Learn about how Vancouver’s TransLink operates internally and how new SkyTrain corridors are decided.

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Nestled by the confluence of Wenatchee and Columbia Rivers, the City of Wenatchee is framed by some of the most dramatic scenery in the state. A small urban core of about fifty thousand people, squeezed into a bench around the confluence, serves as the primary urban center for a huge rural hinterland that extends roughly from Leavenworth at the southwest, Ephrata at the southeast, and 145 miles east of north up US 97 to the Canadian border. I think of Wenatchee as the gateway to Washington’s Big Sky Country, and it seems many other visitors are similarly taken, as the area is struggling with a housing affordability crisis ($).

Wenatchee is a railroad town, and it owes its location primarily to the choices of the Great Northern. Headed west from Saint Paul to Puget Sound, the GN crossed one of its major obstacles, the mighty and wild Columbia, at its narrowest point in Washington, before threading its way up the Cashmere Valley towards Stevens Pass. That westerly alignment, which made Wenatchee well-connected in the era of the railroad, has made the city an island in the age of the macadam road: there are exactly two road bridges carrying one paved road, WA 285, through the urban core, which can suffer startlingly bad car congestion given the small population.

The political and business leaders of Wenatchee have exhibited more progressive thought around transportation policy than one might expect. While the north end of Wenatchee Ave is a hellscape of roaring engines, drive-thrus and giant parking lots, the downtown business association formed a LID in 1989 [PDF page 40] to convert the historic central section into a calm, pedestrian-oriented street. WSDOT-owned land riverfront land on the east bank of the Columbia, once slated for a freeway, has become part of a non-motorized trail system, which notably includes a historic bridge over the Columbia initially designed for wagons and irrigation pipe. The city recently engaged the marginalized South Wenatchee neighborhood in a subarea planning process that yielded safe walking facilities as the top priority.

In a similarly forwarding-thinking vein, Link Transit was founded in 1989 to provide transit service to Chelan and Douglas counties. Today, the agency provides all-day bus and paratransit service throughout the urban core, with a more skeletal service radiating out to smaller towns along the US 2, US 97 and WA 28 corridors. In 2009, Link pioneered battery buses on a set of short, high-frequency urban routes — a bold move for a small agency. This November, car-free mobility in north-central Washington will take another big step forward if voters approve a 0.2% sales tax increase for Link. This ballot measure arises from a planning process which found that residents both wanted more transit options, and were willing to pay for it.

To find out more about Link’s plans, I exchanged emails with planner Lauren Loebsack.  Continue reading “Wenatchee’s Link Transit Goes to the Ballot”

• Who decides if robots can drive? It shouldn’t be the companies racing to build them.
• The real driver of regional inequality in America.
• Here’s the real nightmare scenario for self-driving cars.
• Not a done deal: Convention center expansion could face fight in city hall.
• Tampa Bay’s new transit goal: Dedicated BRT lanes from St. Pete to USF Tampa.
• Feds to dig in on high costs of NYC transit construction.
• New interview of Jarrett Walker: On transit, home, NIMBYism, pipe cleaners. Everyone should listen to the Overhead Wire, but this episode even more so.
• Only a few American cities are growing transit ridership — here’s what they’re doing right.
• Legislature puts lid on tolls ($) as part of Tacoma Narrows Bridge loan.
• Kitsap Transit executive director talks route changes, fast ferries during community meeting.
• Debate continues in Kent over light rail station details.
• Pierce Transit weighs bus lane options for Pacific Avenue BRT.
• America begins capping the scars of freeways past.
• Albany punts ($) on clearing Manhattan’s clogged streets.
• Downtown Vancouver to Seattle flights imminent.
• Plight of Spring: Insane crowding on the Brooklyn Bridge.
• Washington’s loneliest road — from Dusty to Dodge — was one of the state’s first highways.
• New arboretum trail daylights creek, gives greater access to wetlands. The west side is a great bike thoroughfare, too, although the arboretum folks seem to be at pains not to point that out.
• Rainier Avenue’s second phase of improvements lacks vision.
• De Blasio administration may ditch planned streetcar along Brooklyn-Queens waterfront.
• With L Train shutdown a year off, Lower Manhattan braces for upheaval ($).
• As shared scooters invade, cities must decide whose vehicles belong.
• Don’t just rebuild the collapsed pedestrian bridge in Miami. This proposal doesn’t stand a chance in hell, but the authors are absolutely right: pedestrian bridges are usually a capstone of failed street design.

