal calculus: I think twice before driving downtown, even on a Saturday. And I’m much more likely to take the bus.

Some folks aren’t so happy about the changes:

Some neighborhood activists complain that the city’s goals are unrealistic, at least until there’s more convenient public transportation in Seattle.

“The city’s living in a planner’s fantasy that … if you make it hard to park people will magically walk or ride their bike,” said Matt Fox, a longtime activist in the University District, where the city has substantially reduced free parking.

“Until the transit alternatives are in place, I think this is a punitive approach that’s going to make people’s lives really miserable.”

Well, I have a hard time believing it’s going to make anyone’s life truly “miserable” (there are far worse things happening in the world), but I can see where he’s coming from. However, we’re in a bit of a Catch-22 with waiting “until the transit alternatives are in place.” Adding more bus service will be easier when there’s more demand, and there’ll be more demand when there’s more service. In the meantime, Metro’s Transit Now initiative will help.

But my instinct is that the barriers to entry are still too high for many people. The bus system is darn confusing if you don’t have a route that you know and use frequently. It’s reminiscent of the Simpsons episode where Lisa tries to take the bus to the museum and finds herself deposited out in the boonies. When she asks the bus driver why the bus didn’t stop at the museum, he replies “that’s the No. 22. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, this is the 22A.” It’s funny because it’s true.

It surprises me that a city with this many information workers can’t come up with a more intuitive way of communicating bus routes. Use colors, use shapes. Have more intuitive bus maps. Identify, say, 8 major routes and make them stand out from the pack somehow. We’re sort of getting there with the BRT component of Transit Now, but so much more could be done for what’s basically peanuts compared to the cost of, say, laying a mile of rail.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Following up on yesterday’s post on Congestion Pricing, Knute Berger has a smart piece in Crosscut today where he makes the same observation we did, namely that user fees on roads have broad support across the ideological spectrum:

The greens such as the Sightline folks like free candy — uh, congestion pricing because it gets cars off the road. The people who can’t afford to pay to use the roads at peak hours find other means to get to work. This is good for Sims because he’s betting the farm on stuff like bus rapid transit (BRT) and voter-approved improvements to Metro Transit service in King County. To make that work, he needs fewer cars getting in the way and more bus riders. Make driving more expensive by tolling the roads, and voila.

Conservatives like tolls and fees because they can claim it’s not a tax, and it’s certainly not progressive because it whacks drivers regardless of income or the price of their vehicle. The contractor in a pickup pays the same as his client in a Porsche. But it also allows the much-loved “market” to winnow out gridlock.

Still, despite support from across the political divide, Berger notes that it’s still a political nonstarter. “It’s saying something about the popularity of tolling the streets when a property tax hike looks like a great option,” he says.

Nonetheless, the more we fully integrate the costs of driving, the more informed we’ll be as customers and citizens, which is really what it’s all about.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

…maybe they’ll just find another route:

OAKLAND, Calif., April 30 — A day after a fiery tanker crash melted and collapsed a critical highway interchange near the Bay Bridge, rush hour commuters in the Bay Area enjoyed a relatively painless morning, as drivers avoided the roads and the expected nightmare largely failed to materialize.

Free and more frequent trains were running on Bay Area Rapid Transit lines, the region’s light rail system, and additional ferries plowed the waters between San Francisco and the cities on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay. But by and large, vehicle traffic around the site of the collapse was light and fluid during the morning commute, as the combination of telecommuting, absenteeism and mass transit apparently combined to keep many workers off the roads.

“This morning was one of the easiest commutes I’ve ever had,” said Jared Hirsch, associate production manager for American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, who drives to work from Oakland. “I think people assuming that this evening’s would be one of the worst commutes ever everyone elected to either take public or stay at home.”

I’ve never lived in San Francisco, but I’ve visited enough to know that knocking out I-580 and I-880 in Oakland is a fairly big deal.

It turns out, though, that demand for roads is very elastic: if you build more roads, people will drive more. If you take away roads, people will figure out alternatives and drive less. Seattle found this out when we expanded I-90: as soon as the new lanes were added, traffic doubled.

This would seem to lend credence to Erica Barnett’s thoughtfully reasoned argument for replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a surface boulevard:

The day before the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, 110,000 vehicles used the viaduct every day. After it reopened later that year, only 80,000 vehicles did. More recently, a WSDOT study found that if the state charged a $1 toll on the viaduct, 40,000 trips would disappear, indicating that “demand” is a very flexible concept; conversely, a recent UC Berkeley study found that for every 1 percent of new road capacity, traffic increased by 0.9 percent.

To be sure, it’s unclear how many Bay Area residents just stayed home today, something they certainly can’t do forever:

It seemed that many people, however, opted not to even try to come into office. Nathaniel P. Ford Sr., executive director of the Municipal Transportation Agency in San Francisco, said that anecdotal accounts were that trains, buses, and ferries were all only lightly used.

But in the long run, people look for alternatives when they’re forced to. We may grumble for a while, but eventually we adapt and incorporate it into our routines. The key, though, is that we have to force ourselves to a decision. That’s human nature.