Transit Report Card: Washington, DC

Posted on by Martin H. Duke

Second in an occasional series where I wildly generalize about a transit system based on limited experience.

Segments ridden:
Red Line: Shady Grove – Union Station
Blue Line: Springfield – Stadium/Armory
Orange Line: W. Falls Church – Stadium/Armory
Yellow Line: Gallery Place – National Airport
Green Line: Gallery Place – Navy Yard
Time ridden: You name it. I grew up here, so I can’t even begin to recapitulate it.

Scope: A
There aren’t a ton of places to go in D.C. and the surrounding area that you can’t get to via Metro, but it falls a bit short of the blanket coverage you see in New York. The vast majority of the service lies inside the Beltway (analogous to I-405) which has all kinds of benefits for preventing sprawl and allowing a car-free lifestyle.

Service: A
Service is frequent except in the wee hours. Message boards tell you when the next train is coming, in pretty much every station.

Routing: B
The Red Line in Maryland follows some major arterials, rather than the nearby freeway. That isn’t the case along the Orange Line in Virginia, however. Inside the beltway, where most of the system lies, there really aren’t enough freeways to even tempt planners to route along them.

Grade/ROW: A+
As with all third-rail systems, no pedestrian or auto is ever going to get anywhere near the track.

TOD: C
Revisiting this with a newly critical eye, the TOD is kind of disappointing. The city itself is really dense, which was the case before the Metro came. Although many stations are underground and therefore impossible to evaluate without stopping there, my limited experience in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs at the ends of the line is pretty disappointing. My read is that local authorities are really starting to get it, however.

Culture: A
For many suburbanites, driving to work is unthinkable. They’re certainly not deterred by park-and-ride fees approaching $5.00 a day, on top of a fare of as much as $4.50 each way. I don’t personally know any people that work in the city anymore, but what I gather from sources like Matt Yglesias is that in the core a car-free lifestyle is increasingly viable and popular as the city emerges from epic mismanagement a couple of decades ago.

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If you are visiting DC for the traditional tourist itinerary, there’s no good reason to rent a car. Driving and parking are difficult in the main tourist areas. The Metro goes right to National Airport, and there is straightforward bus service if you must fly into Dulles or BWI.

I happened to be in town the very day the USDOT reversed itself and gave the go-ahead to Dulles Rail. Having spent most of that trip in the Dulles Corridor, I can say that there’s tons of high-rise office space surrounded by parking. That’s a good sign, as it indicates that there’s tons of available real estate with mild zoning restrictions. Furthermore, it’s certainly interesting to see how the attitude of federal bureaucrats can change when the system is in their direct experience, while it’s “let them take buses” out here in the stix. But let’s give Virginia’s leaders credit for persevering in the face of really negative feedback.

In terms of sheer beauty, little in the transit world really comparesto a DC Metro Station. The underground architecture, while composed mainly of concrete, is roomy and appealing. Interestingly, as far as I can tell, exactly 0.0% of the capital expenditure was devoted to public art. If it were up to me, I’d encourage all transit systems to build intrinsic beauty into their architecture, rather than add some art of controversial value to each station.

I’ll finish with a brief anecdote. I attended a game at Nationals Stadium downtown, which was built half a block from the Navy Yard station. I was impressed with WMATA’s event management, with the nearest gate to the stadium being exit-only before the game and entrance-only afterwards. Additionally, there were lots of WMATA personnel around to direct the crowds in the station and make sure that every last car was packed to the gills. It was an extremely well-organized operation, especially considering the stadium had only been open for a month.

At any rate, I soon was waiting for a transfer at L’Enfant Plaza, when I overheard this conversation:
“The next train comes in eight minutes.”
“Eight Minutes?!”

Think of the implications of that conversation:
(1) The agency is able to predict with precision the next arrival.
(2) They inform riders with a simple-to-use message board.
(3) The riders are conditioned to think that 8 minutes is an unreasonable time to wait at 10 pm.

Jealous, aren’t you?

Photo courtesy of washingtontravelcast.com

Danger of Speeding Buses!

Posted on by Andrew Smith


I just watched the silliest “special report” on Komo news (no link, sorry) about speeding buses and how dangerous they are. It was embarassing. Sure, I can see it could be a problem if buses are running red lights or breezing through stop signs, but is a bus going 37 in a 35 zone really news worthy? I really bet most drivers even would rather buses go faster. Why does Komo want buses to go slow?

Transit Up Nationwide, Funding Here at a Stand-still

Posted on by Andrew Smith

The Seattle Times ran a modified version of this New York Times article about transit use rising nationwide. The New York Times piece identifies rising gas prices as a primary reason for the rise in use.