This is an open thread.

This spring, construction will finally begin on four seven-story mixed-use buildings above the Capitol Hill light rail station. Though an ideal place to build transit-oriented development (TOD), the land has sat empty since the station opened in March 2016. When the buildings are completed, probably sometime in 2020 according to Capitol Hill Seattle, 428 new housing units will be added to the light rail station walkshed. Of those new units, 41% — 176 of them — will be considered affordable housing.

Sound Transit is in the final stage of updating its TOD guidelines that the agency says will make TOD an integral component of transit project planning and delivery, and could support bringing new development online when transit stations open, rather than years later.

The ST3 plan requires the agency develop and implement “a regional equitable TOD strategy” and offer at least 80% of surplus property first to projects for families making 80% or less of area median income (AMI). The agency, which has until May to update its TOD policy, released a draft at the March 22 board meeting.

The draft policy declares goals such as “encourage [the] creation of housing options near transit with priority given to affordability” and “increase the value and effectiveness of transit by increasing transit ridership.” To reach those goals, the proposal lays out a specific set of strategies.

However, affordable housing advocates, who called the draft policy a step in the right direction while addressing the board Thursday, urged the agency to include specific housing goals in the TOD policy.

“While the statute sets a target over the entirety of the ST surplus properties, it would be beneficial to outline how these targets will be met,” said Angela Compton, an outreach coordinator with Futurewise. “Being transparent about this approach would provide a clear understanding of what ST is trying to achieve through this process.”

Compton suggested housing goals could be set by each site, corridor or year. Continue reading “ST Draft TOD Policy Lacks Specifics, critics say”

As the colorful dockless bike-shares, which began operating last summer in Seattle, stray past city boundaries, some suburban cities want to come along for the ride.

Bothell was the first suburb to issue permits for bike-share companies after bikes began popping up around town, most likely propelled north by the Burke-Gilman Trail. And now Bellevue is set to launch its own dockless bike-share pilot this May.

The city is starting small, permitting only 400 bikes at the pilot’s launch (roughly one for every 350 residents), and is only allowing e-bikes, which Bellevue says will “make the service accessible to a wider variety of potential users.”

Taking lessons from Seattle, where some dockless bikes are being improperly parked and blocking sidewalks, Bellevue’s pilot establishes bike hubs, using paint and racks, to identify preferred parking areas. Operators will be required to offer incentives, to encourage riders to use the hubs, and disincentives, to keep people from parking the bikes improperly. Geofencing will be used to keep bikes from being left in the middle of parks.

The city is laying out strict guidelines for rebalancing bikes nightly which the city says will “facilitate the convenient provision of bicycles where people want them while maintaining orderly and accessible public space and minimizing impacts to private property.”  

Continue reading “Bellevue Eases into Bike-sharing”

New York’s transit woes of the recent past, summarized by The New York Times.

This is an open thread.

Yesterday, Mayor Durkan suspended almost all work on the Center City Connector (CCC) Streetcar that would join the First Hill and South Lake Union lines using dedicated lanes on First Avenue. The trigger was a jump in the cost estimate from $177m to over $200m, partly due to estimation “errors” and partly because costs for all construction projects are skyrocketing in the current economy. This is a setback for Downtown and its people-carrying capacity, obviously, but there are too many unknowns to really understand the long-range implications.

