By Matt the Engineer on April 23, 2008
It looks like we run diesel busses on the weekend in case construction might occur, cutting power. A group has formed to move a diesel bus route away from their street. Of course that just moves the problem around.
Why are we abandoning our bus trolley system every weekend in response to an infrequent and avoidable problem? Here’s an idea: Maybe we should put trolley power on two circuits where this occurs.
Posted in finance, Trail
By Frank on April 23, 2008
Neat interactive feature from the Seattle Times on development around MLK light-rail stations.
It will be interesting to watch how MLK evolves differently than Rainier Avenue going forward. The two streets parallel each other, of course, but Rainier was developed auto-centrically, with the big Lowe’s and QFC stores with their massive parking lots out front. MLK was largely undeveloped in recent years, and so now it’s going to get re-developed in a transit-friendly way. Let’s check back in 20 years and see how different the two thoroughfares are. I think you can guess which one I think will succeed.
(via)
Posted in soundtransit
By Frank on April 23, 2008
Good for the Times calling B.S. on Rossi’s transportation “plan.” Rossi’s basically regurgitated the WSDOT to-do list (“we should totally replace the viaduct and 520!” Um..yeah, ya think??) and added some wacky ideas to it that don’t pass the straight face test.
And yet, he’s running neck-and-neck with Gregoire. Oy.
Posted in Sagrada Familia
By Matt the Engineer on April 22, 2008
One piece of a transit-friendly city that is often neglected is the experience of walking. Shifting from a world of driving to a world of public transportation usually includes more foot travel. This can be an enjoyable leg (heh) of a journey or a drawn out burden depending on many factors from storefronts to weather to incline. The issue I’d like to focus on here is the interface between foot traffic and car traffic.
A bit over a year ago I left a job across the water for a job in Seattle. Something I’ve noticed since more often becoming a pedestrian is how car-centric our city is. Other than a small handful of areas that value people – the Pike Street Market area being the only one that springs to mind – intersections seem to be designed to let the most cars through as quickly as possible.
Let’s take a few examples. Walk to 6th between Union and University. Someone’s gone through the trouble of installing a mid-block crosswalk and light for the high amount foot traffic coming from a hotel. Great. But when you push the button, you’ll find that you can stand there for a good 2 minutes before it will give you a walk signal – even if there are no cars. Walk a half block south. That intersection is just as cruel – rarely backed up with cars, but always backed up with people. Walk another block south – here’s a crosswalk most try to avoid, as it’s an offramp from a freeway and if you want to cross you’d better have a book handy.
This post isn’t just about my pet-peeve intersections – there are many. It’s the planning that sits behind it. Clearly somone put thought into intersection rules, and have decided that cars should have priority. What would our city be like if the bias went the other way?
If I were king, here’s how I’d run things. If you push a button, the light immediately turns yellow, then red, and the little green walking man appears. To keep things fair, this won’t happen again in this direction for another 2 minutes no matter how often you press the button. I’d make high-ped-traffic areas completely car free. I’d banish high-volume streets to the outskirts of the city. I’d add pedestrian and bike overpasses near freeway on/off ramps – if I was feeling nice and allowing them at all.
We may spend millions of dollars on making our transit systems a few minutes faster, just to have to wait for cars once we step off the train. I know the drivers out there will feel this is unfair, but then they’re in warm weather-proof pods and are probably too distracted with their coffee and radio to notice anyway.
Posted in lake union, oil, tickets
By Frank on April 22, 2008
Tranportation is the theme of this week’s Wired magazine photo contest. Lotsa good pics, but not nearly enough Seattle ones. So… light ‘em up!
Posted in light rail
By Frank on April 22, 2008
The Everett Herald is intrigued:
GNP has put together what appears to be a solid business plan that includes paying for upgrading the existing tracks; constructing bare-bones passenger stations in Snohomish, Maltby, Woodinville, Kirkland and Bellevue; building a paved pedestrian/bike trail alongside, and running six trains south in the morning and six more north in the afternoon. Payne says he could have trains, with used locomotives pulling double-decker passenger cars, running as soon as next year. Acting alone, the public sector can only dream about moving that quickly.
Speaking of quick, the ride from Snohomish to Bellevue would take just 32 minutes. Try doing that in your car during rush hour.
Posted in kcmetro, lightrail
By serial catowner on April 22, 2008
As diesel fuel takes a last look at $4/gallon ($4.29 at the pump on Saturday) and heads for $5/gallon, WSDOT continues to predict that the per capita VMT (vehicle miles traveled) will soon begin to rise again, at a rate more typical of 1994 than of 2007. Could WSDOT be wrong?
In 1900 the interurbans looked like a sure thing, faster, cheaper, and better able to compete than the steam railroads. Soon after Henry Ford opened his first assembly line, staid Boston bankers purchased the lines from Everett to Tacoma. The Model T soon took the place of the interurban and it is estimated that a full half of the investment in interurbans never paid a penny in profit.