The sudden jump in ridership comes after several years of steady, gradual growth. Americans took 10.3 billion trips on public transportation last year, up 2.1 percent from 2006.

Transit managers are predicting growth of 5 percent or more this year, the largest increase in at least a decade.

“If we are in a recession or economic downturn, we should be seeing a stagnation or decrease in ridership, but we are not,” said Daniel Grabauskas, general manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which serves the Boston area. “Fuel prices are without question the single most important factor that is driving people to public transportation.”

Transit use rose the most in the West, where transit is traditionally used the least, which makes sense because a place like New York where more than half of commuters use transit has half as many people who don’t use transit compared to a place where nearly no one uses transit. In King County about 10% of commuters use transit, and in Seattle the number is about 17%.

The transit ridership gains here are impressive:

Sound Transit ridership grew 12.3 percent in 2007, according to the agency.

In 2007, nearly 14 million riders boarded Sounder commuter rail, ST Express buses and Tacoma Link light-rail trains, according to the agency.

The biggest ridership increase among Sound Transit’s three modes was on the Sounder commuter rail, with a 27.4 percent increase in 2007, according to the agency, the fourth-biggest commuter-rail ridership increase in the nation for 2007.

In Seattle, Metro ridership has grown 18 percent in the past three years, spokeswoman Linda Thielke said. She said that in the first three months this year, ridership was up 6 percent from the same time last year.

Sounder’s growth can be attributed the number of trains being run. Obviously, more trains carry more people, but a new schedule run also encourages more people to ride the other scheduled trains even if they never ride the new service. Just knowing there are more trains keeps people sure they won’t get trapped in the city without a train to take home.

Buses are getting more crowded, which has got to get painful on buses that don’t come often or were already crowded. I bet the number 7 bus is standing-room only on each rush-hour coach. The problem is that even though demand is high, funding for Metro, especially in the City, has not kept pace. The New York Times but points out a kind of catch-22 in the way we fund transit:

But meeting the greater demand for mass transit is proving difficult. The cost of fuel and power for public transportation is about three times that of four years ago, and the slowing economy means local sales tax receipts are down, so there is less money available for transit services. Higher steel prices are making planned expansions more expensive.

Typically, mass transit systems rely on fares to cover about a third of their costs, so they depend on sales taxes and other government funding. Few states use gas tax revenue for mass transit.

At least transit is a way for some people to save money. The states that use gas-tax money to pay for transit are likely really hurting.

The money quote is right at the end of the article:

“Nobody believed that people would actually give up their cars to ride public transportation,” said executive director Joseph Giulietti, executive director of the authority.

“But in the last year, and last several months in particular, we have seen exactly that.”

Imagine that.

I want to know: are any routes getting seriously over-crowded? There was a time when the 545 was always at crush load, but it’s lightened up a bit thanks to more runs from Sound Transit, and more Microsoft Connector buses.

Regional Transit Map Book

Posted on by Martin H. Duke
Last year, I was thrilled to discover the Regional Transit Map Book, a booklet that consolidates system maps for the three counties in the ST district, and also includes easy-to-use charts showing service times for various routes.
Without a doubt, I found it to be the best portable tool for figuring out routes on the fly.

Unfortunately, it’s also hard to find. I imagine it costs a mint to print. Anyhow, I discovered yesterday that the 2008 edition is available in the downtown post office, across from Benaroya Hall.

Pick up one before it’s too late; alternatively you can get a pdf version here, but I’m all for carrying around the booklet while reducing my own printing costs.

Kudos to Sound Transit for putting this together. Together with mybus and tripplanner, I think it’s one of the big usability improvements we’ve seen in the last decade or so.

And while you’re on that website, there’s a ton of very appealing (and yet spectacularly obscure) maps and documents about road planning, getting around on Capitol Hill and the U-District, etc.

Books on the Bus

Posted on by Andrew Smith

The Seattle Library Blog has a list of books that were spotted on buses last week. I noticed most of the books were fiction, which I’ve found myself reading more and more often too. Back when I lived in SF and had a long train ride to San Jose, I would read only non-fiction books because I could make quite a lot of progress in the hour trip. Now with my 25~40 bus ride, it’s hard to really get through a long non-fiction book, and I find myself reading almost entirely novels.

Space may also be a factor, the bus generally has less elbow room than the train had, and novels are smaller usually than non-fiction.

So, do you read on the bus? If so, what do you read? If not, how do you pass the time? I’d be especially interested to know whether there’s more non-fiction on Sounder as a test of my theory.

