Ride Link Without Pants This Sunday

Posted on by Sherwin Lee

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

If you’ve got nothing better to do this Sunday, here’s another excuse to take Link.  New York-based Improv Everywhere is having its 8th annual ‘No Pants! Subway Ride’ and invites cities around the world to pantslessly jump on board.  With light rail now up and running in Seattle, Emerald City Improv is snagging the chance for locals to participate in the global event.  The ‘No Pants’ ride, which was conceived in 2002, attracted 1200 participants in New York City alone last year plus 1000 more in other cities.  Here is some information about this year’s Seattle event (RSVP on the Facebook page):

Every January, Improv Everywhere in New York stages their annual “No Pants! Subway Ride.” Cities around the globe participate. This year, Emerald City Improv in Seattle invites you to participate in our first annual “No Pants! Light Rail Ride.”

This event will occur SUNDAY, JANUARY 10th, from 12:00- 3:00

REQUIREMENTS FOR PARTICIPATION:
1) Willing to take pants off on light rail
2) Able to keep a straight face about it

WHERE TO MEET:
Meet at the plaza at 4th Ave and Pine St, across from Westlake Center, at noon.

For the sake of decency, though, you’ll probably need to wear underpants.  Assuming ST police and security manage not to throw any fits, we should hope to avoid what happened in New York during their 5th annual ‘No Pants!’ ride:

The fifth annual No Pants ride was abruptly halted by a cop. All passengers, including those not participating, were forced to exit the train as it was taken out of service. 8 people were handcuffed in their underwear and taken into custody. A month later a judge dismissed all of the charges. It is not illegal to wear your underwear in public in New York City. Just ask the Naked Cowboy. The incident was reported by news agencies around the world. David Letterman made two monologue jokes, about it and staged a No Pants Cab Ride as a parody. Keith Olbermann interviewed Agent Todd about the legality of No Pants. Around 150 people participated in the ride.

Why Transit

Posted on by Martin H. Duke
photo by Mike Bjork

I get asked occasionally why I blog, and why I blog about transit.  I’m not going to bore you with self-analysis on whatever psychic rewards I get out of this, so instead, here’s a brief Boxing Day summary of why I think transit, and rail transit in particular, is important:

  1. Cost effectiveness: A 4-car light rail line running (800 passengers) at 7.5 minute frequencies can carry 6400 people in each direction.  At 2.5 minutes, it’s 19,200.   According to FHWA, highway lane of traffic at capacity can carry 2,200 people in single occupancy vehicles under ideal conditions.  Given that regional growth will continue, what’s a more plausible way to expand capacity in, say, the I-5 corridor?  North Link, or 16 new lanes on I-5?
  2. Positive Societal Effects: There are a bunch of societal drawbacks to driving, some well-understood and others not: air pollution, water pollution, trade deficits from oil imports, sedentary lifestyles, traffic deaths, hideous parking-lot-oriented architecture, sprawl, personal transportation costs, and congestion.  Widely available transit is a partial antidote to all of these.
  3. Quality of Life: We usually talk about the other things because they’re more quantifiable, but ultimately it comes down to quality of life.  In major cities around the world, rail is simply the best way to get around.  As Seattle enters that class of metropolis, residents shouldn’t tolerate the lack of such an important amenity any more than they would tolerate the absence of parks and libraries.

News Roundup: Rail Grinding

Posted on by Martin H. Duke


Video by Eric Jensen.

A Sneak Peak at Seatac Station

Posted on by Martin H. Duke
VIPs on the Mezzanine Level, from left to right: County Executive-Elect Dow Constantine, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, Sen. Patty Murray, County Executive Kurt Triplett, and Port Commissioner John Creighton (photo by the author)
VIPs on the Mezzanine Level, from left to right: County Executive-Elect Dow Constantine, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, Sen. Patty Murray, County Executive Kurt Triplett, and Port Commissioner John Creighton (all photos by the author)

As Brian noted, Senator Murray had the honor of announcing Seatac Station’s opening date as Saturday, December 19 at 10am, just in time for the holidays.  The real star of the morning, however, was one of the system’s more beautiful stations.  I’m probably the least of the STB team’s photographers, but since I was the one there you’ll have to peruse my photos in the STB Flickr Pool.  Some select photos and additional comments below the jump.

Continue reading “A Sneak Peak at Seatac Station”

Rail Safety Roundup

Posted on by Martin H. Duke

I think I misfired a bit by focusing on the bogus liability discussion and not on the broader safety issues John Niles was raising.  (By the way, Mike Lindblom did a great piece on this subject back in 2004.)  A few points and I’ll leave the subject — at least till the next accident.