In the 1920s the steam railroads confidently invested in prosperity, building hundreds of millions of dollars worth of coaling towers, steam servicing facilities, and modern passenger terminals- while GM developed the high-speed diesel for railroad use and joined Ford in putting America on the road. By 1954 the coaling towers, roundhouses, and steam engines stood silent and useless, fossil remnants of a bygone age.
After WW II, the railroads invested heavily in new passenger trains, placing so many orders for shiny smooth-sided cars that Budd and other companies couldn’t keep up with the demand. The railroads were still buying new passenger cars while Boeing was demonstrating the 707.
Of course, all of these examples from the past are entirely different from today’s situation in one respect- they were the mistakes of private enterprise. The money that was lost was private money. The big mistakes being made today- the third runway, the plans to rebuild the viaduct- are being made with public money. In the past, companies failed and disappeared or were reorganized. In the future, it will be our government that fails, and disappears or is reorganized.
Too big to fail? Tell it to the Russians.
Posted in Uncategorized
By Frank on April 21, 2008
I’ve been remiss in not linking to Sightline’s widely-discussed report on gas consumption in the Northwest. The upshot is that gasoline consumption per capita in the Northwest declined 11% since 1999, despite the fact that it’s been holding steady nationwide.
Three factors are cited for the decline: increased fuel economy, increased transit ridership and the decrease in total vehicle miles traveled (VMT). What we don’t know is the relative impacts of these factors. For example, Sightline cites the fact that fuel economy increased 5% in just the last few years. And since fuel-efficient cars sell better in the Northwest than anywhere else in the country, we could chalk up a good chunk of the 11% decline to increased fuel economy. That’s all well and good for global warming, but it doesn’t make for a more transit-friendly region, just a more gas-friendly one.
Still, the increase in transit ridership and the decrease in per-capita VMT are great news for transit and density advocates and cannot be denied. Oddly, WSDOT’s VMT forecast, also used in the study, shows per-capita VMT declining between 2003 and FY 2008, but then inexplicably trending back up in the future. Check it out in chart form. Current data is in blue, projections for the future are in red:
You’d think with a Growth Management Act in place, gas topping $4/gallon and likely to increase, and a huge increase in transit investments, per-capita VMT would continue to decline. But WSDOT thinks the past four years are an abberation, and the figure is going to go back up. This doesn’t make sense to me. In fact, it reminds me of this chart (below) from Gen. Petraeus’ testimony before congress last week, showing U.S. expenditures in Iraq taking a whopping 90-degree turn. It doesn’t pass the straight face test, does it?
Update: only a couple of hours after publishing this, I see that Clark Williams-Derry, the author of the report, has a strikingly similar post up at Sightline’s blog. His blog post is datelined Friday (in my RSS reader), but it didn’t show up in my RSS reader until 20 minutes ago for some unknown reason. Anyway, read his post because he has better data and prettier charts, which comes with being a full-time researcher instead of a lowly blogger. Still, it’s reassuring that even he doesn’t know what’s going on!
Posted in kingcounty, light rail
By Frank on April 21, 2008
818 miles long, top speed of 217mph, and opening in 2013.
Remind me why we can’t do this in America?
Posted in lightrail, taxes, zipcar
By Frank on April 20, 2008
The Seattle Times has a front-page story on the changes light rail is bringing to the neighborhoods along MLK Way. It’s a fine read, but I wish it had dug a bit deeper into the underlying reasons why the neighborhood is changing.
Pivoting off of daijimin’s post on the subject, I think there’s a much more complicated story to be told here. We know that light-rail was a disruption, and that many of the Asian immigrants who lived in the neighborhood moved away because of construction. But much of that was going to happen anyway. And anyone who thinks those communities won’t thrive outside of the Rainier Valley has obviously never been to Renton…or Federal Way…or Lynwood…or…
The story of immigrants to America first living in urban areas and then migrating out to the suburbs as they prospered is almost as old as America itself. After all, New York’s Lower East Side is no longer a bastion of Italians, Irish and Jews. And as an Irish-Italian descendant of those immigrants, I’m glad they made their way out.
On the other hand, if they’d held on to the real estate, I’d be sitting pretty right now! Which gets us to the other side of the coin: if you believe, as I do, that the cul-de-sacs of today could become the tenements of tomorrow, then it’s problematic, from a public policy perspective, to consign the poor folks to the auto-dependent suburbs at a time when auto-dependent lifestyles are on the wane.
Still, the newly-middle-class still seem more interested in movin’ on out (to the suburbs) than movin’ on up (to, say, a deluxe apartment in the sky). And not just in the U.S. Thousands of gated suburban communitites are going up in China to house that country’s newly mobile middle class. It’s mostly those of us who’ve lived for a generation or two in the suburbs who want to try living in the city for a change.
All of this is to say…. it’s complicated!
Posted in i5, roads, soundtransit
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