A Google Maps tour of Central Link, part 1

Posted on by Ben Schiendelman

I was looking at Seattle on Google Earth this morning, and I noticed that much of the city has been updated with new images. This is fantastic from a transit standpoint – the last images were taken at a very early stage of construction. Since then, we’ve come a long way, and I just thought I’d link everyone to some highlights. Because Google Earth and Google Maps use the same image data, everything here is a link you can open in your browser.

Let’s start at the top. This is where the rails disappear into the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel. If we scroll out just a little, we can see the DSTT connects directly to the I-90 center roadway. If you happen to work in Seattle and ride a bus that comes in on I-90 in the morning, you probably use these direct access ramps today. These were designed with curves and grades that can be used for rail transit – these are why it makes perfect sense to build light rail over the I-90 bridge.

Moving south, we have Stadium Station. Last night I watched thousands of people come out of Safeco Field – many of them walked across 4th Ave S. to their cars, but they could just as easily have been walking to this station. This station also serves two Metro bus bases, the maintenance facility for Amtrak and Sounder trains, and likely many Port of Seattle workers. Just south of this station is a storage track – a third track in the middle of the other two. As Roger told us on the lunch bus tour this weekend, at the end of big games, this track can hold an empty light rail vehicle (or four) so that when a train leaves the station completely packed and there are many more people waiting, another train can run right away rather than making game-goers wait for several minutes.

Next there’s SoDo Station. This is right next door to the USPS parking facility, and a few blocks from both Starbucks (west) and Tully’s (east) headquarters – not to mention Seattle Schools’ headquarters building.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Link’s Operations and Maintenance base is complete in this image. We can see the nine tracks that enter the building, as well as the five long storage tracks just to the east of it. The tracks that go inside provide access to maintenance bays that provide access under and over the vehicles, as well as a painting room and a special bay for removing and maintaining the ‘trucks’ – the assemblies under the cars that contain the axles, wheels and electric motors (yes, I took a picture of an electric motor).

Near the base, you can see the west portal of the Beacon Hill tunnel. This is a bit old – see all those things sitting around just south of the track? Those are stacks of tunnel segments. Each stack builds a five foot long ring of tunnel – but they’re all used now, except for one or two extra that were probably kept in case of breakage. The truck leaving the site from the south is a great example of Sound Transit’s protection of the Duwamish waterway – you can see that the ground is wet around it. Sound Transit’s contractor, Obayashi, is required to spray down the wheels of vehicles leaving the site so that the mud doesn’t wash into city drainage.

Last, for now, is the Beacon Hill station site itself. Two round holes are visible here. The larger one, on the left, will have four high-speed elevators bringing riders into and out of the station, which is 165 feet below ground. These elevators get you from top to bottom and vice versa in 20 seconds – four is more than enough for the long-term needs of the station. The smaller hole provides an emergency exit stair. The station itself will be two relatively small structures called headhouses, one with elevator equipment over the large hole, and a quite small one over the other. Most of the property you see here will be returned to the landowner for redevelopment once construction is complete.

We’ll move on to the east portal and southward later.

ST2.1 Outlook

Posted on by Andrew Smith

Here is an article from the News Tribune about ST2’s outlook, and two editorials, one from the Seattle Times and one from the Everett Herald saying it’s took soon to go to the ballot for Sound Transit (neither paper endorsed prop 1 last November). Both editorial’s argument is basically that the economy isn’t great, and the first light rail line hasn’t opened yet, so we can wait to for a ballot measure in a few years.

I still think ST2.1 should go to the ballot this year, since gas has already hit $4 a gallon around here, a big election year will get tons of voters to the polls, and the sooner we start the sooner we’ll finish. The trick is really to get a ballot measure that people are really going to like. Twelve years ago Sound Transit was created by a successful ballot measure that came a year after a larger failed measure that had a longer construction time. Amazingly, the Seattle Times endorsed the 1996 measure.

This is not a perfect plan, but it represents a consolidation and rethinking of two earlier versions: a $13 billion budget-buster that never made it to the polls, and a $6.7 billion measure that was defeated in March 1995. The new plan benefits from a more-focused RTA mission and the public’s acceptance that a start must be made toward a solution.
Opponents are running out of ideas and credibility. No one believes there is any more money, physical room or public acceptance for major new highways and freeways. Republican legislative candidates who don’t like the RTA talk instead about pie-in-the-sky people-movers and other fanciful technology better suited to amusement parks than serving a bustling metropolitan area.
Another diversionary tactic is to suggest that King County’s Metro has the resources to take up the slack. Wrong. Metro is adding bus routes but pilfering its budget at the expense of relief for crowded park-and-ride lots.

