April Fools Suggestions

By Matt the Engineer on February 8, 2010

It occurred to me that the electronic signs in Link’s windows telling you their destination are almost useless, since we currently only have one line.  Also, the electronic signs announcing departing trains will be a bit sad, with only one destination announced per direction.  I therefore suggest the following use, for one day humor value:

1. Change train signs to destinations in other cities.  Since everyone in Seattle seems to come from California, I think something along the line of “N Judah” or “Pittsburgh / Bay Point” might be sufficiently disorienting.

2. Why limit the electronic signs to announcing the soonest trains to depart?  I’m picturing:

  • Westlake Center: 2 minutes
  • Westlake Center: 8 minutes
  • University District: 6 years
  • Overlake Transit Center: 20 years

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Stabbing Prohibited

By Matt the Engineer on February 5, 2010

I love the stickers someone placed on Metro buses. Stabbing Prohibited and No Urinating.  This should remove a few common bus faux pas.

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Coffee Clatch

By Frank on February 5, 2010

Reading this reminds me of this.

Ahh… memories.

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West Side Light Rail

By Frank on February 3, 2010

I’m a few days behind on this, but I wanted to comment on Mayor McGinn’s private robo-boll on west side light rail, as reported by The Stranger:

This November, voters will decide a tax measure to fund light rail, pedestrian, and bicycle infrastructure. The measure authorizes up to two point one billion dollars in taxes over thirty-five years. If the election were today, would you vote yes to approve, or no to reject this tax measure?
66% Yes
21% No
13% Undecided

Notably, the ballot doesn’t break down the cost for the average voter, which I assume would make it less popular. Assuming that Seattle has to pick up the full cost, like the monorail, we’re probably looking at something on the order of $230 per household per year.* And that’s assuming the $2.1B includes financing costs. If it does, we’re talking, what, $700M or so for actual construction, assuming a 3:1 ratio? That’s not a ton of money for a 14-mile long light rail line.

I desperately want light rail to the west side of town, and I’m excited to support the Mayor in this effort. But the one thing we know about our new mayor is that he likes to announce elections first, and ask questions later. This needs to be done carefully, and with a plan. Would SDOT be managing this? Will there be federal money available? Sound Transit spent a decade building relationships with the feds. Has SDOT? Let’s make sure we do this right, and not wind up with another monorail situation.

* I’m figuring $2.1B divided by 250,000 households over 35 years.

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SR-520, Transit and Tolls

By Frank on February 2, 2010

Decoding the pluses and minuses of the various SR-520 bridge replacement options is no easy task. Apparently several Seattle-based politicos have decided to oppose WSDOT’s preferred option, “A+” (option A is shown in the video above).

If I understand the argument correctly, A+ would offer 4 general-purpose lanes, 2 in each direction, plus one HOV lane in each direction (the current bridge has only 4 general purpose lanes). The Seattle coalition wants 4 GP lanes plus two transit-only lanes (no HOV). I guess their argument is two-fold: (a) HOV means more car traffic, and (b) transit-only lanes would be easier to convert to light rail at some point in the future.

My first reaction is that it’s crazy to not build HOV lanes. Giving people an incentive to carpool is important. It’s been said that most cars run at 25% capacity at rush hour (3 empty seats). Simply adding one person doubles that to 50%, resulting in twice as many people using the same number of cars. That’s huge.

Upon further reflection, though, I wonder how tolls will figure into this equation. Tolling will create its own incentive to carpool, and variable tolling can be used (if WSDOT has the stones) to manage demand so that traffic almost always runs smoothly in the GP lanes. If that’s the case, you could easily imagine it all working out.

Ultimately, I agree with Ben that the Montlake flyer stop is more important than any of this.

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HSR and Airports

By Frank on February 1, 2010

Autopia discusses the role of airlines in high-speed rail:

Airport congestion is a mounting problem exacerbated in part by all the short flights in and out of major airports.

…

These short hops should not exist. They’re short enough to take by train. It seems airlines keep the flights to attract more passengers by providing connecting service to destinations beyond their hubs. But why would anyone want to put in the time to travel to and from airports, deal with security and then risk delays due to weather or congestion?

There’s a solution. Airlines need to team up with railway lines to optimize the effectiveness of our railway and airport systems.

The post goes on to discuss the various ways this is being done in Europe and even parts of the US.

I think this is one way in which American high-speed rail will be unique, owing to our different land use patterns. We’ll have to build (a) stations with rental car facilities, and (b) stations both in the downtown core and at the nearest airport, to facilitate transfers. Not that these things are completely unique to the US; my point is simply that HSR will look somewhat different in America than it does in Europe and Japan. There probably won’t be the same giant, above-ground hangar-like stations that you have in Europe, for example.