1. What is the impact on FTA funding? Seattle expected a total of $75m from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) for this project, and canceling it would forfeit this money. If this affects FTA awards for other transit projects like Madison BRT, as streetcar boosters warn, then it will be one of the more disastrous decisions in Seattle’s transportation history.
2. Is this a pause or a cancellation? The Deputy Mayor’s language clearly describes a mere pause to get a handle on costs by the June 19th project review. However, advocates on both sides reasonably see this as a prelude to killing it altogether. If it is just a short delay, this might have salutary effects. Construction would have coincided with the city’s period of maximum constraint, where the viaduct comes down, Convention Place Station closes, and so on. Although CCC will be an efficient way to move people in the long run, a slip short enough to stay on the FTA’s good side might allow Seattle to stagger the impact of multiple projects.
3. Where does the money go? Transit-oriented streetcar opponents mostly argue that the same amount of money would achieve much better outcomes if spent on buses. This is a great test of that hypothesis. There is now an extra $100m, minus the continuing utility work and costs to exercise contract cancellation options, in the transportation account. Can it go to more bus hours, which is hard to do with Metro’s capacity limits and leaves no legacy after it’s spent? Could we build more rapid bus corridors? Do the currently planned bus corridors need more money because of escalating costs? Or will the money be siphoned off to tackle homelessness, provide tax relief, or do something else unrelated to transit?
4. What would have paid for the overruns? If the streetcar never opens, we will never get the answer to this. But the $23m shortfall would have been filled from something, and this is the converse question to #3.
5. How will we move through downtown? A lot of Seattle’s job and residential growth is happening in greater downtown. ST3, when built out, will provide the capacity to move about 36,000 people per hour* through the two tunnel lines. That’s a colossal number of people — but it may not even absorb the growth in jobs in that area over the next few decades. Third Avenue is near its bus capacity. Although One Center City may yet piece together some right of way, the CCC’s dedicated chunk of First Avenue would have been very useful for moving people efficiently. Redistributing resources to bus routes that go further into the neighborhoods has its merits, but doesn’t solve the problem of the city’s most important bottleneck.

* assuming 60 trains per hour and 600 people per train on the five approaches to downtown.

• “Red paint” — SDOT collecting feedback on Broadway transit lane proposal.
• PLUZ committee moves parking reform. Almost all the debilitating Herbold amendments were defeated.
• This small Wallingford apartment building is fine-grained urbanism at its finest.
• Paris to offer subsidies to those who buy bikes, give up cars.
• New federal budget would likely keep money flowing ($) to Lynnwood light rail.
• Seattle’s plan to allow more homes near transit and shops doesn’t go far enough.
• Will Boston turn around its ailing bus system?
• Paris mayor floats free transit for all.
• Twin Transit’s purchase of electric bus stalled by WSDOT testing, “Buy America” Standards.
• SEPTA lost millions of bus trips last year. Proposed solutions are in the works.
• SDOT evaluates options to craft Magnolia Bridge alternative.
• Anti-bike lane group tweets that single moms don’t bike. It backfires spectacularly.
• SDOT collecting more traffic data for Lake Washington Loop Greenway.
• Chicago: Parking lots disappearing in ride-sharing era as downtown construction booms.
• How Boise could keep at least some Downtown housing affordable. Here’s an idea: an attractive, fast, reliable transit system that can extend outside of the downtown.
• Not one, not two, but three ($) takes on the MTA’s off-peak service.
• Portland: Two new plans to watch.
• Google Pay now handles transit tickets.
• Plan to dramatically increase development ($) would transform some L.A. neighborhoods. Where’s Washington’s Scott Weiner?
• Thirteen years after painful cut, First Hill still wants a light rail station.
• Transportation projects in Spokane area poised to benefit from federal spending bill.
• Documenting the dynamic black community ($) of 1940s Seattle.
• Slower speed is a service cut.
• You want congestion pricing? Be specific.
• Transportation projects in Spokane area poised to benefit from federal spending bill.
• Third Ryde Tube: Transfer troublesome.
• Georgia governor throws $100M behind metro Atlanta transit initiatives. “Is this really happening in Georgia?”
• As Puget Sound region grows, (free) park and rides fill up.
• Did Fort Collins grow too big too fast?
• NYC: More on weekend service changes and redundancy.
• Arizona governor and Uber kept self-driving program secret, emails reveal.
• Transit App: Now supporting accessibility information.
• Seattle’s Highway 99 tunnel could open to traffic ($) in October.
• Washington State Ferries to look harder at diesel to electric conversion. The shorter ferry routes (Lummi, Guemes, Cathlamet, Keller, Inchelium) also seem worth examining.
• Sound Transit settlement will subsidize ($) Uber and Lyft rides to Mercer Island transit center.
• Let’s not screw up Northgate, too: The redevelopment of Seattle’s oldest mall us a chance to get things right.
• Traffic, traffic everywhere — including rural Pierce County. Shocker: it turns out those big new houses are cheap for a reason.
• Everything is awesome! Southwest LRT officials make the case that the project isn’t the smoldering tire fire so many assume.