All of these arguments were true then, and are even more true today. The 1996 post-election article sited “The difference, said Bob Drewel, county executive in Snohomish County and chairman of the RTA board, was that the RTA was willing to rewrite its plan after its defeat. RTA supporters reduced the scope of the plan and the time to build it.”

The measure from Prop 1 last year could be a good starting point for going to the Eastside and south to Tacoma, and maybe this year’s larger plan could be the design for going north. The lesson from the original Sound Transit vote is that the the plan has to please voters in the suburbs, many of whom will think that a system that doesn’t bring light rail to their area is a bad deal.

Now is the perfect time to go forward with a measure. Let’s hope we can get agreement on one before time runs out.

ST Draft Plan Summary for 2008

Posted on by Andrew Smith

Update: I had a bad version of the draft package.

Here are images of a summary draft plan for 2008, which summaries a .5% plan and a .4% plan. For Seattle, the difference seems to be extending the streetcar from John to Aloha on Broadway, which seems like a tiny difference for .1%. On the Eastside, though, .1% is the difference between Bellevue and Microsoft, which I think is well worth it. I’d guess there’s other money going to something else. What’s interesting is that ST would move about 302,000-309,000 people per day with $700-800 million total operating costs from 2008 to 2020, while King County Metro moves less than that number each day with operating costs of about $500 million per year.

ST News – Surely needed

Posted on by Brian Bundridge

Continuing onward with the ST gripes and such, I thought I’d give the people a comforting update.

Most of the rail is completed for Airport Link except along the roadway and at the final station. This is planned to be completed by this Summer. Wire installation of the entire route will be completed by the Summer of 2008. Beacon Hill Station building will start construction later this Summer with the structure being completed by the end of the year.

Sound Transit has put in an order for 20 additional LRV’s for University Link. This will be the third order and will be delivered in 2013. Sound Transit currently has 21 LRV’s on the property, leaving 14 of the initial order remaining which are all in Everett now for assembly.

Link operators are running 16 hour shifts, starting between 6am and going until at least midnight to get people accustomed to day and night operations. Metro staff will start training in February 2009.

Starting later this week or two, Metro and Sound Transit will begin bus and Light-Rail testing in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel. This will consist of 1 LRV and 6 buses. Next week will be 2 LRV’s and 12 buses. They will simulate a broken down bus, broken down LRV, emergency drills, etc, which will all be repeated in Feb-Mar for Metro operators.

Sound Transit is aiming for a JUNE 2009 opening though it may very well be July 2009. Either way, it will be a Summer launch.

The original concept was always at-grade and not elevated along MLK Way. It was the option that made the most sense and was least impact on the community.

Signaling along MLK Way will be timed with the train and traffic. At any given time, the E-W traffic will be delayed no more than 35 seconds, a typical light on MLK Way. Currently the grade crossing is timed for 23 seconds at Lander and Holgate Street. I timed both of these crossings today. This model is NOT the same as the South Lake Union Streetcar, the Streetcar does NOT have signal priority on any of it’s travel. It waits for it’s own light which is why it suffers being so slow. Central Link will have signal priority throughout the entire line and will travel at 40mph through the entire corridor. From Henderson Street Station, Link will travel at speeds up to 50mph and it’s maximum speed of 55mph on the elevated sections. Link also runs in a dedicated right-of-way and while it is paved over to Henderson, that does not mean vehicles will be on the tracks. Provisioning was left to allow a low yield fence along the right-of-way if pedestrian and vehicle incidents were to be expected.

Total travel time from Sea-Tac Airport to Westlake Mall is slated to be 39 minutes initially and as adjustments are made, will be down to as fast as 34 minutes.

Sound Transit is planning on operating 3 to 4 car trains during the baseball and football seasons, normal runs will be 1 and 2 car trains.

Sound Transit will be closing Pine Street next year to start boring on University Link. Two of the tunnel boring machines will start at Montlake to Capitol Hill, the third will start at Capitol Hill to the Pine Street Stub Tunnel. Sound Transit has most of the properly bought and will begin demolition early next year for construction staging.

Sound Transit will be installing CCTV cameras at all stations and Seattle Police along with security will be on-board trains. Fare inspectors will be present on-board Link at random times. Police will also start riding on buses at select times on the more vandalized bus routes, like the 554, 574, and 594. ST will also start ramping up inspections on Sounder Commuter Rail.

Sound Transit will have Mukilteo Station open in June 2008 with the Northbound platform starting after BNSF Railway finishes up construction for Boeing. Platform construction is scheduled to start in 2009 and open in June 2009.

I’m sure I left some stuff out but let’s just say that more goodness is going to be coming out much, much, sooner….