  • We trade safety for convenience and cost all the time.  Holding Light Rail to a standard beyond all other modes of transportation doesn’t make any sense unless you’re trying to stop light rail.
  • Almost everyone agrees that, all else being equal, grade separated is better than not, for many, many reasons.  Some people really don’t like the visual impacts of elevated track, but that isn’t me.  The problem is that all else isn’t equal.  For various political and financial reasons grade separation simply wasn’t going to happen if this were to get built at all.  If you put basically no value on having rail in the region that’s a small price to pay, but for the rest of us that’s a big deal.
  • Running Light Rail down the street is not a daredevil stunt.  It’s done all the time in cities across the United States and around the world.  There’s likely to be an adjustment period, but after that people will get used to it.  There’s no reason to be an alarmist.
  • I went back and read John Niles’s report more carefully.  I think the technical core of his argument is that non-passenger injuries should have been included in the FTA safety analysis, and therefore that the project should have been rejected by the FTA.  Different strokes for different folks, I guess, but I should point out that (a) it’s far from clear, from a legal standpoint, from the document that one should include external injuries; (b) I don’t see any reason to view the FTA criteria as particularly valid, in a metaphysical sense, given the way we treat other transportation modes; and (c) given that the money is already awarded and spent, the whole argument is irrelevant.
  • All that said, the reason we’ve been given that there isn’t a short, tasteful fence along the length of the surface segment is that emergency vehicles have to be able to make turns and U-turns over the tracks.  That’s a valid interest, but someone ought to do the analysis on whether that actually saves more lives than fencing the thing off except at designated crossings.

Earth Day

Posted on by John Jensen

We like to think of every day at Seattle Transit Blog as an earth day, but today people around the world are celebrating Earth Day. How are you honoring Earth Day today?

LINK Station Spacing

Posted on by Adam Bejan Parast

All forms of transportation can be characterized in two dimensions. The first, accessibility is a measure how easily it is to join and leave that particular facility. The second dimension is speed of travel on that facility. These two dimensions are inversely related. As accessibility increases speed decreases and vice versa. Streets are a perfect everyday examples. Local streets are slow but offer very high accessibility, while freeways have very low accessibility but very high speed.

So how accessible is LINK for pedestrians compared to other mass transit systems in the Northwest? Well, not very, especially compared to Portland. Station spacing is an important measure of how dense of a network a transit system has. The ideal station spacing for pedestrian access and continuous linear TOD is roughly two times what an average pedestrian would walk, so roughly ~.5 mile to ~1 mile. Now look again. Magically MAX and Skytrain fall into that range. Both the Expo and Millenium lines hover perfectly in the range, while MAX jumps around a bit more because of variation in land use patterns and geography. So, coincidence or planning?

Northwest Mass Transit Systems
Northwest Mass Transit Spacing

So what happened to LINK, why is it so off the mark? Well for starters we have weird geography which has forced our growth pattern into a long and narrow shape. This necessitates a long central line of ~55 miles, Everett to Tacoma. This length forces planners to reduce accessibility to increase speed to a competitive level. In comparison the 2nd longest line is MAX’s Blue line at 33 miles. Another double whammy is money. Sound Transit is a three county regional transit provider who’s mission is to build a regional transit system. Subarea equity has forced Sound Transit to build out rather than fill in Seattle proper with highly accessible mass transit. Yet another reason is that we are late to the game. MAX and Skytrain were built to influence growth patters. They were design to maximize accessibility, area coverage, and TOD opportunities. Now LINK is trying to follow growth not shape it.

So before I close I do want to point out one jem in the ruff, East LINK. After removing the distance inured by Lake Washington, East LINK looks like it will be the poster child of the entire system when it comes to walkable, TOD communities. It is hovering just above the walkable range, and because of the S shape of the probable alignment these distances are actually much shorter. In addition to that the City of Bellevue has made Seattle’s zoning department look childish in its attempt to up-zone station areas.

Below the fold is another graph showing how LINK, Skytrain and MAX stacks up against mass transit systems around the world.
Continue reading “LINK Station Spacing”

China’s $586 Billion Stimulus Plan

Posted on by Andrew Smith

From this NYT article:

At a time when major infrastructure projects are being put off around the world, China said it would spend an estimated $586 billion — roughly 7 percent of its gross domestic product — over the next two years to construct new railways, subways and airports and to rebuild communities devastated by an earthquake in the southwest in May.

We’ll see whether Obama’s stimulus plan will be more cash handouts, or infrastructure investment. Infrastructure takes a little longer to trigger activity, but has a much better long-term prospect compared to handing cash out to consumers. The Bush administration’s stimulus package was used by consumers to pay down debt for the most part. If another cash handout is used that way, it won’t have much stimulus effect.

I think China’s got the right idea here.

Kemper Freeman

Posted on by Andrew Smith

Chi-Dooh Li, who wrote a pro-prop 1 opinion piece last year, has a piece this time around explaining Kemper Freeman’s history in transportation activism, and why he’s wrong on light rail:

Kemper Freeman is an honorable man.
…

He is an intelligent man with a great breadth of life experience.

So why is he telling people in this region that they are better off riding buses than taking light rail trains?

There are great cities in this country and around the world where planners, politicians and people have managed to catch a common vision of integrated transportation systems that move people from place to place with the greatest efficiency and lowest cost. Trains, buses and automobiles all play a vital role.

Leave out trains or buses, and you have serious traffic congestion – on the highways and in the city streets.

As they say, read the whole thing. It’s an interesting look.