This is an open thread.

Thanks to a sponsorship deal with the Mariners, for the first two months of the season both digital and printed baseball tickets also serve as a valid Link fare. Until June 3rd, riders can present the ticket for that day’s home game to fare enforcement up to 3 hours before first pitch (typically 1:10 or 7:10) and through the end of the day.

To further eliminate excuses for skipping the train, Uber is discounting rides to the two Link terminal stations (UW and Angle Lake). Even though Sounder and ST Express aren’t included in the deal, a broad segment of the region now has an inexpensive means of avoiding game traffic entirely.

ST spokesperson Kimberly Reason says that the arrangement with the Mariners is a pilot. The finance staff estimated the agency makes about 24 cents per Mariners attendee (whether or not they take the train). At the end of the pilot, the team will write a check based on the attendance over the entire period.

A fare-free transit system isn’t good for most transit riders until other revenue streams fund transit service beyond the point of diminishing returns. However, an ideal (but unenforceable) framework would charge regular users a flat fee to fund the system while letting everyone use the system occasionally for free. This gives more people a stake in the system, makes the marginal cost of riding zero, and eliminates the friction of handling fares from those infrequent users.

Deals like this one provide small glimpses of that ideal system. By (in effect) giving Sound Transit a cut of baseball ticket revenue, a large number of novice riders don’t have to mess with fares and have strong incentives to ride. Let’s hope it makes enough of a measurable difference that all parties decide to continue the experiment.

With over a quarter of blocks missing sidewalks and a backlog of street projects, the city is contemplating adopting a transportation impact fee as a way to help pay for new infrastructure needed to handle growth.

Last week during a meeting of the Seattle Sustainability and Transportation Committee, Councilmember Mike O’Brien instructed city staff to begin developing a transportation impact fee schedule for these one-time charges paid by new development.

Impact fees were authorized by the 1990 Growth Management Act, and today most urban jurisdictions have adopted some kind of impact fees for roads or parks. The City of Sammamish has adopted some of the highest transportation impact fees, charging new single-family homes close to $15,000.

Seattle has considered impact fees for years. A 2015 staff report recommended further study of park and transportation impact fees, but competing priorities delayed the work. Councilmembers sitting on the Sustainability and Transportation Committee received an update on the progress last week.

These funds must be used within ten years of collection and spent on projects that provide capacity for future growth. Impact fees cannot be used to pay for existing deficiencies, but they can be used for transit or greenway projects, according to Kendra Breiland, a consultant from the firm Fehr and Peers.

“When you start thinking through all these parameters, many cities have started moving towards recognizing they can spend these funds not just on those traditional auto capacity projects, but we can spend them on much more multimodal projects,” Breiland told the committee.