I suspect we’ll see this play out in Florida, which looks like it’s going to be America’s first high-speed rail state. The Tampa-Orlando route, with right-of-way donated by Disney, will probably be a tourist-heavy affair. The benefit is that you get riders right away. The danger in this approach is that it becomes a novelty, not unlike Orlando’s other major rapid transit system.

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HSR Grants

By Frank on February 1, 2010

hsr-gov-funds.jpg

I’m excited to see Washington State receive $590 million in high-speed rail grants. It’s pretty remarkable that our state, with just 2% of the nation’s population, managed to snag 7% of the $8 billion in federal dollars.

As much as I adore Sen. Patty Murray, I’m not sure we can give her office the lion’s share of the credit here. To my knowledge, this didn’t go through the typical appropriations process where Sen. Murray has disproportionate clout. Rather, this is the result of 20 years of work by the states of Oregon and Washington to seriously invest in rail when not many other states were doing so.

In addition to shaving several minutes off the Seattle-Portland trip, we’ll also get a couple of new round-trips per day, and some significant work towards systems which will allow our Talgo trains to hit their maximum speed of 125mph.

This is, also, the perfect use of stimulus money, IMO. You have a long-term plan (pdf) for infrastructure investment that might have been cut because of state budget issues, so the feds come in and play the counter-cyclical role of keeping the project and the jobs afloat until the economy recovers.

Finally, one of the criticisms of the $8 billion fund was that it wasn’t enough to do a national network, and so you had a choice of either putting all the money on one “showpiece” project, or doleing it out piecemeal and maybe not seeing any HSR actually get built. Overall, I thought the DOT did a really good job of balancing those two goals. California and Florida, with projects in the advanced planning stages, got over half the money, and the rest was largely doled out to a few projects in substantial amounts that it could actually make a difference.

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Seattle: Cheapest Dense City for Renters

By Matt the Engineer on January 29, 2010

SeattleBubble just posted some very interesting numbers for the 25 most populated cities in the US.  There are a few lessons from this set of data, but my favorite is how cheap this city is – as dense cities go.  Click on the “Density” tab, and we’re #8.  Our Income/Rent ratio is 5 – much higher than most of those above us.  The next cheap city is all the way down at Denver – with a bit over half the density we have.

Of course San Francisco nearly catches us with an I/R of 4.9 and is over twice as dense as us, so although we’re less expensive, if you want density at a reasonable price you may consider SF.

Owning is a completely separate matter.  While owning a home is much cheaper (per income) here than NY, LA, or SF, anywhere else more dense than us is a better deal.  And housing in Detroit – just one under us in density – is practically free (seriously, $25k for a house?  are they missing a zero?).

Why does any of this matter?  Well, there’s the human aspect of wanting to be paid well yet not paying a fortune for housing and still living in a city.  But what I see in these numbers is the drivers of density.  To create density we need an attractive place to live and enough supply.  Lumped in with an “attractive place to live” is income and cost of living, which includes rent.  The price of housing alone doesn’t tell you much, since this can be offset by income.  But an I/R ratio exposes this piece of “attractive place to live”.  Of course, as a city becomes more dense it’s harder to meet housing demand with supply, so rents go up.  So we expect I/R ratios to drop with density.  The fact that ours is still high shows that we’re a comparatively attractive and affordable city, at least by this measure.

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McGinn Negotiates With the Council on Seawall Vote

By Frank on January 27, 2010

Looks like Mayor McGinn is willing to compromise on his May special-election vote for replacing the waterfront Seawall.

It’s looking more and more like the decision to avoid the council was a rookie mistake. Of course, it could have been some kind of brilliant rope-a-dope designed to get them to focus on the date, not the wisdom of the election itself. But I’ll go with the Occam’s Razor explanation here. It was probably an oversight.

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Where I’m Coming From

By serial catowner on January 26, 2010

Underlying a lot of my thinking these days is one basic thought, which apparently hasn’t occurred to a lot of people- that somewhere around 2020 people are going to realize that to save the world, everything has to change. Everything. To cut carbon releases to the bone it will be necessary to house people close to transit, most of which will still at that time need to be built.

I don’t really understand why young people are not frantic about this and screaming from the rooftops. I don’t understand why parents aren’t concerned about the future of their children’s world.

That, of course, is their own business. Being of a somewhat advanced age. I feel a certain detachment that was entirely absent when they were about to ship my ass off to Vietnam to step on a mine.

I do recommend that people get up to speed on this, especially if you’re going to live through it. I do occasionally make comments or blogposts that some people really think come from way out in left field. Well, now you know why.

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