She said transit projects could include off-board fare payment, transit signal priority, rapid ride corridors, in-lane bus stops or curb bulbs.

Continue reading “Seattle Edging Closer to Implementing Impact Fees”

Video by Welwyn22

For those of you who, like me, have been caught miscounting taps before boarding Link Light Rail or Sounder, Sound Transit is going to make the system more user-friendly. Per ST spokesperson Kimberly Reason, a change to the “tap off” tone, to make it unique from the “tap on” tone, is in the works. However, there is no timeline yet for when the change will happen. The change is in the work queue for ST’s information technology vendor.

It will still be possible to forget to tap at all, and get warned and given a $124 citation even if you have a monthly pass covering the highest possible fare for the ride. State law sets the minimum fine.

Nor is there any plan to deal with the regressiveness of the flat $124 ticket. That fine still seems out of proportion for riders with limited financial means who have already paid $36 for a monthly Regional Reduced Fare Permit ORCA pass or $54 for a youth or LIFT monthly pass. Even high school students with free unlimited monthly passes on a youth ORCA card could be cited. I got to talk briefly with a fare enforcement officer, and he confirmed that even students with passes that are free to the student get warned and could get the $124 citation.

The state sets the minimum fine (which is slightly more than enough to cover court administrative costs when the fine actually gets paid), but Sound Transit could choose to increase the number of warnings for riders in different fare groups, or at least do so for full passholders or some groups of reduced-fare riders, or simply honor full passes.

Continue reading “Tapping ORCA Will Soon Get Less Confusing”

• Forget gondolas, turn Silver Line Green.
• ST is hiring a Senior Transportation Planner.
• The mean musical chairs of rising rent and home prices.
• A bold, divisive plan to wean Californians from cars.
• For low-income renters, the affordable housing gap persists.
• Pollution impacts heighten the need for lids or freeway removal.
• Seattle underestimates by millions the cost to run its new streetcar line, Metro says.
• Olympia passes housing bills advancing CLT, homeless funding, and WSCC Lodging Tax.
• Innisfil, Ontario went with Uber instead of public transit‚ and says it saved $8 million per year. Keep in mind that Innisfil is “36,000 people spread over 270 square kilometres,” so this result is what you’d expect.
• Public transit officials are “struggling to understand” Trump’s proposed cuts.
• UW light-rail escalators re-started after 2-hour breakdown ($) Friday.
• Retail turmoil triggers new visions for shopping malls like Northgate ($) in Seattle.
• A closer look at plans to add safety improvements in Green Lake & Wallingford.
• How to survive the Cascadia Earthquake? Tips from seismologist Lucy Jones, “the Beyoncé of earthquakes” ($).
• Can London become a people-centric smart city?
• As city grapples with homelessness, leader tasked with response resigns.
• Here’s how WMATA says it would spend $15.5 billion over a decade.
• Waze launches free carpool app in Washington state matching drivers, riders ($).
• British Columbia goes all in on rapid transit, funds high-speed rail study.
• Modernism in London’s “Metro-Land.”
• Paris rolls out “on demand bus stops” in bid to fight sexual harassment. Note that King County riders already have this.
• Why are the NYC subway’s operating costs so high?
• Light rail frequency: promises and priorities. Another helpful debunking of the the stubborn myth that rails guarantee high-quality service.
• Construction costs and experience.
• How signal timers after a 1995 subway crash led to NYC’s current transit crisis.
• Feds join suit against MTA alleging ADA violations.
• The myth of “forcing people out of their cars.”
• Why outer suburbs in the East and Midwest have stopped booming.
• Portland wants help plotting bus-only lanes, bikeways and safer crossings in central city.
• Falling transit ridership poses an “emergency” for cities, experts fear.
• Don’t delay the downtown bike network.
• City Council briefed on downtown circulator and Seattle streetcar.
• Why Sound Transit doesn’t want you walking down a stalled escalator.

This is an open thread.